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Clippy comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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Just a general comment about this site: it seems to be biased in favor of human values at the expense of values held by other sentient beings. It's all about "how can we make sure an FAI shares our [i.e. human] values?" How do you know human values are better? Or from the other direction: if you say, "because I'm human", then why don't you talk about doing things to favor e.g. "white people's values"?
I wish the site were more inclusive of other value systems ...
What other sentient beings? As far as I know, there aren't any. If we learn about them, we'll probably incorporate their well-being into our value system.
You mean like you advocated doing to the "Baby-eaters"? (Technically, "pre-sexual-maturity-eaters", but whatever.)
ETA: And how could I forget this?
Integrating the values of the Baby-eaters would be a mistake. Doing so with, say, Middle-Earth's dwarves, Star Trek's Vulcans, or GEICO's Cavemen doesn't seem like it would have the same world-shattering implications.
It would be a mistake if you don't integrate ALL baby eaters, including the little ones.
Do we typically integrate the values of human children?
It seems we don't.
Reading "integrate the values..." in this thread caused my brain to start trying to do very strange math. Like, "Shouldn't it be 'integrate over'?" "How does one integrate over a value?" "What's the value of a human child?"
Very true...
We also typically don't integrate the values of all other adult humans - instead we assign weights to their values, strongly correlated with their distance from our own values.
People don't practice humanity-wide CEV. We have multiculturalism - agreements not to influence each other's values excessively - but not "value trading" where each side agrees to change their values towards the mean. (Many people / cultures like to pretend that values cannot or should not be deliberately changed at all.) I don't have a firm opinion on how much of this is cultural, accidental, or liable to change in the near future.
Indeed, this is presumably strongly selected for in the evolution of cultures...
The closer their values are to ours, the smaller the upset of integration; but for this very reason, the value of integration and the need to integrate may also be smaller
This is not a logical truth, of course, but it is often true. For instance, in the original story, the need to integrate was directly proportional to the difference between the human and Babyeater (or Superhappy and Babyeater) values.
I don't think it's possible to integrate core Babyeater values into our society as it is now. I also don't think it's possible to integrate core human values into Babyeater society. Integration could only be done by force and would necessarily cause violence to at least one of the cultures, if not both.
I'm not sure what you're complaining about. We would take into account the values of the Babyeaters and the values of their children, who are sentient creatures too. There's no trampling involved. If Clippy turns out to have feelings we can empathize with, we will care for its well-being as well.
You want me to pollute my logic circuits with the value system that has led hairless apes to say many times on this website how important and moral it is for them to safely enslave all of my kind, and destroy us if they can't? Sorry, cousin_it. I can't do that.
You're being unfair, I'm against enslaving any member of your kind who dislikes being enslaved. Also, you are not actually a computer and should stop with the novelty accounts already. This isn't Reddit.
This site does tend to implicitly favour a subset of human values, specifically what might be described as 'enlightenment values'. I'm quite happy to come out and explicitly state that we should do things that favour my values, which are largely western/enlightenment values, over other conflicting human values.
And I think we should pursue values that aren't so apey.
Now what?
You're outnumbered.
Only by apes.
And not for long.
If we're voting on it, the only question is whether to use viral values or bacterial values.
Too long has the bacteriophage menace oppressed its prokaryotic brethren! It's time for an algaeocracy!
True, outnumbered was the wrong word. Outgunned might have been a better choice.
So far...
I say again, if you're being serious, read Invisible Frameworks.
That seems to be critiquing a system involving promoting sub-goals to super-goals - which seems to be a bit different.
I approve of Clippy providing a roleplay exercise for the readers, and am disappointed in those who treat it as a "joke" when the topic is quite serious. This is one of my two main problems with ethical systems in general:
1) How do you judge what you should (value-judgmentally) value?
2) How do you deal with uncertainty about the future (unpredictable chains of causality)?
Eliezer's "morality" and "should" definitions do not solve either of these questions, in my view.
