[HN Gopher] A first lesson in meta-rationality
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A first lesson in meta-rationality
Author : alboaie
Score : 143 points
Date : 2021-06-06 09:48 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (metarationality.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (metarationality.com)
| raghuveerdotnet wrote:
| I still don't understand how this is any different from the
| notion of problem solving. And I really didn't understand the
| human-AI equivalence, is it just the substrate independent nature
| of turing-completeness? If so, I think we still lack the
| epistemic toolkit to say anything conclusive about creating an
| equivalence, or for that matter any form of comparative
| relationship, especially given that AGI is still not a problem
| that is well-defined, let alone discussing the solution space.
| No?
| abss wrote:
| Another good introduction:
| https://drossbucket.com/2017/09/30/metarationality-a-messy-i...
| alboaie wrote:
| Despite admitting verbally that a map is not the territory,
| rationalists hope that if they take one map, and keep updating
| it long enough, this map will asymptotically approach the
| territory. In other words, that in every moment, using one map
| is the right strategy. Meta-rationalists don't believe in the
| ability to update one map sufficiently (or perhaps just
| sufficiently quickly), and intentionally use different maps for
| different contexts. (Which of course does not prevent them from
| updating the individual maps.) As a side effect of this
| strategy, the meta-rationalist is always aware that the
| currently used map is just a map; one of many possible maps.
| The rationalist, having invested too much time and energy into
| updating one map, may find it emotionally too difficult to
| admit that the map does not fit the territory, when they
| encounter a new part of territory where the existing map fits
| poorly. Which means that on the emotional level, rationalists
| treat their one map as the territory.
|
| Furthermore, meta-rationalists don't really believe that if you
| take one map and keep updating it long enough, you will
| necessarily asymptotically approach the territory. First, the
| incoming information is already interpreted by the map in use;
| second, the instructions for updating are themselves contained
| in the map. So it is quite possible that different maps, even
| after updating on tons of data from the territory, would still
| converge towards different attractors. And even if,
| hypothetically, given infinite computing power, they would
| converge towards the same place, it is still possible that they
| will not come sufficiently close during one human life, or that
| a sufficiently advanced map would fit into a human brain.
| Therefore, using multiple maps may be the optimal approach for
| a human. (Even if you choose "the current scientific knowledge"
| as one of your starting maps.)
| abss wrote:
| Yes.. metarationality is basicaly a sort of belief system
| about how and what we can undestand. If we dont undestand our
| limits and we do not use rationalities as tools we end in
| scientism or very wrong belief systems built on "fakery" and
| self delusions..
| beaconstudios wrote:
| FYI, it is a synonym for the epistemology (philosophy of
| knowledge) called constructivism.
| morsch wrote:
| The above comment should be attributed to https://www.lesswro
| ng.com/posts/hxxN75ZQ5GY4Tjwkv/inscrutabl...
| Retric wrote:
| That line of thinking assumes you can't share maps, as such
| it's of minimal practical value.
|
| To abuse the analogy, a glovebox of old road atlas doesn't
| beat Google maps. On the other hand mixing Google maps with
| your personal knowledge that a bridge is out is a useful meta
| map.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| There's existing terminology for this idea. Rationalists are
| positivists and meta-rationalists are constructivists. These
| are terms from the philosophy of science, and directly relate
| to how one treats the map-territory relationship.
|
| They also relate directly to the philosophies of materialism
| and emergentism.
| fouc wrote:
| Those two terms don't seem to map like you suggest? Doing
| good science is basically the same as solving Bongard
| problems. Good positivist science relies on meta-
| rationality.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yes, Bongard problems are synonymous with the process of
| creating mental models, which is the process of science.
| Logical positivism and constructivism are both scientific
| - constructivism is a superset of positivist tools and
| better accommodates systemic/emergent properties.
|
| Positivism is analytic/materialist, which is to say that
| it purports that you can understand a thing by
| understanding the behaviour of its smallest pieces. This
| denies emergent properties, which cannot be understood
| from the parts. Constructivism allows for multiple
| distinct (ie, irreconcilable) models to be used in
| reference to the same subject, depending on the
| properties that are of interest. It does not require all
| models to be reconciled into a hierarchy.
| roenxi wrote:
| That comment is picking at a fair critique, but some details
| seem to be wrong.
|
| > rationalists hope that if they take one map, and keep
| updating it long enough, this map will asymptotically
| approach the territory
|
| That is, as far as can be detected, what the human brain
| does. It isn't just the rationalists who have a view and keep
| updating it, hoping it will asymptotically approach the
| territory. It is exceedingly difficult to have a strategy
| that doesn't do that and still be a semi-functional member of
| society.
|
| I'm struggling to see how someone could hold 'different' maps
| because they become one map in your head. Rationalists are
| perfectly comfortable with there being multiple possible
| scenarios leading to an outcome.
|
| My guess is that this observation is going to the fact that
| rationalists are very, very uncomfortable (to the point of
| falling apart, sometimes) in accepting "because I say so" as
| sufficient evidence to update a view, change behaviour stop
| arguing and be a good sport about the whole thing. Which is
| very much a social faux-pas when dealing with high status
| people and often a mistake when dealing with inarticulate
| people who are nevertheless correct in their view.
| bordercases wrote:
| There is nothing stopping me from using multiple frameworks
| to understand a position and seeing if they agree or not.
| Such an ability is integral in disciplines like design,
| like intelligence analysis, like trading... You can act as
| if you believe many things without endorsing beliefs, and
| at the level of behavior the two outcomes are
| indistinguishable.
|
| Furthermore, cognitive dissonance exists, which shows that
| minds can maintain contradictory beliefs until their
| beliefs are made to be "live options" for a given
| situation; and there is no guarantee that the consistency
| of the mind's contents won't diverge again under new
| circumstances. Newton believed in alchemy.
|
| The one concession I will make is that in the end, people
| take one action at a time, which implies a single judgement
| made at one time on which to act. But the train of thought
| leading up to that point doesn't have to feature a linear
| incrementing of ideas or beliefs.
|
| You are also making some very strong assumptions about what
| is required to be a "semi-(!)functional member of society".
| What examples do you have in mind? Schizophrenics?
| d0mine wrote:
| I've heard about this idea in a form: <<All models are false.
| Some are useful.>>
| tlb wrote:
| An interesting category of problems are like Bongard problems in
| that you have to deduce the rule from examples, but the examples
| are presented one at a time at random long intervals so you have
| to work from memory. Most real-world learning is like this.
|
| When working from memory, it's normal for your memory to have
| already parsed the previous situation into features. As some of
| the later examples in the blog illustrate, it's easy to fall into
| parsing examples into the wrong set of features, which is how
| you'll remember them.
|
| While I could solve all the problems in the article, I doubt I
| could solve any but the simplest if I was shown 1 image per day
| over 12 days and not allowed to write anything down.
|
| Perhaps the lesson is that when you're trying to deduce a rule
| (say, for what conditions your software crashes in) you can
| increase your rule-discovering power greatly by making notes and
| being able to look at several examples side-by-side.
| ScottBurson wrote:
| Here's a deduce-the-rule problem that completely stumped me
| until I wrote down a series of examples:
| https://illuminations.nctm.org/lessons/petals/petals.htm
| rrmm wrote:
| You also have to know you want to solve a problem.
|
| Once you get to the point where you have any hypothesis
| whatsoever, no matter how weak, a systematic approach (saving
| examples as test cases) helps to avoid confirmation bias and
| makes testing further hypothesis less costly.
|
| Another hard one is when there is a simple, probabilistic rule.
| You usually end up with an over-complicated rule to cover all
| your data instead of the true rule. (Of course that gets down
| to what is at the basis of the probability: are you satisfied
| with a probability?)
| skybrian wrote:
| Probabilistic rules themselves tend to require much more
| data, which can be expensive.
|
| In computing we try to write deterministic tests that either
| pass or fail, which means you can run them once after a
| change and know what the state is. Even if you just _suspect_
| flakiness you may have to run the test hundreds of times to
| be confident that the probability of failure is sufficiently
| low.
| lisper wrote:
| This is exactly right, and it is exactly what makes quantum
| mechanics and relativity so hard to wrap your brain around
| because by the time you get around to learning them you have
| almost certainly deeply internalized a classical model of the
| world. It's just _obvious_ that classical mechanics is
| "correct", that the world consists of objects embedded in a
| three-dimensional space that exist in specific places at
| specific times, and even _talking_ about a world where this is
| not true doesn 't even make _sense_ , let alone qualify as a
| viable candidate for actual truth.
|
| It is equally "obvious" that the heavens are governed by
| different laws of physics than the earth, because things on
| earth fall down if unsupported and naturally come to rest and
| things in the heavens don't. And of course all of these things
| are equally wrong.
|
| One can and should apply the same lesson to social and
| political statements. For example, people get hung up on
| arguing about things like whether or not "God exists" as if
| they were arguing about a question of objective fact when
| actually what they are arguing about is the meaning of the
| words "God" and "exists."
|
| I wrote a longer take on all this about six years ago:
|
| http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.ht...
| yewenjie wrote:
| David Chapman has multiple sites for approaching the same
| problem. However, all the sites (or 'books') are incomplete.
|
| Every time I come across something by him I just want to read a
| complete book on the topic of metarationality from cover to
| cover.
| skybrian wrote:
| I'd settle for more progress on _In the Cells of the Eggplant._
|
| Oddly, this page is on that site but not linked from the table
| of contents, nor does it show up as a recently changed page.
| Matt_Arnold wrote:
| Yeah, as part of my free podcast audiobook version of
| Meaningness, I'm constantly asking him for updates, in order to
| provide a structure in which he'll work on one book at a time
| and completely finish it. So far it's working out pretty well.
|
| https://fluidity.libsyn.com/
| timboy03 wrote:
| Chapman's long-term hidden-agenda project is to teach us all by
| extended example that the notion of a "book" is intrinsically
| nebulous, and that the decision of whether and where one of his
| books stops and another begins (necessary for, say, counting
| how many books he has written) is itself dependent on the
| purpose you have for reading his books.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| Author links to Turing-Church thesis, which is widely assumed to
| be right to talk about things not related to any single thing
| that thesis is about.
|
| It is about computable functions and abstract machines.
| cousin_it wrote:
| A site with lots of Bongard problems:
| https://www.foundalis.com/res/bps/bpidx.htm
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I don't see how Bongard problems are human complete if the author
| can't even solve half of them. Does that mean he doesn't have
| human intelligence?
|
| I think a better candidate for human complete is "knowing what
| other humans are thinking". AKA "theory of mind".
