site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30432 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is a major development. Just a few months ago I remember reading about a similar AI program that was competitive in Diplomacy against people - but nobody was allowed to speak to eachother. I remember thinking that was a bit of a hack, so this is much more impressive.

Even so, I think it's undermined by Diplomacy being such a simple game. I'd like to see AI take on something a bit more complicated in the turn-based strategy genre. Civilization, Galactic Civilization, Endless Space... Any turn-based 4X game has way more complexity than Diplomacy. They have more opportunities for diplomacy and negotiation too. You have spies, subversion, random maps, imperfect knowledge, trade and the potential for economic warfare. I suppose the problem is that it's much more costly to train an AI on games with such a complicated engine - there's a reason Atari is the standard.

Haven't they already made extremely strong Starcraft and Dota AIs?

Last I heard the SC AI was "fine" but very exploitable, once they had worked out the issues of physically impossible APM counts (which everyone knew would let you play at superhuman levels decades ago and is not interesting). That could be out of date though.

The SC and DotA AIs were a massive disappointment. I thought they'd push AI research forward by allowing agents to speculate about other agents with hidden intentions, really focus in on the fog-of-war problem. Instead, they just threw a lot of RL at the problem, achieved some technical success, declared victory and immediately left the field. Even the best DotA AI still couldn't handle cloaked enemies at all.

Starcraft and DOTA are only RTS games. I suppose that negates my theory about the complexity of the engine being a major issue.

Still, I think they're fundamentally simpler games than proper turn based strategy games. The Starcraft AI only crushes human experts because of its APM advantage, when they restrict it to human levels it can be beaten by elite players: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03298-6

In turn-based games APM is not an issue. It's a pure test of intellect.

Civilization has diplomacy, espionage/subversion, much more elaborate economic development, more complicated research, randomly generated maps, more resources and a range of victory conditions. There are many more systems to master than Starcraft or Dota.

The Starcraft AI only crushes human experts because of its APM advantage, when they restrict it to human levels it can be beaten by elite players: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03298-6

You mean, a Starcraft AI from like a million years ago. If there were no stronger Starcraft AIs released since then, it's mostly because the top research groups lost interest in things like that, deeming the problem to be mostly solved, same as why very few people are interested in making better and better chess bots. They field moved on from Starcraft, and is now working on crushing the game of Real Life, Outside.

same as why very few people are interested in making better and better chess bots.

I would say very few people are interested in making better and better chess bots because enough people are interested in making better and better chess bots. Bot performance rose roughly linearly for decades, passed human a decade or two ago, and has continued to rise roughly linearly since.

Even that latter graph only covers through 2020, or "a million years ago" in modern AI development time, I guess. I say "roughly linearly" but of course papers and programs are released discretely; a few years gap here and there shouldn't be shocking, nor should research that focuses on one target at a time rather than trying to comprehensively compare to the state of the art in everything at once. EfficientZero (a year ago, so only a few hundred AI millennia?) results only used an Atari benchmark, but that's surely not because MuZero had already clearly reached peak performance at chess and go and shogi or because only Atari is a particularly grueling task that compares to Real Life.

Real Life Outside is obviously very important. For Example, AlphaStar became AlphaFold.

I still think that getting an AI to play 4X games at a superhuman level would be a major development. They are the most complicated and intellectually demanding games we can make in terms of mechanics. They have a deep layer of diplomacy as well. Real life is important but computer games are easy to simulate and have the machine train against itself.

Not at this point, no. It is a general consensus in the field that developing even stronger game bots is no longer “major development”. These are mostly thought of as a solved problem. This is why nobody cares about these.

I refer you to OP - somebody clearly cares about game bots! That's what we're talking about.

This is silly. The bots from the OP are fundamentally different sort of “game bot” than StarCraft or Dota or chess. This is what the industry moved on to: solving human psychology and language, directly.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats