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> rather than what the questions and the answers are?

The answers are utterly trivial, which is par for the course with PG.


Even DNA wouldn't work because of weird shit like chimerism. Our classic assumptions about this stuff just don't hold in reality.


I think it's dreadfully naive to assume there's a single, identifiable reward function.


You can always map lots of small reward functions onto a single large one.

For a fictitious example, total_reward = sin(time_of_day) × dopamine_reward + (oxytocin_reward / adrenaline_reward)


How do you even add them.. it's like asking what is the utility of the statue of liberty plus the utility of NAFTA?

Just because it's a mathematicians/economists wish doesn't mean it's correct.

Why did the drunken man look under the streetlight for his keys? "Didn't loose them here, but that's where the light is"


> How do you even add them.. it's like asking what is the utility of the statue of liberty plus the utility of NAFTA?

You add them by asking how much each part of the utility function makes you want to do a thing.

As TeMPOraL says, for your specific example you could do that in dollars, but perhaps a more emotionally affective example than USA icons would be asking how many oranges someone would need to offer you to convince you to have a hand amputation without anaesthetic: if you’re well fed, it’s ridiculous to even ask as even a lifetime supply of citrus fruit won’t come close, but if you’re literally starving to death you might well choose to lose a hand to gain anything edible.


If you start by assuming a utility function exists, you can have it do anything you want.

But we haven't quite solved every problem in the world by creating a utility function, have we?

Why is that? Could it be that some domains resist mathematization because the objects are incommensurate?

Why don't we just create utility functions to solve politics?

We cant, because politics is unsolvable in terms of well-defined mathematization and it could very well be that human intelligence is like that too.


If you agree that starting from the assumption that a utility function exists leads to being always able to define one, then you can’t simultaneously take the position that there can’t be two incommensurate things.

You could argue that utility functions are “too powerful” on the grounds that being able to explain anything is equivalent to being able to explain nothing.

> Why don't we just create utility functions to solve politics?

What do you mean by “solve”? I reckon the utility function of politics is approximately “democracy” in many cases.

> it could very well be that human intelligence is [unsolvable in terms of well-defined mathematization] too

That’s equivalent to saying “whatever human intelligence depends on isn’t limited to the laws of physics” as the laws of physics are written in maths, and as we invent new maths for new understanding of physics, that new understanding is also available for modelling our own minds, as they are physical objects. A similar argument also applies if we have an immortal soul. ;)


> If you agree that starting from the assumption that a utility function exists leads to being always able to define one, then you can’t simultaneously take the position that there can’t be two incommensurate things.

> What do you mean by “solve”? I reckon the utility function of politics is approximately “democracy” in many cases.

I don't understand what you're getting at here and I feel like it's missing the broader point I'm making anyways.

I think this conversation ends here


> How do you even add them..

In dollars. It's literally what currency is for.

Of course there's no one set of dollar values for most items. They very much depend on a context. But in a particular, well-defined context, you can very much convert both Statue of Liberty and NAFTA to dollars and sum them up to something that makes sense in that context.

> Why did the drunken man look under the streetlight for his keys? "Didn't loose them here, but that's where the light is"

Well, drunk people tend to have problems calculating expected value.



Not a single reward function, but multiple. Although for each decision/action you could in theory calculate a single value that represents the weight toward making that decision. This value comes from multiple systems.


Correct, if the information simply isn't present no amount of trickery will conjure it up.


Well, these days there is plenty of trickery that will conjure up plausible details to put in place of the information that isn't there. It won't be true information though.


Sometimes enriching possibilities is good enough to break out of an investigative minima but other restrictions prevent you from recapitulating that evidence in your line of thinking. That's why parallel construction is helpful.


Or the degree to which entropy gets reduced still isn't sufficient to åfford admissible amounts of certainty on its own.


While you are correct for a still image, there is more information in a movie. That could potentially be exploited similar to the way a long exposure can cancel noise. This normally requires a static subject, but some AI technique may be able to normalize the position of the objects so that they are amenable to be averaged.