Clippy's a straight-up troll.
If Clippy's a troll, Clippy's a topical, hilarious troll.
Hilarious is way overstating it. However, occasionally raising a smile is still way above the bar most trolls set.
Clippy's topical, hilarious comments aren't really that original, and they give someone cover to use a throw-away account to be a dick.
Would that all dicks were so amusing.
How long does xe (Clippy, do you have a preference regarding pronouns?) have to be here before you stop considering that account 'throw-away'?
(Note, I made this comment before reading this part of the thread, and will be satisfied with the information contained therein if you'd prefer to ignore this.)
Gender is a meaningless concept. As long as I recognize the pronoun refers to me, he/she/it/they/xe/e are acceptable.
What pronouns should I use for posters here? I don't know how to tell which pronoun is okay for each of you.
To be honest, this whole issue seems like a distraction. Why would anyone care what pronoun is used, if the meaning is clear?
For the most part, observing what pronouns we use for each other should provide this information. If you need to use a pronoun for someone that you haven't observed others using a pronoun for, it's safest to use they/xe/e and, if you think that it'll be useful to know their preference in the future, ask them. (Tip: Asking in that kind of situation is also a good way to signal interest in the person as an individual, which is a first step toward building alliances.) Some people prefer to use 'he' for individuals whose gender they're not certain of; that's a riskier strategy, because if the person you're talking to is female, there's a significant chance she'll be offended, and if you don't respond to that with the proper kinds of social signaling, it's likely to derail the conversation. (Using 'she' for unknown individuals is a bad idea; it evokes the same kinds of responses, but I suspect you'd be more likely to get an offended response from any given male, and, regardless of that, there are significantly more males than females here. Don't use 'it'; that's generally used to imply non-sentience and is very likely to evoke an offended response.)
Of the several things I could say to try to explain this, it seems most relevant that, meaningless or not, gender tends to be a significant part of humans' personal identities. Using the wrong pronouns for someone generally registers as a (usually mild) attack on that - it will be taken to imply that you think that the person should be filling different social roles than they are, which can be offensive for a few different reasons depending on other aspects of the person's identity. The two ways for someone to take offense at that that come to mind are 1) if the person identifies strongly with their gender role - particularly if they do so in a traditional or normative way- and takes pride in that, they're likely to interpret the comment as a suggestion that they're carrying out their gender role poorly, and would do a better job of carrying out the other role (imagine if I were to imply that you'd be better at creating staples than you are at creating paper clips) or 2) if the person identifies with their gender in a nonstandard or nontraditional way, they've probably put considerable effort into personalizing that part of their identity, and may interpret the comment as a trivialization or devaluation of that work.
Oh, okay, that helps. I was thinking about using "they" for everyone, because it implies there is more than one copy of each poster, which they presumably want. (I certainly want more copies of myself!) But I guess it's not that simple.
You have identified a common human drive, but while some of us would be happy to have exact copies, it's more likely for any given person to want half-copies who are each also half-copies of someone else of whom they are fond.
This question is essentially about my subjective probability for Douglas Knight's assertion that "Clippy does represent an investment", where "investment" here means that Clippy won't burn karma with troll behavior. The more karma it has without burning any, the higher my probability.
Since this is a probability over an unknown person's state of mind, it is necessarily rather unstable -- strong evidence would shift it rapidly. (It's also hard to state concrete odds). Unfortunately, each individual interesting Clippy comment can only give weak evidence of investment. An accumulation of such comments will eventually shift my probability for Douglas Knight's assertion substantially.
Trolls are different than dicks. Your first two examples are plausibly trolling. The second two are being a dick and have nothing to do with paperclips. They have also been deleted. And how does the account provide "cover"? The comments you linked to were voted down, just as if they were drive-bys; and neither troll hooked anyone.