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| That would exclude many neurodivergent people. Perhaps also
| other cultures, and social classes.
|
| It is easier to guess the state of minds of people who are
| similar to you. Because then your natural algorithm "what would
| _I_ feel in such situation? what would make _me_ say these
| words, act this way? " is more likely to match how _they_ feel
| and think.
|
| I suspect that many people overestimate their ability to "read
| other people's minds". First, they rarely verify their guesses.
| (I see another person and conclude that they are angry. I
| usually don't approach them and ask "hey, are you angry?".
| Therefore, if my guess was wrong, I am not going to learn it.)
| Second, if they turn out to be wrong, it's always the other
| person's fault. (If an autist cannot guess a neurotypical
| person's thoughts, it's the autist's fault. If a neurotypical
| person cannot guess an autist's thoughts, guess what, that's
| also the autist's fault.) Third, it is easier to guess thoughts
| of people we frequently talk to, because people usually think
| today the same thing they thought yesterday, and they already
| told us what they thought yesterday.
| skybrian wrote:
| Being able to solve half of them by computer would be amazing
| progress, indicating a breakthrough in machine learning
| research.
|
| But whether that means artificial general intelligence is
| solved is another question. Most people can't play Go very well
| either.
|
| It's difficult to say whether the solution will generalize
| without having it, but easy to imagine that it might.
| mckirk wrote:
| Am I the only one that gets driven kind of crazy by these kinds
| of problems?
|
| I'm not completely sure so far what it is, but I'm guessing it's
| the frustration of having to find a needle in a haystack of
| essentially infinite size, as depending on how complicated you
| want to see the problem, there's an infinitude of potential
| 'solutions' and you never really know which level of complexity
| the author had in mind.
|
| I love logic puzzles, where the system is constrained and you
| have to work within it, but these find-the-rule problems really
| aren't my thing so far. Maybe I'd need to develop a higher
| frustration tolerance for them, heh.
| solveit wrote:
| You're certainly not the only one, but the point of the article
| is that solving these kinds of problems, with all the vagueness
| that implies, is an important feature of human intelligence.
| mckirk wrote:
| Since I generally seem to do fairly well in problem solving,
| that is exactly what I'm trying to figure out: Are these
| problems actually representative of an important skill that
| you need for general problem solving, or are they, through
| their nature of being man-made puzzles, actually in a realm
| of their own?
|
| When I'm looking at some pattern that I'm trying to find a
| rule for in real-life, I don't think I'm running into the
| same frustration and in fact greatly enjoy trying to figure
| out rules for how things work (or so I believe, at least).
|
| I think a crucial difference is that I know that the problems
| I encounter in real-life are only "as complex as necessary",
| and the data I'm looking at is a direct result of some
| process that serves a specific goal; presumably one I think
| "makes sense", as I wouldn't look for a rule otherwise. In
| contrast, puzzles are made to be complicated on purpose, and
| I suspect that annoys me subconsciously to the point where my
| brain complains about engaging with it. But it's only these
| kinds of "figure out the rules" puzzles, so there has to be
| another important difference compared to logic puzzles.
| Possibly the difference is: for the logic puzzle, the "meta-
| rules" for the problem are made explicit and I know the
| solution-space exactly. For the Bongard problems here I found
| myself thinking for example: "wait, is it always just two
| groups distinguished by single rule, or can there be
| dependencies on the positions of the symbols within the
| groups as well? What kind of solution am I even looking
| for?", and that also apparently frustrates me.
|
| Sorry for the wall of text, but I've actually been trying to
| figure out why these kinds of problems get on my nerves for
| quite a long time, lol.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Bongard puzzles are pretty much the same as the test
| matrices in IQ tests, which annoy me in the exact same way
| these Bongard puzzles do. If you'd ask people questions in
| the same manner these puzzles do, they would refuse to
| answer because they'd feel trolled. Arguably, that's the
| case.
| antlerboy wrote:
| They're closely related to Raven's Progressive Matrices h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matric
| es which are indeed the source for IQ tests. But the
| point of this all is that rationality works within a
| frame; Bongard games are just an illustration that the
| real problem of meaning and choice and acting in the
| world is the not-rational one of choosing a framing.
| glaukopis wrote:
| I feel similarly; the author mentions spending ten minutes
| trying to solve one of these puzzles, and I can't imagine doing
| that and enjoying it. Maybe it's the case that spending more
| time on the ones that stumped me would yield fruit, but I have
| the impression that on this class of problem, if I don't see
| the solution within two minutes then I probably won't be able
| to figure it out in ten, which disincentivizes investing time
| in them. I'd be interested in knowing if the people who /can/
| solve all the problems in the article do so by investing time
| in them and being methodical or if they just "see it"
| eventually, which is how I feel solving the easier ones.
|
| There's also the factor that some Bongard problems, independent
| of their difficulty factor, are just more satisfying than
| others. Spoiler for the fourth one, with pairs of circles: its
| solution is that the entries on the left have $property while
| the ones on the right...don't. This makes the right side
| virtually useless except to check the rule that you derived
| from the left side.
|
| Maybe it's just that I don't have research experience, and am
| thus unsteeled against problems that seem impenetrable, or
| maybe I just don't have the mindset to be good at these, but I
| agree the really difficult ones can be frustrating.
| narag wrote:
| I don't know, the first took me two seconds, the second five
| and the third five too. I stopped reading there because the
| article says next ones are harder and I would like to take a
| quiet time to read the whole thing.
|
| I use to solve chess problems at lichess, a similar concept.
| Maybe.
|
| Is it really an infinite haystack? It's context. And simplest
| solutions first, gradually think of more complicated ones.
