Maybe-Mathematical Musings — That intelligence post started out implying it'd...

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
nostalgebraist

Anonymous asked:

That intelligence post started out implying it'd argue against the claim "the educated public ... thinks intelligence research is all bunk. By contrast ... there is a solid scientific consensus on intelligence" and ended up roughly reaffirming my belief in it. Maybe the author isn't from a bubble that wouldn't even accept that forms of intelligence are relatively well-correlated.

resinsculpture-deactivated20221 answered:

(tagging @nostalgebraist, I suppose, since it was his post)

nostalgebraist

I’ve heard this a number of times – that the educated public denies the existence of the positive manifold itself.

And I’ve definitely been around plenty of educated people who’ve said things (e.g. ”IQ is meaningless”) that amount to this, if read in a particular, literal way.

But I suspect there is not much substance to this apparent disagreement.  Do people actually think different abilities are not correlated, or just that they’re different systems which are only incidentally correlated, as in the case of physical fitness?  When people say “IQ is meaningless,” are they really saying “there are no positive correlations between different intellectual abilities,” or are they saying what any of us might say about the single-factor theory of fitness: “this is a shitty scientific theory which doesn’t tell us anything about what is actually going on”?

Like, even Stephen Jay Gould didn’t deny the existence of the positive manifold.  He just said it was unsurprising.  Do people who read his book miss this and end up thinking the positive manifold isn’t there?  Or is it more likely that people realize it’s there (or admit it might well be), but dismiss IQ in broad terms for other reasons?

jadagul

So prior to reading your post, I was under the impression that youand the people you were citing had been denying the idea that IQ was predictive. Which, if you believe the positive manifold, I don’t think you do. (You can believe it’s not explanatory, but not that it’s not predictive).

If you didn’t see Freddie deBoer’s piece on this, it might be relevant; he certainly thinks he’s arguing with someone. And the response he got suggests that he’s at least arguing with someone.

But yeah, if I were to say “IQ is real,” I would want that to mean that it’s coherently possible to talk about one person being “smarter” than another person. And the existence of the positive manifold seems like it’s enough for that.

iq

See more posts like this on Tumblr

#iq

More you might like

While I’m getting myself in trouble over gender:

I matched with someone on OKCupid yesterday. By which I mean she liked my profile and messaged me to tell me how much she liked it, and I agreed to the match and responded.

And her first followup message was to quote my list of movies and books I like and “gently ask me my fave women/POC creators”.

And like there are various ways I could answer that question. (I just enjoyed Gideon the Ninth. I subscribe to KB Spangler’s patreon at like ten dollars a month. I love Unpretty’s fanfic here on tumblr. Ursula LeGuin is amazing. Etc.)

But my real answer is, I think that’s kind of a poisonous way of engaging with media; I mostly don’t care about the demographics of the author, and I mostly don’t think you should either. I find the question, and the tone in which it was asked (“"gently”“), so offputting that my interest is now at zero.

from a place of privilege gender okcupid dating

I really liked this Sarah Constantin article on why current AI approaches fundamentally aren’t going to lead to AGI.

Her discussion of ontological robustness reminded me of the point I was making the other day, about how GPT on a deep level can’t learn.

And for the agent to be able to conceive of [the possibility that its fundamental model might be wrong] and count it as something to avoid, for it to be able to say I don’t want my loss function to be spoofed by something that kills me, it needs to have a “goal” or a “value” that goes beyond its loss function.

AKA, not a static terminal goal. A way to distinguish the “true real-world goal” from one’s mere current specification of it, and update the specification as necessary.

AKA, cross-ontological transfer of goals.

GPT-like systems just…can’t do this. They have their training weights, and that’s what they have; nothing ever updates.

And of course there are ways to retrain them and fine-tune them, but that’s awkward, and manual, and not feeding off of any of the AI capabilities that GPT has. There’s no iterative improvement; and there’s no obvious or even really suggested path for how to get there.

Sarah says no one is even really working on this, and I believe her. I haven’t encountered anyone genuinely working on this; and it doesn’t seem terribly commercially useful, while it does seem super hard. And this is part of why I’m just not terribly worried about the AI apocalypse.

ai gpt ml

More generally, Yudkowsky has long been

  1. Correct that a powerful optimization agent that we don’t understand the inner workings of would be extremely scary, and
  2. Wrong in his belief that creating such a thing would be easy.

If you grant that a super-powerful uncontrolled optimization process is about to be launched, you should in fact worry quite a lot. But it’s not.

In particular, the successes of GPT and the Transformer should reduce the credibility of Yudkowskian arguments, not raise it. Yudkowsky was arguing from a premise that any recognizable AI would necessarily have a certain collection of capabilities. GPT either does, or probably will soon, satisfy the conditions of a “recognizable AI”, but it doesn’t have those capabilities.