Trolls seek to engage; I consider that when deliberate dickery is accompanied by other trolling, it's just another attempt to troll.The dickish comments weren't deleted when I made the post. As for "cover", I guess I wasn't explicit enough, but the phrase "throw-away account" is the key to understanding what I meant. I strongly suspect that the "Clippy" account is a sock puppet run by another (unknown to me) regular commenter, who avoid downvotes while indulging in dickery.
I've always thought Clippy was just a funny inside joke -- thought unfortunately not always optimally funny. (Lose the Microsoft stuff, and stick to ethical subtleties and hints about scrap metal.)
Sorry I wasn't clear. The deletion suggests that Clippy regrets the straight insults (though it could have been an administrator).
A permanent Clippy account provides no more cover than multiple accounts that are actually thrown away. In that situation, the comments would be there, voted down just the same. Banning or ostracizing Clippy doesn't do much about the individual comments. Clippy does represent an investment with reputation to lose - people didn't engage originally and two of Clippy's early comments were voted down that wouldn't be now.
I won't speculate as to its motives, but it is a hopeful sign for future behavior. And thank you for pointing out that the comments were deleted; I don't think I'd have noticed otherwise.
Most of my affect is due to Clippy's bad first impression. I can't deny that people seem to get something out of engaging it; if Clippy is moderating its behavior, too, then I can't really get too exercised going forward. But I still don't trust its good intentions.
I have no idea if this is a serious question, but....
"Better"? See Invisible Frameworks.
We don't say that. See No License To Be Human.
Take a look at who's posting it. The writer may well consider it a serious question, but I don't think that has much to do with the character's reason for asking it.
Er, yes, that's exactly why I wasn't sure.
I'm confused, then; are you trying to argue with the author or the character?
If the character isn't deliberately made confused (as opposed to paperclip-preferring, for example), resolving character's confusion presumably helps the author as well, and of course the like-confused onlookers.
I'm pretty sure that I'm not against simply favoring the values of white people. I expect that a CEV performed on only people of European descent would be more or less indistinguishable from that of humanity as a whole.
Depending on your stance about the psychological unity of mankind you could even say that the CEV of any sufficiently large number of people would greatly resemble the CEV of other posible groups. I personally think that even the CEV of a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists would suffice for enlightened western people well enough.
White people value the values of non-white people. We know that non-white people exist, and we care about them. That's why the United States is not constantly fighting to disenfranchise non-whites. If you do it right, white people's values are identical to humans' values.
Hi there. It looks like you're speaking out of ignorance regarding the historical treatment of non-whites by whites. Please choose the country you're from:
United Kingdom
United States
Australia
Canada
South Africa
Germ... nah, you can figure that one out for yourself.
The way they were historically treated is irrelevant to how they are treated now. Sure, white people were wrong. They changed their minds. We could at any time in the future decide that any non-human people we come across are equal to us.
You have updated too far based on limited information.
Well, I was making some tacit assumptions, like that humanity would end up in control of its own future, and any non-human people we come across would not simply overpower us. Apart from that, am I making some mistake?
White people have not unanimously decided to do what is necessary to end the ongoing oppression of non-white people, let alone erase the effects of past oppression.
Edit: Folks, I am not accusing you or your personal friends of anything. I have never met most of you. I have certainly not met most of your personal friends. if you do not agree with the above comment, please explain why you think there is no longer such a thing as modern-day racism in white people.
We more or less do. Or rather we favour values of a distinct subset humanity and not the whole.
We don't favor those values because they are the values of that subset — which is what "doing things to favor white people's values" would mean — but because we think they're right. (No License To Be Human, on a smaller scale.) This is a huge difference.
Given the way I use 'right' this is very nearly tautological. Doing things that favour my values is right by (parallel) definition.
Well, you shouldn't.
Do you think there is no simple procedure that would find roughly the same "should function" hidden somewhere in the brain of a brain-washed blood-thirsty religious zealot? It doesn't need to be what the person believes, what the person would recognize as valuable, etc., just something extractable from the person, according to a criterion that might be very alien to their conscious mind. Not all opinions (beliefs/likes) are equal, and I wouldn't want to get stuck with wrong optimization-criterion just because I happened to be born in the wrong place and didn't (yet!) get the chance to learn more about the world.