| First try to find a pattern visually, then use simple concepts,
| then more complex concepts.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| I can see where you're coming from. I always have to judge my
| working solutions using the parsimony of features and parsimony
| of rules to navigate the feature/solution landscape of Bongard
| problems.
|
| The underlying assumption is that the problem's author has
| followed the same rules which is an assumption of good faith on
| my part. This narrows down the feature-solution space
| considerably or at least biases it in a way where I can
| prioritize hypotheses in a more tractable way.
|
| Part of what I feel makes me a good puzzle solver is imagining
| that I'm a puzzle maker. What was going through the author's
| mind when they conceived the puzzle? If I can start to pull at
| that thread then the complexity of the puzzle will start to
| unravel.
| b3morales wrote:
| I was thinking along these lines too when the author went
| into machines solving the problems. One bit that jumped out
| was the quote from Hofstadter:
|
| > They depend on a sense of simplicity which is not just
| limited to earthbound human beings.
|
| Followed immediately by a problem whose solution depends on
| having a sense of 3-D objects in gravity!
|
| Solving Bongard problems is surely a hard thing to get an AI
| to do, but I am wondering too about AI- _authored_ instances.
| Or, say, problems authored by aliens, with a different
| evolutionary history, and different in-built biases for
| cognition. Would they necessarily be solvable by humans, or
| our Bongard problems solvable by them? Some aspects (number
| maybe?) are probably universal. But even a good-faith puzzle
| maker has to take some assumption of shared basis for
| perception.
|
| This probably connects up to the author's final point that
| "what objects even are" is not absolute.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| > Followed immediately by a problem whose solution depends
| on having a sense of 3-D objects in gravity!
|
| I can think of a Bongard problem where the images on the
| left are rebuses which spell English words, and images on
| the right are rebuses which spell Russian words. That's
| baking a LOT of a priori knowledge into the the puzzle.
| Alexandre Linhares' A glimpse at the metaphysics of Bongard
| problems talks a bit about what assumptions can go into
| this problems:
|
| > An interesting but generally ignored aspect of Bongard
| problems is that their difficulty for a given subject is
| directly associated his or hers (or the system's) previous
| experience.Since the problems consist of geometric figures,
| one may be led to believe that cultural factors do not
| influence the performance of a person attempting to solve
| them. This is not the case.
|
| > Solving Bongard problems is surely a hard thing to get an
| AI to do, but I am wondering too about AI-authored
| instances.
|
| I like where you're going. I left out the search I did of
| "generative adversarial networks bongard" because no good
| results popped up. (Hint: this would make for a fantastic
| HN post if any researcher wants to earn fake internet
| points).
|
| Finally, this[2] comment stuck with me over the years. As
| always, would solving or generating Bongard problems be a
| quantum leap in AI or would they, like so many other
| problems, be subsumed into the category of AI-solvable
| problems and we all move on to the next problem at the
| frontier?
|
| [1] - http://app.ebape.fgv.br/comum/arq/Linhares2.pdf [2] -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8964017
| mckirk wrote:
| Hmmmm yes, this assumption of good faith might actually be an
| important part of approaching these problems. I think I
| instinctively look for approaches to problems that would work
| even for adversarial examples. In the case of these puzzles,
| that of course doesn't work, because you then imagine the
| rule to be something completely outlandish and give up before
| you've even checked the easy options.
|
| Something like "I know it's _possible_ the author has chosen
| a ridiculous rule, so it doesn't make sense for me to look
| for it, because even if I find it, I just got lucky and
| didn't actually solve the problem."
|
| That might be a side-effect of perfectionism, actually.
| skybrian wrote:
| I think this has to do with tolerance for being stuck, and that
| varies depending on how rewarded you think you'll be for
| figuring it out and getting unstuck.
|
| Real science and math involves getting stuck on problems,
| perhaps for weeks, months, or years. I guess we should be happy
| that there are people who can tolerate being stuck.
|
| My tolerance for getting stuck on a mere _game_ has dropped
| dramatically since I was a kid; many of the games we played
| then are unplayable by modern standards. You had to _draw maps_
| and _take notes_ , yourself, rather than the computer
| remembering things for you.
|
| But text adventures back then sometimes weren't meant to be
| played alone. The game might be single-player but it was a
| group activity for college students where you'd share ideas.
| The modern equivalent might be games where you're expected to
| search the web to find recipes and strategies for things.
| mckirk wrote:
| Yep, we aren't exactly being conditioned towards higher
| frustration tolerance nowadays... I don't think I could still
| deal with a PC without an SSD.
|
| I think there are different kinds of being-stuck, though.
| With many problems in science, there's at least things you
| can try to gather more data. So you're stuck, but you can
| come up with new experiments to get new insights into the
| problem. Here, you're only given the one set of examples and
| have to make do. I guess you could still see the process of
| generating hypothesis and testing them against the examples
| as a sort of "experiment", but it still feels a lot
| "stuckier" if you don't get anywhere with it.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| The cumbersome part is that the first step requires you to pick
| up patterns and differences without knowing which are actually
| relevant. Which is fine for the first few puzzles, but gets
| much harder with increasing amounts of details.
|
| It's basically the same kind of problem that one faces in the
| more frustrating debugging sessions where you're looking at
| tons of data and try to find a pattern or clue of what causes
| the bug under what circumstances.
| layer8 wrote:
| At least with Bongard problems you don't have heisenbugs.
| rrmm wrote:
| Don't worry you can always solve these problems trivially: The
| examples on the left side are all on the left side, while the
| examples on the right side are not.