It is extremely unrealistic within the next few decades.


Map is data manipulation, whereas pattern-matching is control flow.


Yes, thank you. Reading the sub linked presentation, I see it now.

The sentence "It can traverse a given object and assign its value if it matches a pattern" sounded like traverse and (optionally) manipulate.


It's from Gibsons "Virtual Light", a vastly better book than Snow Crash. Highly recommended!


> a vastly better book than Snow Crash.

I've yet to read anything by Gibson that approaches anything by Stephenson


Other than the ending of every book Gibson has ever written, compared to the ending of any of Stephenson's works.


I do all of the same in emacs (and vim), and because I use doom-emacs I get all this basically for free without much configuration on my end.

- Go-to-definition is `g d` (with the cursor over the function name in question)

- Project-wide file search is `SPC SPC`

- Jumping to a function is `SPC s i` and then just start typing to fuzzy-match the function name

I stick with this setup because it does pretty much everything I could want from IDEA, and does it without churning up most of the resources on my machine. And trust me, I've tried to switch to IDEA, but it's just too big and too slow, and too poor of an editor for me to actually make the switch.


An object lesson in the problems of using emoji to actually convey meaning :)


It's a problem insofar as HN is, on purpose, stripping emoji. Which is a questionable choice...


It saves people from having to guess which subculture you come from, just so they can understand what a certain picture means for you. Emoji are very irritating for this reason: They are focused on the writer, and not the audience.


Hacker News does strip all emoji, FWIW.


That's certainly true of the Soviet case (the fear instilled by the Stalin years left everyone lying constantly just to avoid the bullet), but Chile was very different. The whole project was to build a genuinely inclusive and worker-led democracy. And they got pretty far with it too, considering they were under economic blockade. We don't get to find out how the story would have ended because the Yanks decided to do a fascist coup and kill everyone.


Well, not everyone. Some people were allowed to live so that an unprecedented era of prosperity unmatched by any other country in Latin America could be ushered in.


The "Miracle of Chile" is pretty greatly overstated. Their GDP per capita didn't beat Latin american average until 1990, they've never beat unemplyment rates for Latin America as a whole, etc. They were also subject to much greater recessions relatively when recessions happened across Latin America.

IMO so much of the positives can be attributed to the CIA stopping their policy of "make their economy scream".


So prosperous that raising the price of public transit by a few dollars has led to widespread protests.


Are we comparing it to Canada or something? Then you're right, it's not that close. Or are we comparing it to the lands of triumphant Salvador Allendes, like Venezuela? No successful coup took place there, and I hear the transit is downright free in Caracas these days.


unprecedented prosperity for like, 20 people. The millions of other people definitely haven't enjoyed anything but immense poverty and misery since the Pinochet coup the implementation of the neoliberal wet dream.


I'm gonna take a wild guess and say you haven't traveled around Latin America much and have never been to Chile, and seen the dramatic difference?


What's the dramatic difference? It's like USA, worst quality of life, inequality and a bunch of idiots whom for decades stole from workers and avoided taxes, and try to sell that "model" to the rest of the world.


thats fair, I haven't personally. However my wife is chilean and I am capable of reading and comprehending statistics so I'm satisfied.


Yes, it's so good that Chileans come to the universities in my country, Argentina, and many work here. And we're happy to help them, because Neoliberalism took their opportunities and their future.


... In which most people didn’t reap benefits, as the current protests show.


Almost two months of protests. Now protests in Colombia. Protests in Bolivia against the regime that USA and Israel put there.


Israel is deeply invested in Bolivia?


It appears that way from the outside, bit it's hard to say for sure.

Morales cut ties in response to Israeli actions in Gaza, cutting Israel off from Bolivia's lithium deposits. And now one of the first things the new government has done is reestablish ties, even before getting a lot of their interim government together.


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