The craziest true thing I can imagine right now that Eliezer's hypothetical inhumanly well-calibrated AI could tell me is that the project of Eliezer and his friends will succeed and the EV defined by Eliezer and his friends coheres and does not care how much suffering exists in the universe.
Maybe I am playing the game wrong.
I interpreted the object of the game to be to minimize the probability that Eliezer currently assigns to my response to Eliezer question (what is the craziest thing that . . .) because Eliezer is blinded by anosognosia or by an "absolute denial macro".
That is the only interpretation that I could imagine that would assign a sensible motive for Eliezer to ask his question (what is the craziest thing that . . .) and to define the game.
But maybe I am just not smart enough to play this game that Eliezer has defined.
EDIT. Oh wait. I just imagined a second interpretation that gives Eliezer a sensible motive -- that motive's being to cause the reader of Eliezer's post to do for himself what under my first interpretation I was attempting to do for Eliezer. In other words, I am supposed to imagine what truth I am denying.
A third interpretation is that his motive is for us to respond with a statement that the entire human civilization is denying but is actually true -- in which case I stick to my original response, which I will now repeat:
The craziest true thing I can imagine right now that Eliezer's hypothetical inhumanly well-calibrated AI could tell me is that the project of Eliezer and his friends will succeed and the EV defined by Eliezer and his friends coheres and does not care how much suffering exists in the universe.
The probability that I assign to the event that CEV goes that way is probably higher than any other humans. In addition, two humans I know of probably assign it a probability above 1 or 2%. I cannot rule out the possibility of humans I have not discussed this issue with also assigning it a probability above 1 or 2%, but surely the vast majority of humans are "absolutely denying" this, i.e., assigning it a probability under .01%
Human beings are all crazy. And if you tap on our brains just a little, we get so crazy that even other humans notice. Anosognosics are one of my favorite examples of this; people with right-hemisphere damage whose left arms become paralyzed, and who deny that their left arms are paralyzed, coming up with excuses whenever they're asked why they can't move their arms.
A truly wonderful form of brain damage - it disables your ability to notice or accept the brain damage. If you're told outright that your arm is paralyzed, you'll deny it. All the marvelous excuse-generating rationalization faculties of the brain will be mobilized to mask the damage from your own sight. As Yvain summarized:
I find it disturbing that the brain has such a simple macro for absolute denial that it can be invoked as a side effect of paralysis. That a single whack on the brain can both disable a left-side motor function, and disable our ability to recognize or accept the disability. Other forms of brain damage also seem to both cause insanity and disallow recognition of that insanity - for example, when people insist that their friends have been replaced by exact duplicates after damage to face-recognizing areas.
And it really makes you wonder...
...what if we all have some form of brain damage in common, so that none of us notice some simple and obvious fact? As blatant, perhaps, as our left arms being paralyzed? Every time this fact intrudes into our universe, we come up with some ridiculous excuse to dismiss it - as ridiculous as "It's my daughter's arm" - only there's no sane doctor watching to pursue the argument any further. (Would we all come up with the same excuse?)
If the "absolute denial macro" is that simple, and invoked that easily...
Now, suppose you built an AI. You wrote the source code yourself, and so far as you can tell by inspecting the AI's thought processes, it has no equivalent of the "absolute denial macro" - there's no point damage that could inflict on it the equivalent of anosognosia. It has redundant differently-architected systems, defending in depth against cognitive errors. If one system makes a mistake, two others will catch it. The AI has no functionality at all for deliberate rationalization, let alone the doublethink and denial-of-denial that characterizes anosognosics or humans thinking about politics. Inspecting the AI's thought processes seems to show that, in accordance with your design, the AI has no intention to deceive you, and an explicit goal of telling you the truth. And in your experience so far, the AI has been, inhumanly, well-calibrated; the AI has assigned 99% certainty on a couple of hundred occasions, and been wrong exactly twice that you know of.
Arguably, you now have far better reason to trust what the AI says to you, than to trust your own thoughts.
And now the AI tells you that it's 99.9% sure - having seen it with its own cameras, and confirmed from a hundred other sources - even though (it thinks) the human brain is built to invoke the absolute denial macro on it - that...
...what?
What's the craziest thing the AI could tell you, such that you would be willing to believe that the AI was the sane one?
(Some of my own answers appear in the comments.)