| rrmm wrote:
| The fact that the solution of these problems is in some sense
| satisfying also has a lot to do with the fact that the people
| making these problems are Western systematic-thinkers. They
| think like us (because we were trained by them).
|
| That's not to say there isn't value in learning this way of
| thinking, it's gotten society a long way.
| jxf wrote:
| How would you characterize the opposite of (or alternative
| to) "systematic" thinking?
| rrmm wrote:
| Not an alternative to systematization, but different
| systems. Just that the analogies or groups that make
| sense to one group may not make sense to others.
| ghodith wrote:
| Could you give an example of a different type?
| rrmm wrote:
| Broadly, for example,
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2838233/
|
| """
|
| Analytic cognition is characterized by taxonomic and
| rule-based categorization of objects, a narrow focus in
| visual attention, dispositional bias in causal
| attribution, and the use of formal logic in reasoning. In
| contrast, holistic cognition is characterized by thematic
| and family-resemblance-based categorization of objects, a
| focus on contextual information and relationships in
| visual attention, an emphasis on situational causes in
| attribution, and dialecticism (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, &
| Norenzayan, 2001).
|
| """
|
| This also comes up a lot in cognitive test design.
|
| The anecdote I've always heard in reference to it was
|
| """ What is considered wise in one society may not be
| considered wise in another; the value and meaning of
| intelligence depends on cultural norms. Demonstrating the
| culturally-specific nature of knowledge and intelligence,
| Cole, Gay, Glick, and Sharp (1971) conducted an
| experiment in which Western participants and Kpelle
| participants from Liberia were given an object-sorting
| task. Participants were asked to sort twenty objects that
| were divided evenly into the linguistic cat-egories of
| foods, implements, food containers, and clothing.
| Westerners tended to sort these objects into the groups
| for food and implements, while Liberian partici-pants
| would routinely pair a potato with a knife because, they
| reasoned, the knife is used to cut the potato. When
| questioned, Liberian participants justified their
| pairings by stating that a wise person would group the
| items in this way. When the researchers asked them to
| show what an unwise person would do, they did the
| taxonomic sort that is more familiar to the Western
| culture. """
|
| quoted from https://uscaseps.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/07/standardized...
| ghodith wrote:
| That actually explains a lot! Thank you, that's a great
| anecdote
| b3morales wrote:
| A simple example that still constrains the puzzle to
| human abilities (but also makes it less universal) might
| be this. Rather than diagrams/images, each puzzle
| consists of two groups of short depictions of two people
| interacting. The differences are in the relationships,
| emotional states, or modes of expression. That kind of
| judgement requires different perception, intuition,
| knowledge, and so on compared to the puzzles based on
| shapes. Probably a lot of people who were good with the
| "standard" Bongard problems would struggle with the
| "interpersonal" variety, and vice versa.
| gweinberg wrote:
| The flaw with that "solution" is that if you have found the
| rule, you should be able to say whether a new image belong on
| the right or the left if it is presented to you. If you say,
| "I can do that, but I need one more bit of information,
| namely whether the new image belongs on the right or the
| left", that's a pretty severe defect.
| rrmm wrote:
| There's no necessity (in general) that a new image should
| be able to be classified under the rule. If I give you two
| finite groups A={1,3,9,-2} and B={7,-11,i,5} and the rule
| actually is tautological, Then a new number 22 doesn't
| belong to either group under the rule.
|
| A few of the examples from the article actually are
| similar. The two circles where one circle is either
| clockwise or counterclockwise from the nearest indention
| only admits pictures with two circles, one on the surface
| of the other and an indentation. There are images which
| wouldn't fit into either.
|
| A math professor of mine was illustrating this point with
| number series (of the sort on aptitude tests, eg
| squares,arithmetic sequences, etc), by listing an obvious
| sequences whose completion ended up being an obscure
| function which diverged at the next point.
|
| So, the trivial solution (and the more ultra-complicated
| solution) is defective basically because it's not
| interesting under the rules of the game which assumes the
| answer is somehow interesting, but not impossible to guess.
| mckirk wrote:
| Thanks for that, actually made me chuckle :)
|
| (And it illustrates the point quite well, as that is indeed
| probably the simplest and most general rule you can find.)
| Buldak wrote:
| Yeah, the author says that for any of these problems "there
| should only be one reasonable rule." But I suspect that
| "reasonable" here really points to contingent facts about
| human psychology, i.e. some rules just strike us as more
| intuitive or appealing than others, but they aren't correct
| in any objective sense. That sort of gives the lie to the
| notion that what we're exercising here is "meta-rationality."
| rrmm wrote:
| These sorts of tasks are teaching you how to think a
| specific way which our society promotes. Mechanistic,
| natural, causal, rational (in the first-order logic sense)
| with a healthy dose of Ockham's razor and simplicity as an
| aesthetic.
|
| I stress though, I'm a big fan of these things and the
| innovations they have enabled, but you still have to
| understand that they are an axiomatic underpinning. It's
| like Euclid's parallel postulate in a way: There is non-
| euclidean geometry out there.
| nerdponx wrote:
| The problem with these puzzles is that, without rules for
| the system, you can just make up your own rules and then
| solve the puzzle within the context of those rules.
|
| For example, in the second puzzle, the arrangement of
| black-and-white shapes is the same on the left and right
| pages, but the right page is rotated relative to the left
| page. Is the question about the shapes as in an ordered
| collection? Or is the question about the pages in their
| entirety? These problems tend to be underspecified, and end
| up being more of a guessing exercise about the authors
| intentions than anything else.
