Jayson_Virissimo comments on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You - Less Wrong

81 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 July 2009 02:27AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 July 2009 04:00:13AM *  28 points [-]

Here's some examples for your own consideration...

Bearing in mind, once again, that humans are known to be crazy in many ways, and that anosognosic humans become literally incapable of believing that their left sides are paralyzed, and that other neurological disorders seem to invoke a similar "denial" function automatically along with the damage itself. And that you've actually seen the AI's code and audited it and witnessed its high performance in many domains, so that you would seem to have far more reason to trust its sanity than to trust your own. So would you believe the AI, if it told you that:

1) Tin-foil hats actually do block the Orbital Mind Control Lasers.

2) All mathematical reasoning involving "infinities" implies self-evident contradictions, but human mathematicians have a blind spot with respect to them.

3) You are not above-average; most people believe in the existence of a huge fictional underclass in order to place themselves at the top of the heap, rather than in the middle. This is why so many of your friends seem to have PhDs despite PhDs supposedly constituting only 0.5% of the population. You are actually in the bottom third of the population; the other two-thirds have already built their own AIs.

4) The human bias toward overconfidence is far deeper than we are capable of recognizing; we have a form of species overconfidence which denies all evidence against itself. Humans are much slower runners than we think, muscularly weaker, struggle to keep afloat in the water let alone move, and of course, are poorer thinkers.

5) Dogs, cats, cows, and many other mammals are capable of linguistic reasoning and have made many efforts to communicate with us, but humans are only capable of recognizing other humans as capable of thought.

6) Humans cannot reproduce without the aid of the overlooked third sex.

7) The Earth is flat.

8) Human beings are incapable of writing fiction; all supposed fiction you have read is actually true.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 15 July 2009 05:58:52AM 2 points [-]

"All mathematical reasoning involving "infinities" involves self-evident contradictions, but human mathematicians have a blind spot with respect to them." -Eliezer Yudkowsky

I'm going to lose sleep over this one...Is there anything to this?

Comment author: komponisto 15 July 2009 07:19:01AM *  5 points [-]

Is there anything to this?

There needn't have been in order for this to be a reasonable example, but perhaps Eliezer is not-so-subtly hinting that he actually expects an AI to say this.

But it's really no different than "all reasoning by mathematicians about X is wrong" where X is any mathematical concept you please.

Comment author: andrewcooke 15 July 2009 11:54:25AM 0 points [-]

yes. at least, i assume that it's related to intuitionist or constructivist logic (which you can google - for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionistic_logic)

the flip side is that apparently you can do an awful lot of maths without the law of the excluded middle (which is what is necessary to reason with infinities).

Comment author: andrewcooke 15 July 2009 11:56:03AM 0 points [-]

actually, the wikipedia article for intuitionism is more helpful - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionism (it has a section directly addressing infinities)

Comment author: timtyler 15 July 2009 07:33:08AM 0 points [-]

No - check the infinities in CGT - e.g. "Mathematical Go: Chilling Gets the Last Point".