Relatedly, David Deutsch's "Simple refutation of the ‘Bayesian’ philosophy of science"
> By ‘Bayesian’ philosophy of science I mean the position that (1) the objective of science is, or should be, to increase our ‘credence’ for true theories, and that (2) the credences held by a rational thinker obey the probability calculus. However, if T is an explanatory theory (e.g. ‘the sun is powered by nuclear fusion’), then its negation ~T (‘the sun is not powered by nuclear fusion’) is not an explanation at all. Therefore, suppose (implausibly, for the sake of argument) that one could quantify ‘the property that science strives to maximise’. If T had an amount q of that, then ~T would have none at all, not 1-q as the probability calculus would require if q were a probability.
> Also, the conjunction (T₁ & T₂) of two mutually inconsistent explanatory theories T₁ and T₂ (such as quantum theory and relativity) is provably false, and therefore has zero probability. Yet it embodies some understanding of the world and is definitely better than nothing.
> Furthermore if we expect, with Popper, that all our best theories of fundamental physics are going to be superseded eventually, and we therefore believe their negations, it is still those false theories, not their true negations, that constitute all our deepest knowledge of physics.
> What science really seeks to ‘maximise’ (or rather, create) is explanatory power.
Any refutation that depends on the fundamental unknownability of the Universe rules trivially applies to every single philosophy of science.
Science must work despite it, or you don't have science.
And any other singularity you get from assuming the odds of a hypothesis is infinitely smaller than the odds of it being false is unrealistic. You shouldn't assume that.
> we expect, with Popper, that all our best theories of fundamental physics are going to be superseded eventually
This inductive case against scientific knowledge should only serve to decrease our second-order credence in the proposition that we have assigned the highest credence to the scientific hypotheses that most closely correspond with reality. It does nothing to change the fact that, conditional on evidence we currently have, we may very well have correctly proportioned credence.
Not from a non-bayesian perspective. It's what Deutsch would call a "bad explanation" i.e. it's easy to vary and thus doesn't tell us about how the sun is powered.
It's a bad explanation because the sun (probably) IS powered by nuclear fusion.
Deutsch is confused by this situation because he doesn't have the scientific background to understand the usefulness of negations of hypotheses.
Historically, for example, a lot of people believed the sun revolved around the earth. If we treat this as T, then ~T is "the sun does not revolve around the earth".
~T certainly lacks details, but to say it's a "bad explanation" is rather silly. Obviously it's an incomplete explanation, which is why Galileo presented a full explanation ("the earth revolves around the sun") rather than just saying, "the sun does not revolve around the earth". But in fact, "the sun does not revolve around the earth" was the part that was controversial because it was the bad explanation being presented by the church (who happened to be closer to philosophers than scientists).
Basically, Deutsch is just making a straw man argument. In Deutsch's mind, the fact that "the sun does not revolve around the earth" is an incomplete theory of heliocentrism is somehow a refutation of all science, when in fact that's simply not the sort of hypothesis scientists even explore typically.
Agreed--in fact, science doesn't rely on philosophy at all. If the entire field of philosophy disappeared, science would go on functioning just fine. In fact, science has generally been hindered by philosophy--it's seemingly impossible to discuss scientific methodology without some wanker interjecting "well ackchyually nothing is knowable". Animals with nervous systems were learning from observation before humans invented enough language to epistemologize, and will continue to do so with or without philosophers.
Bayesian epistemology is an attempt to model why science works--it relies on science, not the other way around.
Bayesian epistemology is not used in almost any domain in science, it does not model why science works, and it does not rely on science: it relies on metaphysics.
The scientific method may at one time have been conceived by philosophers, but we are centuries away from that time, and in recent centuries, all the refinements and improvements to science have been done by scientists. The roots of the scientific method which one could reasonably call philosophy are so changed as to be considered invalid today.
The reverse is not true--scientists have written a lot of philosophy--and since they tend to base their philosophy in reality rather than logic based on speculation, it tends to be better philosophy than philosophers.
No the sun either is or isn't powered by nuclear fusion. There is no way of knowing whether that's the case until you can come up with a good explanation (hard to vary) everything before that is just guessing.
