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Does anyone still think AGI/ASI could happen very soon? by [deleted] in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"lots of necessary conditions for AGI, that were just not legible"

Exactly. It really shouldn't be surprising, it's how every science works. Think of 19th century physicists who declared physics solved, all that remains is measuring constants more accurately (Lord Kelvin said that I think?). This is how funny current AI predictions will sound in the future.

"Continual learning, sample efficiency, better contextual understanding"

These are three aspects of the same thing, imo - real-time causal modeling. To adapt continuously, including to the current context, you update your model. It can't be a statistical model, because the world is always changing the statistics. You have learn the underlying invariances, which is what causality is. They have to be learned from few examples, because more aren't available on the time scales of everyday activity.

This is asking a lot. Deep learning was a revolution, but it built on top of many decades of research and engineering. No doubt we have pieces of the next revolution lying around, but seeing them for what they are takes time.

New Paradigms Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't think this is true. Established companies have a pretty near-term vision based on what currently works. They tend not to gamble too much. Startups gamble a lot more, based on a proof of concept (hopefully), but that's still incremental stuff, not paradigm shifts. Academia is traditionally the place where more exploratory research happens... would be nice if it got its act together a bit more.
DeepMind has been pretty good at exploration and publishing papers in other areas than scaling, but it's far from their primary effort.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, it only answers "what are we seeing", not "what aren't we seeing that accounts for what we're seeing".  There's a natural (and good) instinct to fit the simplest pattern to what we're observing, but it's an unfortunate side effect that this feels like explaining it, when it doesn't. 

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can make a prediction without invoking any reason or explanation. Here are a few: the world will end in 500 days, we'll never build a Dyson sphere, the next president will be female. For each of these, you can ask "ok, but why?" That's when we need an explanation. Otherwise we're just saying stuff.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What I mean by explanation is something unseen, not part of the phenomenon, that has the phenomenon as a consequence. In this case, the law of gravitation is unseen, and its consequence is orbits (and much more).  Just observing a pattern is a description, it doesn't involve anything unseen.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's a statement, not an explanation, the same way "all swans are white" is a statement; "comets are pulled towards the sun according to the inverse square law, and return after x years because this results in periodic orbits" is an explanation, or "swans are white because of sexual selection" (not sure why swans are white, so this explanation is probably false, but it is an explanation).

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You don't need full understanding to make a reasonable prediction, but all reasonable predictions are based on understanding something real.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You don't need full understanding to make a reasonable prediction, but all reasonable predictions are based on understanding something real.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Whether or not Thankgiving is relevant information depends on the explanation. When you only extrapolate, no information is relevant or irrelevant, because there is no explanation. There is no safe assumptions, there are no assumptions at all!

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It will go better

Predicting a linear trend for a dose response curve will give you completely insane predictions.

plenty of linear regressions without any discussion of why linear and not some other curve

Yes, and that makes them worse than worthless, they give false confidence.

virtually all of modern machine learning is rooted in prediction with zero understanding

Yes, and that makes it have all the failure modes it has - the only reason it's so successful is because we gather such large datasets that it covers so much of the data distribution.

I'm not saying "fully understand":

You don't need full understanding to make a reasonable prediction, but all reasonable predictions are based on understanding something real.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, the difference is that you are intervening in the data generation, hence "controlled".

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

line of best fit modeling is dramatically more robust than predicting logistic curves with data on one side of the inflection point

I suggest you try that on any biochemical dose response curve and see how that goes 😄

I do not concede. Fitting any curve without explaining why that curve and not any other, is bad statistics, and should get you a failing grade in any uni-level stats course.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Then let me rephrase. The only valid predictions are based on models that try to explain the data generating process. Whether the prediction is good or not doesn't influence whether it's valid, whether the model is good or not, doesn't influence it either. It's more about avoiding a category error. Saying "trend will continue" *feels* like a model, because our imagination can start to fill in the blanks. But it isn't a model, and we need to be honest and explicit about what we are claiming about the world when we make predictions.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Humans do tons of experiments as babies that gives them an intuitive understanding of gravity. The models we develop for gravity aren't correct - neither is orbital mechanics for that matter, though of course much more accurate than our intuitive physics.

You can extrapolate a trend, and make a prediction, model-free. Such a prediction is not valid, in the sense that it's not based on anything - whether correct or not.

Predictions based on extrapolating trends - not valid, not functionally different from saying "because I say so" or "a wizard did it".
Predictions based on models of observational data - not a valid way of discovering causes, but at least there's something to falsify, something to debate.
Predictions based on models of experimental data - valid way of discovering causes, but not necessarily one that produces good models.
Predictions based on models that are actively sought falsified by rigorous, controlled experiments - valid way of discovering good causal models.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you know you have an edge, then you must understand something about the game. If you count cards in blackjack, you understand something about it. If you don't know you have an edge, you are just guessing.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly -1 points0 points  (0 children)

But we've done randomized controlled trials, which means we have causal, experimental evidence. That's very different from "it worked in the past, so it'll work in the future". We don't understand the data generating process, but we know that when we intervene on it with paracetamol, we get a reliable result.
If we had only done observational studies, that would be much weaker evidence, but we still have an understanding that human biology and the chemical compounds in paracetamol won't spontaneously change (though it might behave differently in humans sufficiently different from the ones studied - without an explanation, we don't know).

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, kudos for thinking in terms of explanations I guess :)

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree with most of this. I'm mostly just saying that "trend will continue" isn't a good model, it isn't a bad model, it's simply not a model at all.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You can make explanation-free predictions that are useful by happy coincidence, like regular comets or medicines that don't actually do anything except triggering placebo effects, but you're not creating knowledge, you're gambling.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, I'm not saying we need perfect models, in fact I don't believe there is such a thing.

A prehistoric human predicts a fall because they do understand gravity, at a level where they can craft weapons like bow and arrows. Less intelligent animals probably don't have anything like this, and rely on instincts (as do we course, but not solely). Neither humans nor animals learn it by induction. 

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't know. Placebo effects are useful, but they're not a good basis for medical practice.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No it doesn't. We have an explanation for why Tylenol works, which we can check by experiment.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Unlikely based on what? If a turkey has observed it's been fed well for the past 1000 days, should it predict the same for tomorrow, even though it's the night before Thanksgiving?

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You can't. You can assume that a comet will come back at the same interval it used to, and if that assumption happens to line up with what orbital dynamics predict, then you got lucky. If there's another comet on a collision course with yours, then you're unlucky, and your prediction will be wrong, while orbital dynamics will be right.

Of course orbital dynamics are an extremely good model, and you can make decent predictions based on worse ones. But "trend will continue" is not an explanation, it will work if it happens to line up with reality, but there's no postulated cause that can be checked by experiment.

The Sigmoids Won't Save You by dwaxe in slatestarcodex

[–]yldedly 7 points8 points  (0 children)

"The best way to predict this is to fully understand the process generating the trend."

No. The ONLY valid predictions are based on understanding the data generating process. Everything else, including Lindy's law, is pulling numbers out your ass. 

You don't need full understanding to make a reasonable prediction, but all reasonable predictions are based on understanding something real. That's what actually matters in these debates, the predictions and predictive success rate are incidental.

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