Playing around with horse racing (sports predictions markets) a lot at Betfair, I finally fully understood the flaw in Bayes, and the difference between near and far modes.
I noticed that far from a big race, the prices on offer are much poorer -the 'book' is well above 100% for backing(betting for), and well below 100% for Laying (betting against). Near a big race, the prices are much better, and the book begins to convergence on 100%.
I've observed the same thing for horses which are unknown qualities - foreign horses for instance, or horses running for the first time (maidins). Punters think them as far abstractions, and the odds are gnerally poor, whereas for horses that are known qualities (lots of info avaliable), they are thought of as near and the prices are generally better.
It seems that when thinking in far mode, punters badly miscalibrate probabilities in a very particular way. When thinking of how to take advantage of this, I suddeny had a casade of insights.
Here's the horse racing gambling insight: In far mode (a long way out from a race), you don't want to take the odds on offer. The only way to win is to be the market maker and be setting the odds yourself. You should back at the lay price, and lay at the back price
And here's the generalized insight:
Far mode is the market maker and near mode is only deciding on the accuracy of the prices
And applied to Bayes, decision theory and logic:
The flaw in Bayes is that is can only decide on the accuracy of the probabilities, it is not a market maker. Even decision theory can be redefined in purely passive terms, as a predefined set of actions which may or not be enacted. categorization on the other hand, it creative, it changes the very parameters on which decision making is based. It does not passively calcuate odds, instead it makes the odds.
Bayes (near mode thought) is the sucker punter that can only accept or reject the odds, but Categorization (far mode thought) is the bookie and ultimate market marker
> It would be extremely difficult to try and stop immigration from our southern border
Seriously? It would be politically difficult, yes. But when the will to do it was there, Eisenhower was able to accomplish it effectively. It could probably be done even more efficiently using a national citizenship/visa card. If I show up at your restaurant or broccoli farm and some worker doesn't have one, you're going to be fined and the worker repatriated. Intrusive, yes. But we already have authorities poking around restaurants to look for unsafe food handling and lax enforcement of alcohol laws. I would guess that the IRS can also already look at the payrolls of any business, but I'm not sure.
Use Sperner's Lemma. Essentially, one can prove that there is some way of assigning rents to rooms so that everyone prefers a different room. (there is no guarantee of economic efficiency in the usual sense, but that's not necessarily what you're aiming for). I've never actually used the applet, but it might prove useful.
Alternately, forget about the total rent figure. Each person shares that equally. Then auction the rooms, with the sum payed to everyone else. Each person agrees to pay x dollars to each other person (per month or whatever) if they get a specific room; the high bid for each room wins.
Or auction pick order, to prevent the "two rooms, one person" problem.
Efficient, but not fair, using Coase's Theorem:Assign rooms randomly (or allowing by picking in a random order), allow people to bribe to switch rooms.
I've tried repeatedly to do this using google and OB's search function, but I've been unable to find the answer, so if anyone can help me out, it's much appreciated.
I remember reading on this blog something to the effect of "visiting a doctor had a negative expected value until about the year 1900." I don't remember a source for it, and because of the many posts that use similar terminology I've been unable to track down the particular post. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about, or, alternately, have a source for something like this?
I find your auction really tricky and weird insofar as the bid may not be what I actually pay, and I can't figure out what bid I would make. If it weren't a big deal to anyone, it might work out OK. But if I really wanted Nice Room 1 but had an inelastic maximum of dollars I could pay, I wouldn't know how to bid. Likewise if I was rather determined to avoid Small Room 3, but didn't want to pay too much. Also, is your auction open and non-simultaneous? If so there might be runaway 'inflation' or 'deflation' as the thing goes on, or am I wrong about that? If it is a secret auction and simultaneous, what do you do about people winning multiple rooms or zero rooms?
Jason asked: I was just looking for some intuition behind why it might be possible.
Maybe it would help to separate your quest into two parts:1. Does the universe allow any physical entity to have intelligence significantly greater than current humans?2. Is it possible for humans to build a device that self-improves to become the kind of entity in #1?
Thanks, but it wasn't a demand for proof. I was just looking for a reference, if there is one, to some intuition behind why it might be possible. Hook's reasoning makes some sense, for example.
My intuition is not that computers cannot achieve more than their creators. My intuition was more along the lines of "if we had access to our own code, the improvements we could make are limited by the intelligence generated by that very code." So I was having trouble picturing the next major intelligence jump. I suppose, though, that the change would be in small increments, theoretically at an increasing pace (although the latter is unclear, because the more intelligent the AI, the harder it is to find ways to get smarter).