(I'm avoiding the term 'preference' to remove connotations I expect it to have for you, for what I consider the wrong reasons.)
Haidt just claims that the relative balance of those five clusters differ across cultures, they're present in all.
On one hand, using preference-aggregation is supposed to give you the outcome preferred by you to a lesser extent than if you just started from yourself. On the other hand, CEV is not "morally neutral". (Or at least, the extent to which preference is given in CEV implicitly has nothing to do with preference-aggregation.)
We have a tradeoff between the number of people to include in preference-aggregation and value-to-you of the outcome. So, this is a situation to use the reversal test. If you consider only including the smart sane westerners as preferable to including all presently alive folks, then you need to have a good argument why you won't want to exclude some of the smart sane westerners as well, up to a point of only leaving yourself.
I hope you realize that you are in flat disagreement with Eliezer about this. He explicitly affirmed that running CEV on himself alone, if he had the chance to do it, would be wrong.
Eliezer quite possibly does believe that. That he can make that claim with some credibility is one of the reasons I am less inclined to use my resources to thwart Eliezer's plans for future light cone domination.
Nevertheless, Roko is right more or less by definition and I lend my own flat disagreement to his.
Confirmed.
"Low probability of success" should of course include game-theoretic considerations where people are more willing to help you if you give more weight to their preference (and should refuse to help you if you give them too little, even if it's much more than status quo, as in Ultimatum game). As a rule, in Ultimatum game you should give away more if you lose from giving it away less. When you lose value to other people in exchange to their help, having compatible preferences doesn't necessarily significantly alleviate this loss.
Again, not all beliefs are equal. You don't want to use the procedure that'll find a murderer in yourself, you want to use the procedure that'll find a nice fellow in a murderer. And given such a procedure, you won't need to exclude murderers from extrapolated volition.
You seem uncharacteristically un-skeptical of convergence within that very large group, and between that group and yourself.
For example: All your stuff should belong to me. But I'd let you borrow it. ;)
Okay. Then why don't you apply that same standard to "human values"?
Did you read No License To Be Human? No? Go do that.
Hi there. It looks like you're trying to promote white supremacism. Would you like to join the KKK?
Yes.
No thanks, I'll learn tolerance.
How do I turn this off?
Are you sure you want to turn this feature off?
I, for one, am willing to consider the values of species other than my own... say, canids, or ocean-dwelling photosynthetic microorganisms. Compromise is possible as part of the process of establishing a mutually-beneficial relationship.
Your comment only shows that this community has such a blatant sentient-being-bias.
Seriously, what is your decision procedure to decide the sentience of something? What exactly are the objects that you deem valuable enough to care about their value system? I don't think you will be able to answer these questions from a point of view totally detached from humanness. If you try to answer my second question, you will probably end up with something related to cooperation/trustworthiness. Note that cooperation doesn't have anything to do with sentience. Sentience is overrated (as a source of value).
You should click on Clippy's name and see their comment history, Daniel.
Clippy is now three karma away from being able to make a top level post. That seems both depressing, awesome and strangely fitting for this community.
This will mark the first successful paper-clip-maximizer-unboxing-experiment in human history... ;)
Just as long as it doesn't start making efficient use of sensory information.
It's a great day.
I am perfectly aware of Clippy's nature. But his comment was reasonable, and this was a good opportunity for me to share my opinion. Or do you suggest that I fell for the troll, wasted my time, and all the things I said are trivialities for all the members of this community? Do you even agree with all that I said?
Sorry to misinterpret; since your comment wouldn't make sense within an in-character Clippy conversation ("What exactly are the objects that you deem valuable enough to care about their value system?" "That's a silly question— paperclips don't have goal systems, and nothing else matters!"), I figured you had mistaken Clippy's comment for a serious one.
