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Clippy comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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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.
But consider also sperm donation. (Not from the donor's perspective, but from the recipient's.) No sex, just a baby.
Contrawise, adoption: no shared genes, just a bundle of joy.
Yes, yes, and the same is true of pet adoption! A friend of mine found this ultra-cute little kitten, barely larger than a soda can (no joke). I couldn't help but adopt him and take him to a vet, and care for that tiny tiny bundle of joy, so curious about the world, and so needing of my help. I named him Neko.
So there, we have another contravention of the gene's wishes: it's a pure genetic cost for me, and a pure genetic benefit for Neko.
Well, I mean, until I had him neutered.
Right - similarly you could say that the child doesn't really want the donut - since the donut can be eliminated and replaced with stimulation of the hypoglossal and vagus nerves (and maybe some other ones) with very similar effects.
It seems like fighting with conventional language usage, though. Most people are quite happy with saying that the child wants the donut.
No.
The child wants to eat the donut rather than store up calories or stimulate certain nerves. It still wants to eat the donut even if the sugar has been replaced with artificial sweetener.
People want sex rather than procreate or stimulate certain nerves. They still want sex even if contraception is used.
Which people? Certainly Cypher tells a different story. He prefers the direct nerve stimulation to real-world experiences.
I wasn't making any factual claims as such, I was merely showing that your use of your analogy was very flawed by demonstrating a better alignment of the elements, which in fact says the exact opposite of what you misconstrued the analogy as saying. If what you now say about people really wanting nerve stimulation is true that just means your analogy was beside the point in the first place, at least for those people. In no way can you reasonably maintain that people really want to procreate in the same way the child really wants the donut.
Once again, which people? You are not talking about the millions of people who go to fertility clinics, presumably. Those people apparently genuinely want to procreate.
Yeah, I was talking to Cypher the other day, and that's what he told me.
Many drug addicts seem to share Cypher's perspective on this issue. They want the pleasure, and aren't too picky about where it comes from.
Yes ... but that's a shortcut of speech. If the child would be equally satisfied with a different but similar donut, or with a completely different dessert (e.g. a cannolu), then it is clearly not that specific donut that is desired, but the results of getting that donut.
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.
OK thanks.
My response to "yes" would be normally something like:
OK - but I hope you can see what someone who said that deep blue "wanted" to win games of chess was talking about.
"To win chess games" is a concise answer to the question of "what does deep blue want?" that acts as a good approximation under many circumstances.