I can assure you Deutsch is no confused by anything in that matter and it's obvious you don't know who he is.
He is literally the guy who created quantum computation and IS a scientist.
And no that's not his argument against the the sun is revolve around the earth.
> No the sun either is or isn't powered by nuclear fusion. There is no way of knowing whether that's the case until you can come up with a good explanation (hard to vary) everything before that is just guessing.
"The sun is powered by nuclear fusion" is a clear explanation of the phenomena we observe. "The sun is not powered by nuclear fusion" would be an explanation if we observed phenomena that were inconsistent with the sun being powered by nuclear fusion.
> I can assure you Deutsch is no confused by anything in that matter and it's obvious you don't know who he is.
Well, I do now, and I assure you he is still confused.
> He is literally the guy who created quantum computation and IS a scientist.
So, he's a programmer.
What hypotheses is he known for testing? What makes him a scientist in your mind?
> And no that's not his argument against the the sun is revolve around the earth.
I'm not sure who you think said it was; I certainly didn't.
He's a theoretical physicist whose most notable is in quantum computing, philosophizing about experimental physics. Essentially his work has more to do with math/logic than science, and as far as I can tell you're simply incorrect that he's done any work in astrophysics at all.
Bullshit like this is exactly why I think scientists are better philosophers than philosophers are. The text you've quoted, is, frankly, not the writings of an intelligent person.
The reason I'm being very blunt about this, is because bullshit like this is actively harmful. Science is fucking important. Science is what resulted in the technology you're using to read this. Science is, with non-negligible probability, the basis of medicine that prevented you from dying before the age of 5 to be able to read this. When philosophers posit that they can inspect the their own navels and find deep truths about the world, they are undermining one of the fundamental pillars of society that holds up so much of the positive changes humans have been able to make.
We need to call this what it is--nonsense and misinformation--and stop amplifying its signal.
> By ‘Bayesian’ philosophy of science I mean the position that (1) the objective of science is, or should be, to increase our ‘credence’ for true theories, and that (2) the credences held by a rational thinker obey the probability calculus. However, if T is an explanatory theory (e.g. ‘the sun is powered by nuclear fusion’), then its negation ~T (‘the sun is not powered by nuclear fusion’) is not an explanation at all. Therefore, suppose (implausibly, for the sake of argument) that one could quantify ‘the property that science strives to maximise’. If T had an amount q of that, then ~T would have none at all, not 1-q as the probability calculus would require if q were a probability.
Of course "the sun is not powered by nuclear fusion" IS an explanation, it's just not an explanation of a phenomenon we observe, which is why most scientists don't believe "the sun is not powered by nuclear fusion". If we observed something about the sun that was not consistent with the hypothesis that it is powered by nuclear fusion, "the sun is not powered by nuclear fusion" would indeed be an explanation of what we were observing.
This is all sidestepping the absurdity that Deutsch doesn't seem to understand that "none at all" has a mathematical representation, 0, meaning that if p = 1 - q = 0, then q = 1. This is not difficult math here, folks.
> Also, the conjunction (T₁ & T₂) of two mutually inconsistent explanatory theories T₁ and T₂ (such as quantum theory and relativity) is provably false, and therefore has zero probability. Yet it embodies some understanding of the world and is definitely better than nothing.
Uh sure, which is why nobody with a brain takes the conjunction of those two things. This isn't a criticism of Bayesian philosophy of science, it's a straw man argument.
> Furthermore if we expect, with Popper, that all our best theories of fundamental physics are going to be superseded eventually, and we therefore believe their negations, it is still those false theories, not their true negations, that constitute all our deepest knowledge of physics.
Deutsch is primarily a physicist, not a philosopher. I'm not a fan of his philosophical takes either but he is not as stupid as you infer. He invented the Deutsch-Josza algorithm along with Richard Josza, the first example of absolute quantum speedup.
Doctor Oz was at one time a doctor, too, but he's also been a blight on society, spreading medical misinformation for decades.
A lot can go wrong with a person's brain between the publication of Deutsch-Josza (1985, 1992) and the writing of the linked post (2014).
