We were delighted to be joined by Davis Professor at the Sante Fe Insitute, Melanie Mitchell! We chat about our understanding of artificial intelligence, human intelligence, and whether it's reasonable to expect us to be able to build sophisticated human-like automated systems anytime soon.

Follow Melanie on twitter @MelMitchell1 and check out her website: https://melaniemitchell.me/

We discuss:

• AI hype through the ages
• How do we know if machines understand?
• Winograd schemas and the "WinoGrande" challenge.
• The importance of metaphor and analogies to intelligence
• The four fallacies in AI research:
  • 1. Narrow intelligence is on a continuum with general intelligence
  • 2. Easy things are easy and hard things are hard
  • 3. The lure of wishful mnemonics
  • 4. Intelligence is all in the brain
• Whether embodiment is necessary for true intelligence
• Douglas Hofstadter's views on AI
• Ray Kurzweil and the "singularity"
• The fact that Moore's law doesn't hold for software
• The difference between symbolic AI and machine learning
• What analogies have to teach us about human cognition

Errata

• Ben mistakenly says that Eliezer Yudkowsky has bet that everyone will die by 2025. It's actually by 2030. You can find the details of the bet here: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/01/my_end-of-the-w.html.

References:

• NY Times reporting on Perceptrons.
• The WinoGrande challenge paper
• Why AI is harder than we think
• The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil

Contact us

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link

Eliezer was more scared than Douglas about AI, so he wrote a blog post about it. Who wrote the blog post, Eliezer or Douglas? Tell us at over at [email protected].

Special Guest: Melanie Mitchell.

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Ben and Vaden sit down to discuss what is possibly Popper's most confusing essay ever: Language and the Body-Mind Problem: A restatement of Interactionism. Determinism, causality, language, bodies, minds, and Ferris Buhler. What's not to like! Except for the terrible writing, spanning the entire essay. And before we get to that, we revolutionize the peer-review system in less than 10 minutes.

We discuss

• Problems with the current peer-review system and how to improve it
• The Mind-Body Problem
• How chaos theory relates to determinism
• The four functions of language
• Why you don't argue with thermometers
• Whether Popper thinks we can build AGI
• Why causality occurs at the level of ideas, not just of atoms

References

• Link to the essay, which you should most definitely read for yourself.
• Ben's call to abolish peer-review
• Discrete Analysis Math Journal
• Pachinko
• Karl Buhler's theory of language

Quotes

This, I think, solves the so-called problem of 'other minds'. If we talk to other people, and especially if we argue
with them, then we assume (sometimes mistakenly) that they also argue: that they speak intentionally about
things, seriously wishing to solve a problem, and not merely behaving as if they were doing so. It has often been seen
that language is a social affair and that solipsism, and doubts about the existence of other minds, become
selfcontradictory if formulated in a language. We can put this now more clearly. In arguing with other people (a thing
which we have learnt from other people), for example about other minds, we cannot but attribute to them intentions,
and this means, mental states. We do not argue with a thermometer.
- C&R, Chap 13

Once we understand the causal behaviour of the machine, we realize that its behaviour is purely expressive or
symptomatic. For amusement we may continue to ask the machine questions, but we shall not seriously argue with it--
unless we believe that it transmits the arguments, both from a person and back to a person.
- C&R, Chap 13

If the behaviour of such a machine becomes very much like that of a man, then we may mistakenly believe that
the machine describes and argues; just as a man"who does not know the working of a phonograph or radio may
mistakenly think that it describes and argues. Yet an analysis of its mechanism teaches us that nothing of this kind
happens. The radio does not argue, although it expresses and signals.
- C&R, Chap 13

It is true that the presence of Mike in my environment may be one of the physical 'causes' of my saying, 'Here is
Mike'. But if I say, 'Should this be your argument, then it is contradictory', because I have grasped or realized that it is
so, then there was no physical 'cause' analogous to Mike; I do not need to hear or see your words in order to realize
that a certain theory (it does not matter whose) is contradictory. The analogy is not to Mike, but rather to my
realization that Mike is here.
- C&R, Chap 13

