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Thomas comments on On the Power of Intelligence and Rationality - Less Wrong
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A perfect rationalist can mimic any kind of irrational behavior like Hitler's, for example.
Therefore we can expect, that the SAI may act weird just to utilize our irrationality.
True. There aren't even plausibly any perfect rationalists though. In practice, good rationalists don't seem to mimic effective irrational people frequently. Why not?
wedfrid's right, it's (edit: partly) a selection effect. If they imitated irrational people frequently and well, we wouldn't identify them as rationalists.
Once again, it's the difference between rationality-as-winning and rationality-as-signalling.
No, if they imitated irrational people well when doing so was useful we would see many irrational successful people suddenly shift behaviors to different sorts of irrationality or to rationality as their situations changed. We wouldn't be able to predict future weaknesses of successful rational people from past irrationalities but we can do this with successful people who appear irrational.
You're partly right, I'll change my statement: I think it's partly a selection effect.
The most obvious examples are along the lines of pretending to believe in God when atheism is illegal.
How do we know that?
"A perfect rationalist can mimic any kind of irrational behavior like Hitler's, for example."
What you mean is, AIXI could mimic any kind of irrational behavior. Someone could have perfectly accurate beliefs about everything and still not have Hitler's speechmaking ability.
Knowing everything means also knowing what a spoken statement will do inside listeners minds.
Which still doesn't mean being able to produce it.
Knowing everything means also knowing HOW to produce the best speech. Even more so for all Hitler's, which were probably not the best possible, after all.
This is what I always come back to when people talk about the value of rationality.
If the art of rationality is winning, the art of rationality includes the art of behaving in what appears to be an irrational manner to get people to do what you want.