I'd also note that the algorithm described is more a work of math than an example of experimental science. It's not creating a hypothesis and testing it, it's writing an algorithm for a (then-theorized) computer system. So I wouldn't say that this lends credence to his ideas on the validity of hypotheses.
Perhaps, but I don't think that's what happened. He continued publishing good quality research in quantum theory and quantum computation until I was doing my PhD, which is just before 2014, and likely still does.
As I say, I also disagree with his philosophical (and political) viewpoints. But your dismissal above is based on a pretty shallow reading alongside unfounded personal attacks.
I agree entirely. As a professional scientist who routinely uses Bayesian methods to solve complex computational and statistical problems, with actual real world applications, I cannot stress enough how irrelevant such philosophical musings about the foundations of Bayesian Statistics are for getting actual science work done.
That's missing the point--philosophy as a whole is not required for science. Invertebrates were adjusting their beliefs to observations (science) long before the first philosopher. I'm not confusing Bayesian models with Bayesian epistemology.
What this is at its essence is that science has allowed us to evolve, learn to kill lions and bears, create agriculture, build ships, cure diseases, travel to the moon, build AI, etc. And all this time while science has been empowering humans and saving lives, science has been under attack by philosophy. You have a scientist saying, "I observe that solar and lunar patterns are more consistent with the earth revolving around the sun" and a philosopher saying "ackchyually the bible says the sun revolves around the earth". When evidence (collected through scientific methods) for a hypothesis becomes overwhelming, the last refuge of ignorance is the philosopher saying, "ackchyually, you don't know that because nothing is truly knowable".
Epistemology is an attempt to understand how we know things, and Bayesian epistemology is probably the best description of how we know things based on science. It's a description, based on observation of how scientists practice science, of how science works.
So when philosophers come in and say Bayesian epistemology doesn't work, they're saying science doesn't work. It's yet another attack on science by philosophers.
And as I said in my other post, Popper's criticism of Bayesian epistemology is actually smart: he does understand what he's talking about, it just doesn't, ultimately, matter much, because the practice of science de facto works, in practice, even if the philosophical model says it doesn't. If all the nuance of Bayesian epistemology and Popper's ideas isn't captured, it's easy for it just to become a straw man argument for philosophers to say that science doesn't work. When it comes down to it, the way people talk about Popper and Bayesian epistemology is just a more sophisticated version of "ackchyually, you don't know that because nothing is truly knowable".
I'm not defending Bayesian epistemology, per se. I'm defending science, as it's practiced, because as I said, science is fucking important. Now, more than ever, in the era of anti-vaxxers and climate change denial, we desperately need people to believe in science.
> Invertebrates were adjusting their beliefs to observations (science) long before the first philosopher.
To underscore the bad science you are led to in terms of assumed truth, let alone hypothesis: there is very little evidence or justification or explanation that any of the processes used by the invertebrate here execute calculation that obeys the very specific axioms of probability and updates to a state in accordance with Bayes' theorem. Stimulus response is not Bayes' theorem. Updating a state from new inputs is not Bayes' theorem.
Learning from observation is the basis of science, and invertebrates certainly do that.
A lot has changed since invertebrates started doing that. Not only have we evolved more senses than the first invertebrates, we've also developed methods such as Bayesian inference to combine the results of multiple observations, as well as numerous methods for removing confounding variables such as control groups and regression analysis. Unsurprisingly this has led us to discover a lot more with science, with a lot more accuracy, than invertebrates.
And yes, updating a state from new inputs is not literally Bayes theorem, which is why nobody said it was. However, the process of updating a belief confidence from new inputs as it is done today can be modeled today using Bayesian inference. No, invertebrates don't do that--which is again, why I never said they did.
It's a bit tiresome to be corrected by people who clearly don't seem to understand that Bayes theorem, Bayesian inference, and Bayesian epistemology are all named after the same guy because they're all built on each other in that order. Yes, they aren't all the same thing, but if you're jumping in with that as if it's a correction, you certainly don't understand the concepts.