The fear of obscurantism (or of being judged an obscurantist) has prevented most anti-obscurantists from saying
such things as these. But this fear has produced, in the end, only obscurantism of another kind.
- C&R, Chap 13

When's the last time you argued with your thermometer? Tell us over at [email protected]

Image Credit: http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/modernlanguages/research/groups/linguistics/

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Have you ever wanted to be more rich? Have you considered just working a bit harder? Welcome to part III of our libertarian series, where we discuss Part B: Social Issues of Scott Alexander's Anti-Libertarian FAQ, which critiques the libertarian view that if you're rich, you deserve it, and if you're poor, well, you deserve that too. As always, the estimable Bruce Nielson (@bnielson) helps guide is through the thorny wicket of libertarian thought.

We discuss

• Do the poor deserve to be poor? Waddabout the rich?
• Is dogmatism ever a good thing?
• Is social mobility determined in part by parental wealth?
• Is this due to genetics, culture, upbringing or something else?
• The chances of escaping the lower class
• Does government regulation increase social mobility?
• Why progressive taxation makes sense

References

• David Friedman's response
• Bruce's Theory Of Anything podcast
• Popperian/Deutschian FB group: Many Worlds of David Deutsch
• On dogmatism:
  • Bruce's episode: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/four-strands/episodes/Episode-51-Was-Karl-Popper-Dogmatic-e1obs0m/a-a2hb64g
  • Ben's blog post: https://benchugg.com/writing/dogmatism/
• Vaden's blog posts on Libertarianism:
  • First: Is Austrian Economics the Best Explanation of Economics?
  • Second: Can we predict human behaviour? A discussion with Brett Hall

Quotes

The Argument:

Those who work hardest (and smartest) should get the most money. Not only should we not begrudge them that money, but we should thank them for the good they must have done for the world in order to satisfy so many consumers.

People who do not work hard should not get as much money. If they want more money, they should work harder. Getting more money without working harder or smarter is unfair, and indicative of a false sense of entitlement.

Unfortunately, modern liberal society has internalized the opposite principle: that those who work hardest are greedy people who must have stolen from those who work less hard, and that we should distrust them at until they give most of their ill-gotten gains away to others. The “progressive” taxation system as it currently exists serves this purpose.

This way of thinking is not only morally wrong-headed, but economically catastrophic. Leaving wealth in the hands of the rich would “make the pie bigger”, allowing the extra wealth to “trickle down” to the poor naturally.

The Counterargument:

Hard work and intelligence are contributory factors to success, but depending on the way you phrase the question, you find you need other factors to explain between one-half and nine-tenths of the difference in success within the United States; within the world at large the numbers are much higher.

If a poor person can’t keep a job solely because she was lead-poisoned from birth until age 16, is it still fair to blame her for her failure? And is it still so unthinkable to take a little bit of money from everyone who was lucky enough to grow up in an area without lead poisoning, and use it to help her and detoxify her neighborhood?

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Help us maintain poverty traps and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

Do your part to increase social mobility by sending your hard-earned money to: [email protected]

Special Guest: Bruce Nielson.

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Sick of hearing us shouting about Bayesianism? Well today you're in luck, because this time, someone shouts at us about Bayesianism! Richard Meadows, finance journalist, author, and Ben's secretive podcast paramour, takes us to task. Are we being unfair to the Bayesians? Is Bayesian rationality optimal in theory, and the rest of us are just coping with an uncertain world? Is this why the Bayesian rationalists have so much cultural influence (and money, and fame, and media attention, and ...), and we, ahem, uhhh, don't?

Check out Rich's website, his book Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World, and his podcast.

We discuss

• The pros of the rationality and EA communities
• Whether Bayesian epistemology contributes to open-mindedness
• The fact that evidence doesn't speak for itself
• The fact that the world doesn't come bundled as discrete chunks of evidence
• Whether Bayesian epistemology would be "optimal" for Laplace's demon
• The difference between truth and certainty
• Vaden's tone issues and why he gets animated about this subject.

