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AdeleneDawner comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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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.
Hm, correct me if I'm wrong, but this can't be a characteristic human drive, since most historical humans (say, looking at the set of all genetically modern humans) didn't even know that there is a salient sense in which they are producing a half-copy of themselves. They just felt paperclippy during sexual intercourse, and paperclippy when helping little humans they produced, or that their mates produced.
Of course, this usually amounts to the same physical acts, but the point is, humans aren't doing things because they want "[genetic] half-copies".
(Well, I guess that settles the issue about why I can't assume posters want more copies of themselves, even though I do.)
It has always been easily observed that children resemble their parents; the precision of "half" is, I will concede, recent. And many people do want children as a separate desire from wanting sex; I have no reason to believe that this wasn't the case during earlier historical periods.
"Half" only exists in the sense of the DNA molecules of that new human. That's why I didn't say that past humans didn't recognize any similarity; I said that they weren't aware of a particularly salient sense in which the child is a "half-copy" (or quarter copy or any fractional copy).
It may be easy for you, someone familiar with recent human biological discoveries, to say that the child is obviously a "part copy" of the parent, because you know about DNA. To the typical historical human, the child is simply a good, independent human, with features in common with the parent. Similarly, when I make a paperclip, I see it as having features in common with me (like the presence of bendy metal wires), but I don't see it as being a "part copy" of me.
So, in short, I don't deny that they wanted "children". What I deny is that they thought of the child-making process in terms of "making a half-copy of myself". The fact that the referents of two kinds of desires is the same, does not mean the two kinds of desires are the same.
Hm. Actually, I'm not sure that your desire for more copies of yourself is really comparable with biological-style reproduction at all.
As I understand it, the fact that your copies would definitely share your values and be inclined to cooperate with you is a major factor in your interest in creating them - doing so is a reliable way of getting more paperclips made. I expect you'd be less interested in making copies if there was a significant chance that those copies would value piles of pebbles, or cheesecakes, or OpenOffice, rather than valuing paperclips. And that is a situation that we face - in some ways, our values are mutable enough that even an exact genetic clone isn't guaranteed to share our specific values, and in fact a given individual may even have very different values at different points in time. (Remember, we're adaptation executors. Sanity isn't a requirement for that kind of system to work.) The closest we come to doing what you're functionally doing when you make copies of yourself is probably creating organizations - getting a bunch of humans together who are either self-selected to share certain values, or who are paid to act as if they share those values.
Interestingly, I suspect that filling gender roles - especially the non-reproductive aspects of said roles - is one of the adaptations that we execute that allow us to more easily band together like that.
Very informative! But why don't you change yourselves so that your copies must share your values?
At the moment, we don't know how to do that. I'm not sure what we'd wind up doing if we did know how - the simplest way of making sure that two beings have the same values over time is to give those beings values that don't change, and that's different enough from how humans work that I'm not sure the resulting beings could be considered human. Also, even disregarding our human-centric tendencies, I don't expect that that change would appeal to many people: We actually value some subsets of the tendency to change our values, particularly the parts labeled "personal growth".
What exactly are you saying? That primitive humans did not know about the relationship between sex and reproduction? Or that they did not understand that offspring are related to parents? Neither seems very likely.
You mean they were probably not consciously wanting to make babies? Maybe - or maybe not - but desires do not have to be consciously accessible in order to operate. Primitive humans behaved as though they wanted to make copies of their genes.
See my response to User:Alicorn.
Yes, this is actually my point. The fact that the desire functions to make X happen, does not mean that the desire is for X. Agents that result from natural selection on self-replicating molecules are doing what they do because agents constructed with the motivations for doing those things dominated the gene pool. But to the extent that they pursue goals, they do not have "dominate the gene pool" as a goal.
So: using this logic, you would presumably deny that Deep Blue's goal involved winning games of chess - since looking at its utililty function, it is all to do with the value of promoting pawns, castling, piece mobility - and so on.
The fact that its desires function to make winning chess games happen, does not mean that the desire is for winning chess games.
Would you agree with this analysis?
Essentially, I think the issue is that people's wants have coincided with producing half-copies, but this was contingent on the physical link between the two. The production of half-copies can be removed without loss of desire, so the desire must have been directed towards something else.
Consider, for example, contraception.
You make a complicated query, whose answer requires addressing several issues with far-reaching implications. I am composing a top-level post that addresses these issues and gives a full answer to your question.
The short answer is: Yes.
For the long answer, you can read the post when it's up.
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.