iroh2727

This "pulling balls from an urn" analogy at the beginning is very misguided. Where is the agency in this analogy? If you build tools with the intention of them directly being useful to people, they're likely to be useful. If you build tools to be parasitic (i.e. useful to people who are trying to benefit at the expense of others), they're likely to be parasitic. It's quite simple.

If, on the other hand, you try to "innovate" with no clear goal in mind (like much of the current "AGI" research), who knows. But there is no law of nature that says that innovation that is not explicitly designed to be beneficial will magically be beneficial.

This is actually a common myth in silicon valley: that technology is somehow beneficial by default. But again, there is no law of nature that makes this myth true. First of all, technology is not one unified thing but an organic process of individual people building individual things. Second of all, the common explanation people give for this myth ("would you rather live 200 years ago?") is in no way a proof of technology's by-default beneficialness. Even if it is true that it's better to live today than 200 years ago (which is unclear), it's still possible that that is so because early innovators were focused on building useful things (and perhaps less money-motivated), whereas now we may or may not be as focused on building useful things.

Bostrom's brand of fear mongering does not appear to be based in science, logic, or basic common sense. I mean, a lot of world issues are obvious to the naked eye: overpopulation, consumption, housing prices, destruction of natural habitats. Filtering to just "AI"-related world issues: addictive and distracting digital products powered in-part by ML or people losing jobs due to ML-based automation. But things that Bostrom speaks of, like superintelligence, are, at the very least, not nearly as obvious as the aforementioned concerns, which makes me question his sincerity. Furthermore, it's precisely fear-mongering that drives the development of potentially dangerous technologies like weapons.

Yeah honestly I only remember Avatar the movie because of the SNL Papyrus skit mentioned in this article lol. Possibly superior to the movie. But who knows, maybe Avatar 2 with its new font will be better...

I mean, I do like the ideas and messages Avatar the movie was going for, but perhaps it was too visual for me. The experience of watching in theater was great/dazzling but nothing really stuck with me.

Yeah related to this: another interpretation of this paper's findings could be that what's important is not listening per se, merely putting the other person's interests above your own. For example, if I hear and remember every word you say but am still very adamant about putting in my two cents for ego reasons, then yes, I did listen but I'm still putting myself first.

So I agree with you in the sense that merely letting the other person speak and giving them enough attention to appear like you're listening is still putting their interests first. Though, if you're already there, why not actually listen? Or if you really don't want to listen, sounds like not a great relationship...

Spotify (brilliant!), unix, Google's Flume, DynamoDB, EC2, the Lithium ereader app on android (simplicity is good!), Wikipedia, Google Search (or perhaps Old Google Search), emacs, vscode

If I just take a purely observational stance with no judgment, what jumps out to me as salient from what you just said is not your loneliness (many people are lonely). It's your attitude towards the purpose of socializing.

At least in your current mentality, it sounds like you're viewing socializing and other people as a means to an end (of not feeling bad). A more common view would be that people are (in some form, even if mostly "selfish" forms) the end rather than or in addition to the means.

I tend to agree with Alfred Adler's view that "all problems are interpersonal relationship problems" (e.g. I recommend this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43306206-the-courage-to-...). Socializing is so core to human existence that existence is meaningless without it (even as an introvert). So I hope you can find a way to cherish and be grateful of the positive aspects of relationships (and avoid or acccept the negative aspects), so that you can view relationships as bringing a form of joy in itself.

I guess your perspective implies also that it's a personality aspect of yours (e.g. "most people like hanging out with people but I just don't."). But I would push back against that view. I think everyone, even you and all introverts, are meant to find joy in social relationships. The world can be cruel sometimes, but there are always good things to be found if we are open, willing to take some risk, try not to take ourselves too seriously, but are also strategic and constantly learning and improving. Whatever has happened, think of it as a learning experience. You'll come out the other side as a better man than when you started. The past is past.

And other important questions, such as: (1) does a meaningful form of AGI already exist? (2) is the field of ML a bubble and will there be another AI winter? (3) how are breakthroughs in the field of ML made?

Yep, this is very similar to my take as well.

Also, now that I think of it, although we often talk about how much more data-efficient humans are compared to ML models, we could say that we're actually much more data-inefficient than most (or all) other animals. Our gestation period is long and then we're totally useless as a baby. We require a lot of learning and development early on in order to reap the benefits later (which consist of generality and flexibility like you mentioned and also, for example, being able to generate our own synthetic data via imagination and counterfactual reasoning).

If you make it to the psychology section, that's where the explanatory power becomes apparent (or at least is speculated on). Though, yes, it is a lot of text to get there (I'm relieved that some people made it that far).

If you do make it that far, there is a payoff, though. This "trivial kind of system" isn't merely an analogy but the actual algorithm that we use, and the "implementation details" of this algorithm manifest in unintuitive ways that have a lot to say about how psychology is understood in general. Though, given your skepticism, more research will likely have to be done before this is satisfactorily proven to you.

This breakthrough (which I'd say is primarily K&A's breakthrough that I merely am speculating on top of), is actually a great example of theoretical progress. I typically consider myself an anti-reductionist, but this is a lesson in how studying simple systems (in this case, chemotaxis), can lead to better understanding of complex systems (because, well, it turns out at least in this case that these complex systems are actually the same simple systems at the top level—the complexity gets added in "layers" much like the evolution of brains).

Thanks for quoting this part of the paper. It's probably the most interesting part.

