Maybe this idea about “entanglement” and “mutual information” could focus the criticism a bit? This seems to underpin Yudkowsky’s general conception of representation.pic.twitter.com/i0uqS3McCh
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Maybe this idea about “entanglement” and “mutual information” could focus the criticism a bit? This seems to underpin Yudkowsky’s general conception of representation.pic.twitter.com/i0uqS3McCh
I only vaguely know this particular post, but 3 years ago I got the idea that EY had a coherent story on representation and I just had to work out what it was. so god help me I ended up reading a pile of sequences posts, Arbital pages and ancient pdfs...
... I was motivated by the fact that sometimes (as in your screenshot) he shows an understanding that representation should ground out in interaction somewhere. But exactly how he wants that to work is hugely contradictory across his writing, and sometime flat out absent...
To be charitable to Yudkowsky, he just made the common, tragic mistake of assuming that the field called “X Science” has some sort of sane agenda for studying X and knows something about X and is the only field that has something to say about X.
To be charitable to “Cognitive Science,” the clueful people in the field figured out* around 1990 that none of that was true in their case, and it’s been a non-field since. * Well, Dreyfus told them, and eventually some of them listened
If you are a bright 16-to-24-year-old, it’s essentially impossible to figure out on your own that field X is bogus; you just assume it’s real because lot of smart famous people do. If you are lucky, you encounter a mentor who points out that it’s nonsense, and do something else
There are lots of senior people who can explain to students that cognitive science isn’t a thing. However, Yudkosky was self-taught, so he didn’t get the benefit of that, and just read a lot of papers, and assumed without thinking about it that there was some there there.
So his understanding of representation was no more incoherent than most; it just reflects the state of the field circa 1990, when the smart people said “oh @#$%, we suddenly realize none of this makes any sense, we’d better find something else to do instead.”
This is a failure mode I worry about a lot in myself TBH. I read a tonne across a range of fields but have minimal access to the ghost library.
I think partly the "across a range of fields" helps counteract that a bit because it helps expose one to criticism, but there's almost certainly still some knowledge in my head that is total junk as a result.
Yes, I think learning lots of different fields to some depth is invaluable by giving you a range of tools for asking “does this actually make sense; and if so, is it likely to be true?” Retaining some junk pseudoknowledge seems inevitable :(
I guess I'm more into instrumental rationality anyway so as long as the knowledge is proving useful I don't really mind if it's junk, and if it's not useful I'm probably not going to keep it around regardless of whether it's junk, but it still makes me nervous.
Also then we get into the problem of not kidding yourself about whether something is useufl.
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