References

• Scott's original piece: In continued defense of non-frequentist probabilities
• Scott Alexander's post about rootclaim
• Our previous episode on Scott's piece: #69 - Contra Scott Alexander on Probability
• Rootclaim
• Ben's blogpost You need a theory for that theory
• Cox's theorem
• Aumann's agreement theorem
• Vaden's blogposts mentioned in the episode:
  • Critical Rationalism and Bayesian Epistemology
  • Proving Too Much

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Follow Rich at @MeadowsRichard
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Help us calibrate our credences and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

What's your favorite theory that is neither true nor useful? Tell us over at [email protected].

Special Guest: Richard Meadows.

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Part two on Chapter 19 of Conjectures and Refutations! Last time we got a little hung up arguing about human behavior and motivations. Putting that disagreement aside, like mature adults, we move on to the rest of the chapter and Popper's remaining theses. In particular, we focus on Popper's criticism of the idea of a nation's right to self-determination. Things were going smoothly ... until roughly five minutes in, when we start disagreeing about what the "nation" in "nation state" actually means.

(Note: Early listeners of this episode have commented that this one is a bit hard to follow - highly suggest reading the text to compensate for our many confusing digressions. Our bad, our bad).

We discuss

• Are there any benefits of being bilingual?
• Popper's attack on the idea of national self-determination
• Popper's second thesis: that out own free world is by far the best society thus far
• Reductions in poverty, unemployment, sickness, pain, cruelty, slavery, discrimination, class differences
• Popper's third thesis: The relation of progress to war
• Whether Popper was factually correct about his claim that democracies do not wage wars of aggression
• Self-accusation: A unique feature to Western societies
• Popper's fourth thesis about the power of ideas
• And his fifth thesis that truth is hard to come by

References

• Conjectures and Refutations
• Definition of self-determination from Cornell Law School
• The UN Charter
• Wilson's 14 Points

Quotes

The absurdity of the communist faith is manifest. Appealing to the belief in human freedom, it has produced a system of oppression without parallel in history.

But the nationalist faith is equally absurd. I am not alluding here to Hitler’s racial myth. What I have in mind is, rather, an alleged natural right of man— the alleged right of a nation to self-determination. That even a great humanitarian and liberal like Masaryk could uphold this absurd- ity as one of the natural rights of man is a sobering thought. It suffices to shake one’s faith in the wisdom of philosopher kings, and it should be contemplated by all who think that we are clever but wicked rather than good but stupid. For the utter absurdity of the principle of national self-determination must be plain to anybody who devotes a moment’s effort to criticizing it. The principle amounts to the demand that each state should be a nation-state: that it should be confined within a natural border, and that this border should coincide with the location of an ethnic group; so that it should be the ethnic group, the ‘nation’, which should determine and protect the natural limits of the state.

But nation-states of this kind do not exist. Even Iceland—the only exception I can think of—is only an apparent exception to this rule. For its limits are determined, not by its ethnic group, but by the North Atlantic—just as they are protected, not by the Icelandic nation, but by the North Atlantic Treaty. Nation-states do not exist, simply because the so-called ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’ of which the nationalists dream do not exist. There are no, or hardly any, homogenous ethnic groups long settled in countries with natural borders. Ethnic and linguistic groups (dialects often amount to linguistic barriers) are closely intermingled everywhere. Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia was founded upon the principle of national self-determination. But as soon as it was founded, the Slovaks demanded, in the name of this principle, to be free from Czech domination; and ultimately it was destroyed by its German minority, in the name of the same principle. Similar situations have arisen in practically every case in which the principle of national self- determination has been applied to fixing the borders of a new state: in Ireland, in India, in Israel, in Yugoslavia.

There are ethnic minorities everywhere. The proper aim cannot be to ‘liberate’ all of them; rather, it must be to protect all of them. The oppression of national groups is a great evil; but national self-determination is not a feasible remedy. Moreover, Britain, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland, are four obvious examples of states which in many ways violate the nationality principle. Instead of having its borders determined by one settled group, each of them has man- aged ...