To add to what you said, though, I don't think of these phenomena in terms of random mutations. In other words, I don't think of these people as anomalies that do anomalous things; moreso, I think of it as following our growth imperative (i.e. the expected reward gradient), which, if we follow it long and hard enough, can lead to behaviors that appear anomalous.

One commenter below (kortex) really hit on what is at least my interpretation when he said "we are basically seeing an implementation detail come to light."

Correct. I'm very familiar with RL, but I didn't see how referring to RL literature fit in to my particular argument (and I'm not intimately familiar with that literature). That said, I'd suspect there are fruitful connections to make there, especially considering that this model completely glosses over learning, which is a pretty crucial element...

The K&A paper does mention the connection with RL: "Here, we consider the function of the circuit from the point of view of navigation, a connection anticipated by early work on TD learning (Montague et al, 1995)" (specifically, Montague et al found this connection when building a model of bee foraging).

Yep I think you hit another nail on the head (likely the bigger nail).

There is a whole 'nother category of ideas I wasn't thinking about which are the ideas that seem promising but just like way too much effort to even test.

Those ideas just get completely lost when it's hard to test ideas.

Yeah this is good point, honestly hadn't thought about this.

Yeah I guess in any field the low-hanging fruit will be yanked. One situation we could end up in is where we feel like we have more possibilities but counter-intuitively they don't work (otherwise, by definition I guess we could say, they would be low-hanging fruit that had already been yanked). This is the situation you may be describing. Let's call this situation A.

Alternatively, we could end up in a place where there's no more low-hanging fruit and we also can't even come up with ideas that seem promising. I guess at that point the field will just kind of die and people will move on to other pursuits. Let's call this situation B.

I guess a field should hit A at some point and may continue to progress to B eventually or splinter into sub-fields.

Yeah so from a very meta perspective I guess I should expect that things that I expect to work should fail. But at the same time I can't ignore the fact that I honestly felt surprised for at least a few of my ideas that they failed (others felt more like a gamble so it's no surprise they failed). So in some sense I should expect to be surprised but I am still trying to get to the bottom of why I felt surprised in the individual situations...

Your point does raise some other psychological questions. Like maybe we're wired to delusionally believe our likely-to-fail ideas are likely-to-succeed. If we get rid of those delusional beliefs, will we become unmotivated to try new ideas, or will we just seek out actually promising ideas?

Hi HN peeps, I did a write-up on the major lessons I learned doing ML research at Google and PathAI, including my time working with Samy Bengio and Ian Goodfellow.

The main questions I'm curious to answer are (1) why do so many good-seeming ideas fail? and (2) what should we do about it? So I'm curious to know y'alls answers on those questions too.

I don't often get triggered by people being wrong on the internet (https://xkcd.com/386/). However, when I read "MBTI is astrology for nerds" by well-respected academics on Twitter, THAT triggers me. And it happens surprisingly often.

Thus, I decided to write a logical, scientific proof for the existence of personality types (as well as calling out the problems with the Big Five and why Big Five followers are the true cult).

If you lose smell, then the brain will shift smell-related resources to other functions.

Any large-scale body damage should cause "brain damage," though it's possibly a little misleading to call it that (of course I'm not enough of a neuroscientist to know if that's all that's at play here).

related: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/a-new-theory-of-dreami...

Hi HN,

I originally launched Wortharead on HN a few months ago. Since then we've improved performance a lot (especially on Android, which I had neglected before).

The app is built with Vue.js, which is a bit experimental for a high-quality mobile app, so it's taken a lot of work to get the speed, smoothness, performance and native-feel up-to-par, but I think you'll like it now.

I'd love any feedback!

-Nate

Everything I’ve ever done

Everything I ever do

Every place I’ve ever been

Everywhere I’m going to

It’s a sin.

(song by Pet Shop Boys, or what every health article tells me)

Let's just yolo and enjoy the food of this bountiful earth.

Myers-Briggs is the single most useful mental model for personality types in existence, or that I know of at least (especially the modern versions like 16personalities.com).

I've heard a common complaint that "traits are a spectrum, not discrete categories." But often in biology, this is not exactly true, just like there are light brown leopards and black leopards but no dark brown leopards.

Don't "listen to the scientists" who say otherwise, those hopeless reductionists who obsess over what is true but useless rather than what is faulty but useful. Pareto said it right: "Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself."

Of course it doesn't cover everyone well or every aspect; it's just one model of many, but it's useful and predictive.

As for zodiac signs...I can see some correlations popping out based on whether you're young for your grade or old for your grade (like Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers), or perhaps when your parents decided to "mate" says something about them which says something about you, but yeah idk how deep it goes.

How is HACF bad entertainment? Greatest show ever IMO

Yeah definitely agree with this sentiment. Ads will be ads, but the organic results getting worse is the real issue.

Of course, I wouldn't exactly say they've gotten "worse" because those 2011 results looked pretty terrible...but certainly they've gotten much more "commercial".

Hi HN! This is my first time posting here despite being a daily HN reader for many years. This is the first "public launch" of my project, Wortharead. It aims (eventually) to address a lot of current problems with news and news products (happy to discuss my thoughts on those if anyone's interested).

Anyways, I hope y'all can try it out and let me know what you think. FYI, you have to register to try it out, but if you really don't want to register, you can go to the sign in page and enter <name>@test with a blank password (try to make the name unique to not conflict with others using this method); you'll have to register a separate account later to keep using.

Happy reading!