Could you give an example of where a philosopher has impeded science in the way you describe? Where it has been not just irrelevant, but obstructive? Irrelevant is fine - science and the philosophy of science have different goals. You might as well say that chemistry is irrelevant to mathematics.
> Bayesian epistemology is probably the best description of how we know things based on science.
This is wrong, and it's a bit ironic you are so adamant on a point that is bad philosophy and leads to bad science as a way of insisting that philosophy has no relevance for science.
You're grossly misrepresenting both science and philosophy. Science is a conscious and self referential effort, it has nothing to do with animals learning how to survive in their environment. Philosophy is definitely not bible thumping.
I don't think you know what you're responding to, but in any case, regarding Deutsch, he "laid the foundations of the quantum theory of computation, and subsequently made or participated in many of the most important advances in the field, including the discovery of the first quantum algorithms, the theory of quantum logic gates and quantum computational networks, the first quantum error-correction scheme, and several fundamental quantum universality results."
> Bullshit like this is exactly why I think scientists are better philosophers than philosophers are. The text you've quoted, is, frankly, not the writings of an intelligent person.
Which instantly refutes your position, because the alleged "bullshit" he quoted was written by a scientist, David Deutsch, not a by philosopher. Meanwhile, the defenders of "Bayesian philosophy of science" and (largely synonymous) "Bayesian epistemology" are mainly philosophers.
Am I correct in assuming you will now account for the above mistake and change your opinion to "Bullshit like this is exactly why I think philosophers are better philosophers than scientists are"?
If you look up what Deutsch actually did, I think you'll find that he worked on quantum algorithms, making him more of a mathematician than a scientist since he never actually did any experimental work that I can see. But it's sort of irrelevant unless you're trying to make an appeal to Deutsch's authority as a scientist. You wouldn't commit such a logical fallacy, would you?
If you insist on calling Deutsch a scientist, fine, go ahead. That doesn't change my argument in any way, but you'll have to actually read the post you're responding to to know that.
> Am I correct in assuming you will now account for the above mistake and change your opinion to "Bullshit like this is exactly why I think philosophers are better philosophers than scientists are"?
Probably the better thing to do would be to simply remove that paragraph since people like you don't read past the first thing you can find to disagree with. The rest of the post stands on its own fine, but I can't edit it now.
This article doesn't do a good job of getting at the main points of Valiant's book Educability, in my view. You can see some of them in e.g. this talk he gave here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4fIoLGjFtM
He makes various arguments in the book that I disagree with, two of which I've put below. On the whole I think it is directionally correct though, and worth reading.
The first quibble I have is about humanity's most characteristic trait. In the book, he writes: "The mark of humanity is that a single individual can acquire the knowledge created by so many other individuals. It is this ability to absorb theories at scale, rather than the ability to contribute to their creation, that I identify as humanity's most characteristic trait".
I don't think that ability to acquire knowledge from other people is our most most characteristic trait. Creativity is. Learning is a form of knowledge-creation, and it is a creative process. We don't passively "absorb" theories when we learn from someone else. Instead, we actively look for and attempt to resolve problems between our existing ideas and the new ideas to create something new.
Another thing I disagree with is when he touches on AGI. He makes the argument that "we should not be fearful of a technological singularity that would make us powerless against AI systems". This is because it will "asymptote, at least qualitatively, to the human capability of educability and no more".
This is reminiscent of David Deutsch's argument that people are universal explainers, and AGI will also be a universal explainer; there is nothing beyond such universality, so they will not fundamentally be different from us (at least, there is nothing that they could do that we couldn't in principle understand ourselves).
I think this is true, but it misses something. It doesn't address the point that there is a meaningful difference between a person thinking at 1x speed (biological human speed) and a person thinking at e.g. 100000x speed (AGI running on fast hardware). You can be outsmarted by something that wants to outsmart you, even if you both possess fully universal educability/creativity, if it can generate orders of magnitude more ideas than you can per unit time. Whether we should be fearful or not about this is unclear, but I do think it is an important consideration.