And the Yudkowskian conclusion is basically, therefore it must have those capabilities somewhere.

ai ml gpt yudkowsky

bulbous-oar

We don’t know that no possible large neural network implements an optimizer. If one does, we could stumble into it via gradient descent, just as we’ve stumbled into large neural networks that have world models.

Sure, we don’t know that no possible neural network implements an optimizer. In fact, I’ll go farther: it seems like if it’s possible to write one, which it probably is, we should probably be able to encode one in a large neural network. It’s just a very flexible framework for a model.

(Of course that flexibility is also the weakness: if it could be anything it has no strong pressure to be a specific thing.)

But I can say something stronger and also dumber than that, right? If an optimizer exists, then it’s possible that if I have my computer spit out 10TB of random bits and then interpret that as the source code to a C program, it will compile to that optimizer. It’s just…unlikely.

Large neural networks like GPT are not attempting to create optimizing agents. The training process is (outer-)optimizing for something, and the thing it’s optimizing for is very much not an (inner-)optimizer.

So this argument is something like, maybe writing an extremely powerful optimizer is so easy that we’ll do it by accident. And then not only will we create one, but it will be so powerful that it can out-optimize us, even if we’re trying to stop it, even though that’s if anything counterproductive to what we were training the model to do. That’s not impossible but it seems extremely unlikely.

(In contrast, I don’t think we “stumbled into” world models exactly; they are something we were more or less explicitly trying to get for the past couple years. This is part of Sarah’s point: people are trying to get world models, but they aren’t trying to get ontological stability or train inner optimizing loops basically at all.)

ai ml gpt
jaydaigle.net

A Fictional History of Numbers, Part 2: Measurement, Estimation, Completeness, and Reality

This week we continue our exploration of what numbers are, and where mathematicians keep finding weird ones. We start by asking for the area of a circle, get exhausted by Archimedes's method for finding the answer, and take a tour through the idea of limits to construct the complete field of real numbers. We resolve one of the oldest mathematical flame war topics on the internet, and finish by worrying the real numbers are just too weird to actually use.
Jay Daigle

A new post up on my blog!  Last time we talked about the algebraic numbers, and how just wanting to solve simple equations can create a ton of different numbers.  But they don’t get us everything.

So this time we start off with the idea of measurement, and wind up inventing the real numbers.  The real numbers are weird.  Real weird.  But they show up when we start asking questions about size or measurement.  And in part 3, we’ll see they’re exactly the right way to do calculus.

blog math number theory calculus analysis
loki-zen
transgenderer

its an interesting choice that link is mute from the players perspective but clearly conveying ifnromation, seemingly verbally, to other characters. i think the implicaiton is that link is speaking, we just dnt know what hes saying. i guess to make him more of a "blank slate". im not sure.

max1461

Mario does this also. Nintendo thing. Very interesting I actually like it a lot.

jadagul

It’s a pretty common video game thing! Especially in earlier games. Link and Mario are always mute. But like Crono is also mute. In the Golden Sun games, whichever character is the protagonist at the time is mute. (And the Pokemon protagonists are mute, but that’s Nintendo again.)

In general if you want one character to be a standin for the player, it can be helpful for them to have no literal dialogue; the menu selections the player makes are “your dialogue”. That’s why modern pokemon games give you a bunch of dialog prompts where you can choose between “yes” and “of course” or some shit—the point is not to give you a choice, it’s to give you a line.

That doesn’t work well with modern voice-acted games, so it’s died out of those. But with a purely text-based interface it’s often the most reasonable choice.

video games
tanadrin
tanadrin

my other, more grounded argument against “data” being plural is that “agenda” is also a plural form used as a singular, and you’d sound like a lunatic if you used a plural verb with “agenda.”

also “video” isn’t even a noun in Latin, it’s a verb, and we don’t restrict it to first-person uses (’he watches a video’ is no less admissible than ‘i watch a video’) even though it’s a first person singular verb

jadagul

But like, “agendum” isn’t really attested in English, right? I have used it, but only as like playful/joking behavior. “Datum” is a real word!

tanadrin

a fairly rare one–you talk about geographic datum(s) occasionally (and look! i have to use a different plural there to emphasize that i do not mean “data” in the generic sense!), but “data” in the usual sense isn’t differentiable into individual components

you would talk about the “data” an experiment yields even if that “data” was a single number.

jadagul

But I would totally say “but this one datum was extremely weird”. Now this is partly because I speak Latin, but it’s a real use.

I decided to go check the OED. Surprisingly to me, they have “datas” attested before either “datum” or “data” as a mass noun, so ew.  But it does site 

Course Math. (ed. 5) II. 350   The omission of a material datum in the calculation..namely, the weight of the charge of powder.1841  

But then it turns out that “agendum” is also attested, so… Maybe I should start using it unironically.

language english latin
See this in the app Show more