Vladimir_Nesov comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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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.
Ultimatum game was mentioned primarily to remind that the amount of FAI-value traded for assistance may be orders of magnitude greater than what the assistance feels to amount to.
We might as well have as a given that all the discussed values are (at least to some small extent) different. The "all of money" here are the points of disagreement, mutually exclusive features of the future. But you are not trading value for value. You are trading value-after-FAI for assistance-now.
If two people compete for providing you an equivalent amount of assistance, you should be indifferent between them in accepting this assistance, which means that it should cost you an equivalent amount of value. If Person A has preference close to yours, and Person B has preference distant from yours, then by losing the same amount of value, you can help Person A more than Person B. Thus, if we assume egalitarian "background assistance", provided implicitly by e.g. not revolting and stopping the FAI programmer, then everyone still can get a slice of the pie, no matter how distant their values. If nothing else, the more alien people should strive to help you more, so that you'll be willing to part with more value for them (marginal value of providing assistance is greater for distant-preference folks).
You don't include cultures in CEV, you filter people through extrapolation of their volition. Even if culture makes value different, "mutilating women" is not a kind of thing that gets through, and so is a broken prototype example for drawing attention to.
In any case, my argument in the above comment was that value should be given (theoretically, if everyone understands the deal and relevant game theory, etc., etc.; realistically, such a deal must be simplified; you may even get away with cheating) according to provided assistance, not according to compatibility of value. If poor compatibility of value prevents from giving assistance, this is an effect of value completely unrelated to post-FAI compatibility, and given that assistance can be given with money, the effect itself doesn't seem real either. You may well exclude people of Myanmar, because they are poor and can't affect your success, but not people of a generous/demanding genocidal cult, for an irrelevant reason that they are evil. Game theory is cynical.
Might "mutilating men" make it through?
(sorry for the euphemism, I mean male circumcision)
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.