I think AI development is a useful way for intelligent people to spend their time.
This is a selfish question. I'm considering moving into a 7 bedroom house with 10 people. The house is priced at $6200 a month. What is an economically efficient way to price the rooms? Some sort of auction I assume, but it gets tricky because the entire house is priced so the more one room costs the less every other room costs.
> I tend to buy into the story that there is a natural upward bias on immigration, in that immigrants tend to be above the mean on intelligence, productivity, and lawfulness
Plausible that they are above average for their own population. Not plausible that all nations have the same average values for these traits. Not plausible that any known force can shift these average values by all that much (they can certainly be shifted a little bit). It's been tried many times by researchers, and laudably so. It would be great if US whites could have the 112 mean IQ of Ashkenazim. IQ scores correlate with job performance and are not biased against whites: the questions that whites find challenging or easy are the same ones Ashkenazim find, respectively, challenging or easy. No wonder then that Ashkenazim are about 15x "overrepresented" in the professoriate, in the richest 500 Americans, among American novelists, etc (they make up ~33% of all elite groups, but are ~2% of the population). Overrepresented is of course a semi-misnomer, unless one mistakenly believes that they have the same average traits as others.
Actually, eugenics definitely could bring American whites to a mean 112 IQ, and change other trait averages. I'm describing, not necessarily prescribing. But no other known force can do the same.
Plausible that you will get in trouble if you draw attention to the above facts.
Everything we know about the topic (AI, computers, psychology, biology, physics) suggests that self-improving AI is possible.
You're misapplying Godel. It's not relevant. Similarly, you seem to have an intuition that computers cannot possibly achieve more than their creators, which is demonstrably false. (E.g. chess playing programs.)
You ask if there is "a thought experiment or theory that demonstrates it's possible". You need to reverse your burden of proof. There is no thought experiment or theory which demonstrates that self-improving AI is impossible.
Since it is not known to be impossible, and since the benefits would be astronomical, people work on the idea.
Super click:
Playing around with horse racing (sports predictions markets) a lot at Betfair, I finally fully understood the flaw in Bayes, and the difference between near and far modes.
I noticed that far from a big race, the prices on offer are much poorer -the 'book' is well above 100% for backing(betting for), and well below 100% for Laying (betting against). Near a big race, the prices are much better, and the book begins to convergence on 100%.
I've observed the same thing for horses which are unknown qualities - foreign horses for instance, or horses running for the first time (maidins). Punters think them as far abstractions, and the odds are gnerally poor, whereas for horses that are known qualities (lots of info avaliable), they are thought of as near and the prices are generally better.
It seems that when thinking in far mode, punters badly miscalibrate probabilities in a very particular way. When thinking of how to take advantage of this, I suddeny had a casade of insights.
Here's the horse racing gambling insight: In far mode (a long way out from a race), you don't want to take the odds on offer. The only way to win is to be the market maker and be setting the odds yourself. You should back at the lay price, and lay at the back price
And here's the generalized insight:
Far mode is the market maker and near mode is only deciding on the accuracy of the prices
And applied to Bayes, decision theory and logic:
The flaw in Bayes is that is can only decide on the accuracy of the probabilities, it is not a market maker. Even decision theory can be redefined in purely passive terms, as a predefined set of actions which may or not be enacted. categorization on the other hand, it creative, it changes the very parameters on which decision making is based. It does not passively calcuate odds, instead it makes the odds.
Bayes (near mode thought) is the sucker punter that can only accept or reject the odds, but Categorization (far mode thought) is the bookie and ultimate market marker
And yes, my insights do work. I win.
Robin Hanson and John Delaney talking prediction markets: http://english.aljazeera.ne...
> It would be extremely difficult to try and stop immigration from our southern border
Seriously? It would be politically difficult, yes. But when the will to do it was there, Eisenhower was able to accomplish it effectively. It could probably be done even more efficiently using a national citizenship/visa card. If I show up at your restaurant or broccoli farm and some worker doesn't have one, you're going to be fined and the worker repatriated. Intrusive, yes. But we already have authorities poking around restaurants to look for unsafe food handling and lax enforcement of alcohol laws. I would guess that the IRS can also already look at the payrolls of any business, but I'm not sure.
I had some thoughts on my ideal system of immigration here.
Use Sperner's Lemma. Essentially, one can prove that there is some way of assigning rents to rooms so that everyone prefers a different room. (there is no guarantee of economic efficiency in the usual sense, but that's not necessarily what you're aiming for). I've never actually used the applet, but it might prove useful.
