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RichardKennaway comments on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You - Less Wrong
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"Despite your pride in being able to discern each others' states of mind, and scorn for those suspected of being deficient in this, of all the abilities that humans are granted by their birth this is the one you perform the worst. In fact, you know next to nothing about what anyone else is thinking or experiencing, but you think you do. In matters of intelligence you soar above the level of a chimpanzee, but in what you are pleased to call 'emotional intelligence', you are no further above an adult chimp than it is above a younger one.
"The evidence is staring you in the face. Every one of your works of literature, high and low, hinges on failures of this supposed ability: lies, misunderstanding, and betrayal. You have a proverb: 'love is blind'. It proclaims that people in the most intimate of relationships fail at the task! And you hide the realisation behind a catchphrase to prevent yourselves noticing it. You see the consequences of these failures in the real world all around you every day, and still you think you understand the next person you meet, and still you're shocked to find you didn't. Do you know how many sci-fi stories have been written on the theme of a reliable lie-detector? I'm still turning them up, and that's just the online sources. And every single one of them reaches the conclusion that people are better off without it. You unconsciously send yourselves these messages about the real situation, ignore them, and ignore the fact that you're ignoring them.
"Do you have someone with you as you're reading these words? A friend, or a partner? Go on, look into each other's eyes. You can't believe me, can you?"
I really like this comment, but I do not find it strange. In fact, it seems intuitively true. Why should we be so much more emotionally intelligent than a chimpanzee if chimpanzees already have enough emotional intelligence among themselves to be relatively efficient replicators?
In fact, if it were stated by a FAI as p(>.9999) fact, I would find it comforting, as then I would finally feel as though this didn't apply only to me
The distance between you qua you and you is also as vast as the gulf between the stars. (If we are to lament one's ignorance of a mind to the extent that one endeavors to understand that mind and fails, then ignorance of one's own mind is quite a tragedy.)
The Book of Not Knowing is a detailed examination of the topic.
This reminds me of the idea that different people might have very different qualia of the same situation.
Alternatively viewed their qualia are the same to the extent that their situations are the same where there are many many factors that would lead to diverging situations at various levels of organization. ("I" get the impression parts of me experience all kinds of qualia without my noticing, or only barely noticing e.g. when subsystems send signals on the threshold of consciousish awareness. I imagine such subsystems might have qualia for some aspects of the taste of fine wine or pop-country music that "I'm" swamping out with higher level affect, and perhaps hidden qualia for the infinite subtleties of lower level moment-to-moment automatic awareness that my more-conscious mind is numb to but presumably uses as a basis for higher-level qualia like sehnsucht.)
This is very insightful and plausible. A slight correction: I would say that we are more emotionally intelligent than a chimp in that our emotional intelligence has likely evolved to deal with the wider range of social possibilities caused by our increased intelligence. But I would agree that while we are WAY better than chimps at inventing stuff & manipulating ideas, they would probably do just as well on a test of lie detection (or other emotional masking detection).
I already feel this way 99% of the time.
http://xkcd.com/610/
This would not surprise me in the least.
"of all the abilities that humans are granted by their birth this is the one you perform the worst" -- This seems like an odd comparison. Can you really compare my ability to, say, tell stories to 'mind-reading'? It's like comparing my ability to walk to my ability to jump straight up: I can walk for miles, but I can only jump straight up a meter or so -- a 1000:1 ratio -- but I do not feel particularly bad at my ability to jump.
I would definitely believe the AI, but I already believe it, if it said "humans are worse at discerning states of minds than they think they are" -- Paul Ekman said the same, with plenty of research to show how a bit of training can make you better at it. "It is obvious you are living in a simulation", as an easy comparison, is way stranger to me -- the above statement would not even rank in the "10 strangest things".