His overall message though, is good and worth pondering:
"Educability implies that humans, whatever our genetic differences at birth, have a unique capability to transcend these differences through the knowledge, skills, and culture we acquire after birth. We are born equal because any differences we have are subject to enormous subsequent changes through individual life experience, education, and effort. This capacity for change, growth, and improvement is the great equalizer. It is possible for billions of people to continuously diverge in skills, beliefs, and knowledge, all becoming self-evidently different from each other. This characteristic of our humanity, which accounts for our civilization, also makes us equal."
> there is nothing that they could do that we couldn't in principle understand ourselves
It is trivial to prove otherwise - AlphaZero move 37. After 4,000 years of gameplay (yes, it is that old!) we still didn't get this level of insight in its strategy.
The core ability of humans might not be learning but search. Creativity is just an aspect of search. AlphaZero was both searching and learning. It's what we do as well, we search and learn. Science advances by (re)search. Art searches for meaningful expression. Even attention is search. Even walking is - where will I place my next foot?
Why is search a better concept that creativity? Because it specifies both the search space and the goal. Creativity, intelligence, understanding and consciousness - all of them - specify only the subjective part, omitting the external, objective part. Search covers both, it is better defined, even scientifically studied.
Fair, education is the wrong word really. That said there's a difference between learning by exercises (AlphaGo) and learning "in production". Synchronous vs asynchronous or something, is there a better name?
> It is trivial to prove otherwise - AlphaZero move 37. After 4,000 years of gameplay (yes, it is that old!) we still didn't get this level of insight in its strategy.
Are you saying that AlphaZero contains knowledge that we can't understand, even in principle? It is somehow beyond science, beyond all explanation?
> Why is search a better concept that creativity?
Search suggests a fixed set of options, whereas what is crucial is creating new ones.
A very accomplished older professor once told me in grad school that “research” was a process of first intuiting patterns, and then “searching” for further examples of said pattern, and then “re-searching” until you had statistical confirmation.
You don't keep searching until a point of "statistical confirmation". This implies you have arrived at an infallible truth. Instead you look for ways you could be wrong, and try to correct any errors you find.
For instance, if you guess 'all swans are white', you don't ever get "statistical confirmation" that your guess was right. When you eventually see a black swan, you find out you were wrong. Then it's time to come up with a new theory.
There are very large search spaces. Consider the space of all text documents (Borge's Library of Babel), which includes all research papers and all novels. Also, the space of all mathematical theorems, the space of all images, all videos, all songs, whatever evolution searches over.
These cover many creative activities.
But it's true that some search spaces are less well-defined.
I think one thing we've learned in the past 5 years or so is how inadequate our vocabulary is to describe all the different aspects of intelligence and consciousness (and really just psychology in general). Everything is so handwave-y. What is educability, exactly, in a formal sense -- how could we quantify it and measure it? Mostly we've tried to answer questions like that by writing tests and trying to tease out some reliable measure from it, but that requires so many layers of indirection -- it would be much better to examine the internal state and activity of a "thinking system" directly, something that is rarely possible in humans. I think one way to show that the tests are inadequate is to read the responses to people when those tests are applied to AI. People insist that they simply don't measure what they're supposed to measure in people when they're applied to AI, and for all anyone knows, they may be right -- but _why_? What _exactly_ are those tests measuring, and how could we measure it in a way that _would_ apply to artificial intelligence?
These are philosophical questions that really, despite our best efforts, have never transitioned to a true science, and philosophy has been working on it for thousands of years. We've been hamstrung by the fact that as far as we knew, we were the only intelligent beings in the universe, so it's extremely difficult take any aspect of "the way we think" and separate it, by finding some system that thinks in some ways like us, but in other ways doesn't. It's really only been since we've had large neural networks that anything has approached the way we think in _any_ aspect, so this is probably a once-in-history opportunity to formalize and systematize all of this.
> it would be much better to examine the internal state and activity of a "thinking system" directly
The particular problem here is complexity management. The 'problem' with thinking is it is a system, very possibly one of the largest and most complex systems we know about. Thinking as we know it in DNA based life is something that's at least 500 million years old and developed a few bits at a time. There is no unwinding the different components of the thinking from each other. Motor skills, reactions, learning, etc are all compressed and mixed together in the same code.
