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Alicorn comments on A Less Wrong singularity article? - Less Wrong
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Comments (210)
I really do not know. Our disagreements on ethics are definitely nontrivial - the structure of consequentialism inspires you to look at a completely different set of sub-questions than the ones I'd use to determine the nature of morality. That might mean that (at least) one of us is taking the wrong tack on a shared question, or that we're asking different basic questions. We will arrive at superficially similar answers much of the time because "appeal to intuition" is considered a legitimate move in ethics and we have some similar intuitions about the kinds of answers we want to arrive at.
I think you are right that paperclip maximizers would not care at all about ethics. Babyeaters, though, seem like they do, and it's not even completely obvious to me that the gulf between me and a babyeater (in methodology, not in result) is larger than the gulf between me and you. It looks to me a bit like you and I get to different parts of city A via bicycle and dirigible respectively, and then the babyeaters get to city B via kayak - yes, we humans have more similar destinations to each other than to the Space Cannibals, but the kind of journey undertaken seems at least as significant, and trying to compare a bike and a blimp and a boat is not a task obviously approachable.
I find it a suspicious coincidence that we should arrive at similar answers by asking dissimilar questions.
Do you also find it suspicious that we could both arrive in the same city using different vehicles? Or that the answer to "how many socks is Alicorn wearing?" and the answer to "what is 6 - 4?" are the same? Or that one could correctly answer "yes" to the question "is there cheese in the fridge?" and the question "is it 4:30?" without meaning to use a completely different, non-yes word in either case?
Not at all, if we started out by wanting to arrive in the same city.
And not at all, if I selected you as a point of comparison by looking around the city I was in at the time.
Otherwise, yes, very suspicious. Usually, when two randomly selected people in Earth's population get into a car and drive somewhere, they arrive in different cities.
No, because you selected those two questions to have the same answer.
Yes-or-no questions have a very small answer space so even if you hadn't selected them to correlate, it would only be 1 bit of coincidence.
The examples in the grandparent do seem to miss the point that Alicorn was originally describing.
It is still surprising, but somewhat less so if our question answering is about finding descriptions for our hardwired intuitions. In that case people with similar personalities can be expected to formulate question-answer pairs that differ mainly in their respective areas of awkwardness as descriptions of the territory.
And we did exactly that (metaphorically speaking). I said:
It seems to me that you and I ask dissimilar questions and arrive at superficially similar answers. (I say "superficially similar" because I consider the "because" clause in an ethical statement to be important - if you think you should pull the six-year-old off the train tracks because that maximizes your utility function and I think you should do it because the six-year-old is entitled to your protection on account of being a person, those are different answers, even if the six-year-old lives either way.) The babyeaters get more non-matching results in the "does the six-year-old live" department, but their questions - just about as important in comparing theories - are not (it seems to me) so much more different than yours and mine.
Everybody, in seeking a principled ethical theory, has to bite some bullets (or go on an endless Easter-epicycle hunt).
To me, this doesn't seem like superficial similarity at all. I should sooner call the differences of verbal "because" superficial, and focus on that which actually produces the answer.
I think you should do it because the six-year-old is valuable and precious and irreplaceable, and if I had a utility function it would describe that. I'm not sure how this differs from what you're doing, but I think it differs from what you think I'm doing.
Correct. But neither would they 'care' about paperclips, under the way Eliezer's pushing this idea. They would flarb about paperclips, and caring would be as alien to them as flarbing is to you.
I think some subset of paperclip maximizers might be said to care about paperclips. Not, most likely, all possible instances of them.
I had the same thought.