| rrmm wrote:
| Yeah I think a lot of it is learning to think like how
| the people who thought up the problem think.
|
| It still may not be a bad exercise (like art students at
| a gallery copying a master's work), but you shouldn't get
| too far ahead of yourself claiming it's some sort of
| 'exercise in pure reason'.
| timboy03 wrote:
| One tricky thing about Bongard problems is that for any given
| problem there are likely many different rules that could
| distinguish the six positive examples from the six negative
| examples.
|
| For example, maybe a problem that is "really" about circles vs.
| triangles also happens to have more black pixels in the left
| images than in the right images.
|
| A key skill in solving these problems is not just to find a
| compact and discriminating description, but to find such a
| description that is _also_ one that a human Bongard problem
| designer would be likely to think was a cool and elegant puzzle
| that needs an "Aha" moment to recognize. If you find such a
| description, then you're very likely to be right.
|
| I suspect that that last part (recognizing when you have found a
| solution that is pleasing enough to be the answer) is likely to
| be the biggest challenge for ML-based approaches to Bongard
| problems
| OisinMoran wrote:
| This was a good read and I really enjoyed it (I'm another person
| who was turned onto Bongard problems by Hofstadter), but two
| parts weren't particularly strong.
|
| The first one was the dismissal of intuition in a way that seemed
| pretty straw man like to me: "Mostly, "intuition" just means
| "mental activity we don't have a good explanation for," or maybe
| "mental activity we don't have conscious access to." It is a
| useless concept, because we don't have good explanation for much
| if any mental activity, nor conscious access to much of it. By
| these definitions, nearly everything is "intuition," so it's not
| a meaningful category."
|
| I think the author could have spent longer trying to come up with
| a better definition of what someone would mean by intuition with
| relation to these problems instead of just setting up a poor one
| then immediately tearing it down. Intuition here would be
| contrasted against the deliberate procedural thinking of "let's
| list out qualities of these shapes" and would be something like
| seeing the solution straight away, but can also be combined with
| the procedural thinking too with the intuition originating
| possible useful avenues and then the deliberate part working
| through them. The contrast is that you could easily write down
| one set of the steps to be replicated by others (the deliberate
| part: "I counted the sides on all shapes") but less so the other
| (intuition: "I thought x", "x jumped out").
|
| The second is that the example they use for mushiness really
| isn't. There is a perfectly concrete solution to that that
| doesn't involve any mushiness and is simply that the convex hull
| of one set is triangular while the others are circular. The only
| mushiness involved is that saying "triangles vs circles" feels
| like enough of answer to us to not need to specify any more. We
| think that we can continue with just this answer and be able to
| correctly identify any future instances so it seems mushy but you
| can probably think of examples that would confound the mushy
| solution but be fine under the more concrete convex hull one.
| teknopaul wrote:
| I thought that one was the most interesting too. The convex
| hull appears circular but it is not, in one case you have to
| join the dots between the center point of triangles, none of
| the points on the triangles are on a circle, or maybe all of
| them are if we discard the hull abstraction, in which case
| there are three circles.
|
| Imagine trying to write code that identifies that. However it's
| one of the most obvious to me.
| yamrzou wrote:
| Very Interesting. This reminds me of _The Abstraction and
| Reasoning Corpus_ [1] by Francois Chollet, accompanying his paper
| _On the Measure of Intelligence_ [2]...
|
| Edit: Found a recent article mentioning both and discussing a
| NeurIPS paper on using Bongard problems to test AI systems [3].
|
| [1] https://github.com/fchollet/ARC
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547
|
| [3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-
| intelligence/...
| sonkol wrote:
| I know this is a little bit out of topic but I think meta-
| rationality is more about organizing other people/machines
| intelligences to achieve your goal even when you are not highly
| intelligent.
| brudgers wrote:
| I am reminded that the simplest regex for the words "apex, ibex,
| index" is 'apex|ibex|index'.
|
| A commonality of all the boxes on the right is being on the
| right.
|
| A commonality of all the boxes on the left is being on the left.
|
| There is no offside in golf. The rules of the game only apply if
| when we are playing the game.
|
| Here, Wittgenstein might have said Bongard problems are another
| language game and the confusion arises from using words in a
| peculiar way...the game is pretending there is a problem in a
| Bongard problem.
| EricBurnett wrote:
| It depends how you define "simple" : '(ap|ib|ind)ex' is fewer
| symbols and a smaller character graph.
|
| There is no offside in golf...yet. But the rules are
| surprisingly long, and will only get longer as loopholes are
| found and exploited. Humans trying to codify a game, or any
| system, cannot do so precisely; others can and will find the
| gaps between the written rules and the intended meaning, and
| play a different game but pretend it's the same. Or I guess,
| every game is a language game?
|
| Which I think is a point of meta rationality: we can't avoid
| including questions of the rules of the problem. It's clouds
| all the way down.
| brudgers wrote:
| '*' is fewer characters.
|
| If we are playing that language game.
| Gys wrote:
| 'There is no spoon'
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| For the third I got:
|
| _triangle never in circle - circle never in triangle_
|
| compared to the given answer:
|
| _triangle bigger than circle - circle bigger than triangle_
|
| My solution is more general (worse), because it ignores size in
| non-containment arrangements, but also slightly more specific
| (better), because it constrains the single containment example in
| each set.