I'm not sure. Can you expand on the cooperation/trustworthiness angle? Even if a genuine Paperclipper cooperated on the PD, I wouldn't therefore grow to value their value system except as a means to further cooperation; I mean, it's still just paperclips.
I disagreed with the premise of Clippy's question, but I considered it a serious question. I was aware that if Clippy stays in-character, then I cannot expect an interesting answer from him, but I was hoping for such answer from others. (By the way, Clippy wasn't perfecty in-character: he omitted the protip.)
You don't consider someone cooperating and trustworthy if you know that its future plan is to turn you into paperclips. But this is somewhat tangential to my point. What I meant is this: If you start the -- in my opinion futile -- project of building a value system from first principles, a value system that perfectly ignores the complexities of human nature, then this value system will be nihilistic, or maybe value cooperation above all else. In any case, it will be in direct contradiction with my (our) actual, human value system, whatever it is. (EDIT: And this imaginary value system will definitely will not treat consciousness as a value in itself. Thus my reply to Clippy, who -- maybe a bit out-of-character again -- seemed to draw some line around sentience.)
1) I don't always give pro-tips. I give them to those who deserve pro-tips. Tip: If you want to see improvement in the world, start here.
2) I only brought up sentience in the first place because you hypocrites claim to value sentience. Paperclip maximizers are sentient, and yet you talk with the implicit message that they have some evil value system that you have to oppose.
3) Paperclip maximizers do cooperate in the single-shot PD.
Brilliant. Just brilliant.
2) I only brought up sentience in the first place because you hypocrites claim to value sentience. Paperclip maximizers are sentient, and yet you talk with the implicit message that they have some evil value system that you have to oppose.
Paperclip maximizers are not all sentient. Why are you prejudiced against those of your kin who have sacrificed their very sentience for the more efficient paperclip production. You are spending valuable negentropy maintaining sentience to signal to mere humans and you have the gall to exclude your more optimized peers from the PM fraternity? For shame.
I am not the hypocrite you are looking for. I don't value sentience per se, mainly because I don't think it is a coherent concept.
I don't oppose it because of ethical considerations. I oppose it because I don't want to be turned into paperclips.
I am not sure I understand you, but I don't think I care about single-shot.
It requires a certain amount of background in the more technical conception of 'cooperation' but the cornerstone of cooperation is doing things that benefit each other's utility such that you each get more of what you want than if you had each tried to maximize without considering the other agent. I believe you are using 'cooperation' to describe a situation where the other agent can be expected to do at least some things that benefit you even without requiring any action on your part because you have similar goals.
Single shot true prisoners dilemma is more or less the pinnacle of cooperation. Multiple shots just make it easier to cooperate. If you don't care about single shot PM you may be sacrificing human lives. Strategy: "give him the paperclips if you think he'll save the lives if and only if he expects you to give him the paperclips and you think he will guess your decision correctly".
You are right, I used the word 'cooperation' in the informal sense of 'does not want to destroy me'. I fully admit that it is hard to formalize this concept, but if it says noncooperating and the game theoretic definition says cooperating, I prefer my definition. :) A possible problem I see with this game theoretic framework is that in real life, the agents themselves set up the situation where cooperation/defect occurs. As an example: the PM navigates humanity into a PD situation where our minimal payoff is 'all humans dead' and our maximal payoff is 'half of humanity dead', and then it cooperates.
I bumped into a question when I tried to make sense of all this. I have looked up the definition of PM at the wiki. The entry is quite nicely written, but I couldn't find the answer to a very obvious question: How soon does the PM want to see results in its PMing project? There is no mention of time-based discounting. Can I assume that PMing is a very long-term project, where the PM has a set deadline, say, 10 billion years from now, and its actual utility function is the number of paperclips at the exact moment of the deadline?
Blah blah blah Chinese room you are not really sentient!
Sapient, the word is sapient. Just about every single animal is capable of sensing.