Re: I haven’t seen any discussion about whether the type of self-improving AI we’re talking about here is even theoretically possible.
Most of us just take that for granted. There are discussions out there, though - e.g. see the paper at:
http://fragments.consc.net/...
Alternately, forget about the total rent figure. Each person shares that equally. Then auction the rooms, with the sum payed to everyone else. Each person agrees to pay x dollars to each other person (per month or whatever) if they get a specific room; the high bid for each room wins.
Or auction pick order, to prevent the "two rooms, one person" problem.
Efficient, but not fair, using Coase's Theorem:Assign rooms randomly (or allowing by picking in a random order), allow people to bribe to switch rooms.
I've tried repeatedly to do this using google and OB's search function, but I've been unable to find the answer, so if anyone can help me out, it's much appreciated.
I remember reading on this blog something to the effect of "visiting a doctor had a negative expected value until about the year 1900." I don't remember a source for it, and because of the many posts that use similar terminology I've been unable to track down the particular post. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about, or, alternately, have a source for something like this?
I find your auction really tricky and weird insofar as the bid may not be what I actually pay, and I can't figure out what bid I would make. If it weren't a big deal to anyone, it might work out OK. But if I really wanted Nice Room 1 but had an inelastic maximum of dollars I could pay, I wouldn't know how to bid. Likewise if I was rather determined to avoid Small Room 3, but didn't want to pay too much. Also, is your auction open and non-simultaneous? If so there might be runaway 'inflation' or 'deflation' as the thing goes on, or am I wrong about that? If it is a secret auction and simultaneous, what do you do about people winning multiple rooms or zero rooms?
Jason asked: I was just looking for some intuition behind why it might be possible.
Maybe it would help to separate your quest into two parts:1. Does the universe allow any physical entity to have intelligence significantly greater than current humans?2. Is it possible for humans to build a device that self-improves to become the kind of entity in #1?
I'm not sure which of these concerns you most.
Auction the rooms, then use this:
auction price of room / total value of all room auctions = [ room rent ] / actual house rent
to recalculate based on actual rent.
Don,
Thanks, but it wasn't a demand for proof. I was just looking for a reference, if there is one, to some intuition behind why it might be possible. Hook's reasoning makes some sense, for example.
My intuition is not that computers cannot achieve more than their creators. My intuition was more along the lines of "if we had access to our own code, the improvements we could make are limited by the intelligence generated by that very code." So I was having trouble picturing the next major intelligence jump. I suppose, though, that the change would be in small increments, theoretically at an increasing pace (although the latter is unclear, because the more intelligent the AI, the harder it is to find ways to get smarter).
I think AI development is a useful way for intelligent people to spend their time.
This is a selfish question. I'm considering moving into a 7 bedroom house with 10 people. The house is priced at $6200 a month. What is an economically efficient way to price the rooms? Some sort of auction I assume, but it gets tricky because the entire house is priced so the more one room costs the less every other room costs.
> I tend to buy into the story that there is a natural upward bias on immigration, in that immigrants tend to be above the mean on intelligence, productivity, and lawfulness
Plausible that they are above average for their own population. Not plausible that all nations have the same average values for these traits. Not plausible that any known force can shift these average values by all that much (they can certainly be shifted a little bit). It's been tried many times by researchers, and laudably so. It would be great if US whites could have the 112 mean IQ of Ashkenazim. IQ scores correlate with job performance and are not biased against whites: the questions that whites find challenging or easy are the same ones Ashkenazim find, respectively, challenging or easy. No wonder then that Ashkenazim are about 15x "overrepresented" in the professoriate, in the richest 500 Americans, among American novelists, etc (they make up ~33% of all elite groups, but are ~2% of the population). Overrepresented is of course a semi-misnomer, unless one mistakenly believes that they have the same average traits as others.
Actually, eugenics definitely could bring American whites to a mean 112 IQ, and change other trait averages. I'm describing, not necessarily prescribing. But no other known force can do the same.
Plausible that you will get in trouble if you draw attention to the above facts.
You've got the demand for proof backwards.
Everything we know about the topic (AI, computers, psychology, biology, physics) suggests that self-improving AI is possible.
You're misapplying Godel. It's not relevant. Similarly, you seem to have an intuition that computers cannot possibly achieve more than their creators, which is demonstrably false. (E.g. chess playing programs.)
You ask if there is "a thought experiment or theory that demonstrates it's possible". You need to reverse your burden of proof. There is no thought experiment or theory which demonstrates that self-improving AI is impossible.
Since it is not known to be impossible, and since the benefits would be astronomical, people work on the idea.