|
| Neither of the rules say anything about overlapping cases, but
| there are no overlapping examples in the given sets. So there is
| a underlying constraint of _no overlaps,_ but it applies to both
| sides, so it is not a distinguishing factor.
| teknopaul wrote:
| There is no correct answer (see nebulosity) , the point is to
| learn how the problem works. And what a marvelous thing your
| brain is by being able to come up with any solution.
| laszlokorte wrote:
| The issue with your solution is that it can not decide for a
| single combination of circle and triangle if it would belong to
| the left or the right side.
| EE84M3i wrote:
| >The contents of the six boxes on the left all have something
| in common. The six on right also all have something in common,
| which is the opposite of the ones on the left.
|
| I think you and the author might disagree on the meaning of
| "opposite" here. I think they mean logical negation and you are
| using a more colloquial interpretation.
| chubot wrote:
| _From the Church-Turing Thesis, we know there's nothing special
| going on! We know humans can't do anything more than a computer
| can._
|
| I see people making such claims about human cognition all the
| time, and I have no idea how it follows. (note the author is
| paraphrasing "people" here)
|
| The Church-Turing Thesis says nothing about human cognition.
|
| It is perfectly plausible that a human can do things a computer
| can't. (Scott Aaronson has a paper "Why Philosophers Should Care
| About Computational Complexity" which sheds some light on why
| that might be, but it's far from the only possible reason.)
|
| The burden of proof is on people who claim that human cognition
| can be simulated by computer, not the other way around. To me, it
| seems far more likely that it can't.
|
| Human cognition can obviously be simulated by "the laws of
| physics", since brains are material, but it seems very likely
| that computers are less powerful than that.
|
| That's my refutation of the (silly IMO) "simulation argument".
| I'd argue it's simply not possible to simulate another universe.
| You can simulate something like SimCity or whatever, but not a
| real universe. The people who make that argument always seem to
| leave out the possibility that it's physically impossible.
|
| In fact I would actually take the simulation argument ("we are
| almost certainly living in a simulation") as proof by
| contradiction that simulation is impossible.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| > The burden of proof is on people who claim that human
| cognition can be simulated by computer, not the other way
| around. To me, it seems far more likely that it can't.
|
| C-T makes a claim about computable functions on natural
| numbers. It seems strange to argue that humans can perform such
| computations on a fundamental level better than a computer,
| thus we might assume the same is true of more complex
| computations. So while I suppose you could take the position
| that the burden of proof is to show every individual method of
| computation is equivalent, since there are infinitely many
| methods this seems a bit unfair.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I don't think anyone is claiming that humans can compute
| computable functions in some way better than a computer, the
| claim is that minds can do things that are not reducible to
| computing computable functions. See, for example, the Lucas-
| Penrose argument:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Lucas_argument
|
| Note that I am not suggesting that I concur with it.
| throwamon wrote:
| > That's my refutation of the (silly IMO) "simulation argument"
|
| I'm not one of these people, but your rebuttal wouldn't
| convince me if I were. Maybe we _are_ the SimCity of a much
| more complex universe.
| chubot wrote:
| OK, but I'm saying the burden of proof is on who think that
| simulation is possible. It's not at all obvious that it is.
|
| As far as I can tell, the idea was basically made popular by
| movies [1], and there is no science behind it. All the
| science I know of points the other way -- simulating anything
| is incredibly hard and slow. It requires approximations and
| shortcuts to make it work for specific cases, and it doesn't
| work in the general case.
|
| (Maybe some alternative model like quantum computation will
| be different, but we're MUCH much further there. I think
| "adding two small numbers" is still an issue for state of the
| art quantum computers.)
|
| -----
|
| Here's a nice example from a few days ago, trying to
| represent even a tiny part of the human brain in a computer:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27362883
|
| [1] I think this is more literally true than you might
| expect; IIRC the published papers in philosophy liberally
| reference _The Matrix_ , maybe because it attracts readers.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| It seems to be purely an issue of computing power, not
| feasibility. That's why it's conceivable that future
| advances would make it feasible.
|
| Like if in 1950 you looked at a computer and thought
| "there's no way to make realistic 3D graphics".
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's an important misconception here.
|
| The part you're right about is that simulating what we
| understand about our own reality on some subset of that
| reality (e.g. some kind of computer) is really, really
| hard, possibly verging on impossible.
|
| But that's not really the simulation hypothesis at all.
|
| It's relatively easy to build a simulation of a
| _simplified_ or (and this is important) a _different_
| reality in some subset of our own. Trivial examples like
| Conway 's Game of Life come to mind, but also (somewhat
| obviously) SimCity.
|
| The simulation hypothesis is that our reality is a
| simulation running in some subset of a different reality.
| Given what we know about building simulations in our own
| reality, the hypothesis implicitly recognizes that the
| meta-reality in which which our reality is a simulation is
| necessarily different (and likely more complex) than our
| own.
|
| There's an even deeper notion to the simulation hypothesis.
| If our reality is a "simulation", given the richness that
| we see around us, what is the difference between a
| "simulation" and something that isn't a simulation? Based
| on what I said above, the different "levels" would
| necessarily need to differ in terms of their own
| complexity. But is a reality in which our own could be
| simulated really any "better" than our own?
| ema wrote:
| > given the richness that we see around us, what is the
| difference between a "simulation" and something that
| isn't a simulation?
|
| One thought that stayed with me for a while is, my entire
| experience could, theoretically, be encoded in (a rather
| large) integer and in the same way that the number 2
| exists in many contexts maybe I exist simultaneously in
| reality and multiple simulations as well.