So, going from top down isn't working. But going the other way isn't working either. The computational complexity of a system that gets anywhere close to a biological thinking system requires quadrillions of calculations.
“At least qualitatively” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A computer has the same capability as a human to do any computable algorithm, “at least qualitatively”. But Google search (to name one example) is so far beyond human practical ability that calling it “qualitatively” equivalent is not useful.
What makes you think his promotion of the book was particulary motivated by making money rather than any other reason an author might promote their book?
I agree with him on the notion that we have no 'free will' to speak of. In the end, we are just physical beings that must operate according to cause and effect, whether we are 'compelled' or not.
Sound depressing, but that gives us incredible freedom to investigate causes of human misery and correct them.
Does this come down to the fact that you don't like the topic of his book? As you have said elsewhere that you're not going to criticize someone for wanting to make money.
Hacker News put a delay on my response to you because it thought we were arguing so I responded to user afpx. Yes, you're right. I vehemently disagree with him.
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. Has an exceptionally high density of good ideas.
The first time I read it, I didn't love it and only engaged with it superficially. But gradually I began thinking about it more and came back to it, and I read it with more attention. After re-reading it several times I think it is one of the deepest and most important books I have ever read. It has changed how I see the world.
It is probably the most hopeful thing I've ever read and more or less believed. Internalizing parts of it has made almost everything easier to think about. I love the idea that flowers are objectively beautifully.
I read that book and didn't take away anything from it. It left no impression. Maybe it should give it another try. Can you explain why you think it is so good?
Here are some things that I think about often from that book.
* Problems are inevitable, but problems are soluble
* All evils are the result of insufficient knowledge
* Knowledge being the result of trial and error, and there being no such thing as certain knowledge.
* The idea of 'wealth' being the set of all physical transformations you can bring about.
* The thing that distinguishes people from non-general intelligences is the ability to create an endless stream of explanatory knowledge; that is, to have unbounded creativity.
* People are universal explainers; anything that can be understood, we can understand
* If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how
* How commitment to knowledge growth entails a commitment to particular moral values (tolerance, openness to being wrong, valuing the truth); objective morality
I love how the ideas support each other and have such tremendous reach (morality, politics, epistemolgy, computing). And it is written very cleanly and lucidly, which perhaps makes it easy to read quickly and miss how dense and deep the ideas actually are.
Me too. I’ve been impressed with some essays I’ve listened to via Open AI TTS. Much better than the librivox ones I’ve occasionally suffered through, and it’s only going to get better.
> [the view Deutsch opposes] entails giving up on explanation in science. It is in the very nature of computational universality that if we and our world were composed of software, we should have no means of understanding the real physics – the physics underlying the hardware of the Great Simulator itself. Of course, no one can prove that we are not software. Like all conspiracy theories, this one is untestable. But if we are to adopt the methodology of believing such theories, we may as well save ourselves the trouble of all that algebra and all those experiments, and go back to explaining the world in terms of the sex lives of Greek gods.
...
> these approaches fail because they attempt to reverse the direction of the explanations that the real connections between physics and computation provide. They seem plausible only because they rely on a common misconception about the status of computation within mathematics. The misconception is that the set of computable functions (or the set of quantum-computational tasks) has some a priori privileged status within mathematics. But it does not. The only thing that privileges that set of operations is that it is instantiated in the computationally universal laws of physics. It is only through our knowledge of physics that we know of the distinction between computable and non-computable (see Deutsch, Ekert and Luppaccini 2000), or between simple and complex.
What Deutsch is saying is that any simulation is going to virtualize all possible observations (including time and any/all side channels), which means there's no way to see through the abstraction.
But that doesn't mean we are in a simulation (i.e. are software). It'd be actually kind of dumb if we were, as this universe cannot be simulated efficiently on classical computers--the kind that occur to logicians working from the first principles of mathematics. Our universe wasn't designed by a CS person, that's for sure.
I recently read Deep Utopia and I found it frustratingly disjointed and inelegant. I kept expecting a big reveal, or a drawing together of the various threads into an unexpected insight, which never came.