| pontifier wrote:
| This all assumes that the limitations of our universe are
| the same as the limitations on the hardware outside the
| simulation.
|
| We can run Conway's game, but a being inside that
| simulation, contemplating it's existence, would have no way
| to even begin to think about quantum computing.
|
| The rules are just too different.
|
| That being said, I almost look at the finite speed of
| light, and quantum effects as shortcuts to simulation.
|
| The light speed limit allows greater parallelization by
| reducing the number of particles inside the local light
| cone. Likewise, quantum effects seem like a compiler
| optimization where a calculation isn't performed until the
| result is needed.
|
| It's fun to think about, but I doubt we will ever know for
| sure either way.
| mannykannot wrote:
| If we go around demanding proof of every hypothesis before
| considering its implications, we will find that we have
| very little to think about. Not even mathematics and
| philosophy are conducted at this level of rigor.
|
| The burden of proof is a double-edged sword: it can be used
| to rein in tendentiousness, but also to avoid discussing an
| issue.
| wydfre wrote:
| If anyone is interested in this, they should look into Alfred
| Korzybski and general semantics. He invented the term "The map is
| not the territory", in case you want an idea of who he is.
|
| IIRC, he at one point says in his book, "Science and Sanity: An
| Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics"
| something along the lines that the mistakes most people make are
| in categorization. Something along the lines of "Some things look
| the same but they are different, and some things look different
| but they are the same". It's a very interesting book and I loved
| how Non-Aristotelian logic was used in Null-A by A.E. van Vogt,
| which introduced it to me.
| slx26 wrote:
| We should keep one morning of school a week, no matter our age,
| to get together with other humans and discuss about stuff like
| this. Individual reading and HN comments are fine, but we are
| missing the best part of learning, which is actually verbalizing
| and battle-testing those vague ideas. It would really help in
| cases like this... Have no friends? Make a club!
| hliyan wrote:
| I've always considered "pattern recognition for the purpose of
| prediction" a core function of the human brain that precedes
| language, rationality or any form of logic. So it feels counter-
| intuitive to me to label this meta-rationality or even associate
| it with rationality. I subscribe somewhat to the idea that much
| of our rational decision making is _ex post facto_ , i.e a verbal
| narration that comes after the decision making to explain the
| decision. The actual decision making being an opaque process that
| takes place inside our brain's neural network. Confession: I lost
| the author about halfway through the article.
| diab0lic wrote:
| This ex post facto explanation is referred to as
| rationalization and is ironically irrational. If you've already
| made a decision you've forfeited the option to do so
| rationally.
|
| I do agree that most of what gets labeled rational is in fact
| ex post facto rationalization. I do it myself all the time,
| haha.
| rrmm wrote:
| Ex post facto rationalization is a major annoyance of mine.
| Let's just be honest with ourselves and recognize that lots
| of what we want isn't rational. That's ok, use your
| rationality to keep yourself from making huge, dumb mistakes,
| but don't pretend you're doing it for "rational" reasons or
| through a "rational" process.
|
| But I'm kind of over-strict about it and like to reserve
| "rational" for processes you can do with first-order logic.
| Given the complexity and lack of information in real life,
| that happens almost never. Of course this is not a terribly
| rational point of view.
| pontifier wrote:
| I have recently come up with a model that has been useful to me
| for thinking about thinking.
|
| It involves the realization that different brain regions must
| communicate, but also contain their own representation of
| reality.
|
| Partial thought precursors echo back and forth between these
| regions, with each region amplifying or dampening parts of the
| idea that it recognizes as valid.
|
| When multiple brain regions begin to agree on its validity to a
| high level, the aha moment occurs.
|
| This model has some characteristics of waveform collapse, and
| discrete task specific neural networks. When multiple tasks
| specific networks arrive at consensus that a model matches
| experience, the proto-idea forms. This proto-idea can then be
| evaluated, and inspected. New scenarios are reflected off this
| new idea, to see if it continues to make sense.
|
| Converting an idea into words makes it useful to others, and
| allows sharing of ideas. This process requires refinement by
| echoing back and forth with the proto-idea until the words match
| it's shape.
|
| In order for these words to be understood effectively, they need
| to make sense to the brains that are receiving them. That means
| the words chosen need to activate multiple brain regions that the
| listener may use to evaluate this new idea and have the aha
| moment themselves.
|
| This process is easier when the 2 brains have many shared
| experiences to draw on, or communication is bi-directional to
| allow message refinement.
| tomcatfish wrote:
| > However, by "system" I mean, roughly, a set of rules that can
| be printed in a book weighing less than ten kilograms, and which
| a person can consciously follow.
|
| Is this tongue in cheek or is it a very strange thing to say?
| That's definitely not a statement that should be made with no
| justification. I can guess what the author meant, but I don't
| really want to guess at basics of their argument.
| tlb wrote:
| It's important to exclude infinite books, which could just
| contain a lookup table for every possible situation rather than
| any general rules. And also finite but exponentially large
| books, which could contain a lookup table for every possible
| image (and be something like 2^(1024x768x24) pages long.)
| alboaie wrote:
| As people and societies we evolve towards metarationality. The
| reality is too complex to be handled within a single theory. We
| have to develop metarationality (wisdom) and pragamaticaly make
| jumps between contradictory theories. Any other aproach is doomed
| because the complexity will be always too much for any "single
| rationality" approach.
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