I agree with the review by Steve Jurvetson, linked at the start of Hanson's review.
> My biggest frustration with the book is that he takes over 500 pages to convey what could be more clearly said in well under 50...
> there is no high-level organization to the book...
> more of a survey of all possible answers versus the much more difficult task of making specific predictions....
Sad news. I aspire to be as intellectually acute in old age as Dennett was. His recent autobiography was engaging, although somewhat too indulgent at times. I admire how he created a life and a world-view that worked so well for him.
That reflects kind of badly on NeurIPS if true. I first became aware of him over 10-15 years ago when he was pushing his "mathematical universe" idea, which is quite simply the most vapid and contentless idea I've ever seen in physics. (I don't think it's at all surprising that someone like him would be drawn to the AI community, or vice versa!)
He has some PhD students doing what seems to me to be reasonable work that gets published at NeurIPS. Somewhat speculative, of the flavor you’d expect from theoretical physicists doing AI work, but it’s at least speculation about concrete technologies that exist, not pure metaphysics. For example, there’s a recent paper proposing and validating in small models a possible mechanism to explain some power laws seen in NN scaling curves [1]. May turn out to be wrong, but doesn’t seem nutty to me. On the other hand, I’d guess these papers specifically are probably not what got him famous in AI circles. For that his general self-created role as AI futurist is probably more responsible [2]. I tend to avoid that kind of stuff, but staking out a debate position on questions like “how smart could AI get? Will it kill us all?” is the kind of stuff the general public likes to hear.
I think that paper is pretty weak, but at least in terms of content it's still night and day compared with the nature of Tegmark's clout-chasing in his physics days. But it's pretty grim if that's the kind of paper that made him popular at NeurIPS.
My read is that some former fans strongly disagree with, and are thus disappointed by, Tegmark's recent enthusiasm for "AI will kill us all" arguments, & advocacy of strong/intrusive policies against AI progress.
His flavour of "modal realism" is rather different from those of David Lewis or Takashi Yagisawa – the way he intersected that with debates about mathematical Platonism – original and interesting
I doubt he's right, but novel wrongness is admirable in a way that same old wrongness
Well, he published a nonfiction book, the best part of which is the first chapter which consists of literally a fiction story.
He also has some serious problems with blinders, but they're the same blinders HN has so if I explain any further this post will get flagged, flogged, deleted, and downvoted. Ah well.
But I have no idea whether those allegations are true or accurate–I just did a search trying to work out what people here were talking about, and this is the first thing that came up, and this is the first I've heard of this controversy
No, the allegations in that article are not accurate; I remember discussion of it at the time. The story there is that Nya Dagbladat applied for a grant from FLI, passed the first phase of the grant-award process, and was rejected during due diligence. Then after the rejection had already happened, espo.se ran the article you linked to, which made it sound like they had funded or were going to fund them, which they weren't.
> By ‘Bayesian’ philosophy of science I mean the position that (1) the objective of science is, or should be, to increase our ‘credence’ for true theories, and that (2) the credences held by a rational thinker obey the probability calculus. However, if T is an explanatory theory (e.g. ‘the sun is powered by nuclear fusion’), then its negation ~T (‘the sun is not powered by nuclear fusion’) is not an explanation at all. Therefore, suppose (implausibly, for the sake of argument) that one could quantify ‘the property that science strives to maximise’. If T had an amount q of that, then ~T would have none at all, not 1-q as the probability calculus would require if q were a probability.
> Also, the conjunction (T₁ & T₂) of two mutually inconsistent explanatory theories T₁ and T₂ (such as quantum theory and relativity) is provably false, and therefore has zero probability. Yet it embodies some understanding of the world and is definitely better than nothing.
> Furthermore if we expect, with Popper, that all our best theories of fundamental physics are going to be superseded eventually, and we therefore believe their negations, it is still those false theories, not their true negations, that constitute all our deepest knowledge of physics.
> What science really seeks to ‘maximise’ (or rather, create) is explanatory power.
https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/2014/08/simple-refutation-of...