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Roko comments on The I-Less Eye - Less Wrong
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Comments (83)
Morendil's comment made me realize that my example is directly analogous to your Counterfactual Mugging: in that thought experiment, Omega's coin flip splits you into two copies (in two different possible worlds), and like in my example, the rational thing to do, in human terms, is to sacrifice your own interests to help your copy. To me, this analogy indicates that it's not mind-copying that's causing the apparent value changes, but rather Bayesian updating.
I tend to agree with you, but I note that Eliezer disagrees.
Do you want to lose what you value upon learning that you were confused? More realistically, the correct preference is to adapt the past preference to something that does make sense. More generally, if you should lose that aspect of preference, it means you prefer to do so; if you shouldn't, it means you don't prefer to do so. Whatever the case, doing what you prefer to do upon receiving new information is in accordance with what you prefer.
This is all tautologous, but you are seeing a conflict of interest somewhere, so I don't think you've made the concepts involved in the situation explicit enough to recognize the tautologies.
Preference talks about what you should do, and what you do is usually real (until you pass to a next level).
This seems to confuse stuff that happens to a human with decision theory. What happens with a human (in human's thoughts, etc.) can't be "contradictory" apart from a specific interpretation that names some things "contradictory". This interpretation isn't fundamentally interesting for the purposes of optimizing the stuff. The ontology problem is asked about the FAI, not about a person that is optimized by FAI. For FAI, a person is just a pattern in the environment, just like any other object, with stars and people and paperclips all fundamentally alike; the only thing that distinguishes them for FAI is what preference tells should be done in each case.
When we are talking about decision theory for FAI, especially while boxing the ontology inside the FAI, it's not obvious how to connect that with particular interpretations of what happens in environment, nor should we try, really.
Now, speaking of people in environment, we might say that the theist is going to feel frustrated for some time upon realizing that they were confused for a long time. However I can't imagine the whole process of deconverting to be actually not preferable, as compared to remaining confused (especially given that in the long run, the person will need to grow up). Even the optimal strategy is going to have identifiable negative aspects, but it may only make the strategy suboptimal if there is a better way. Also, for a lot of obvious negative aspects, such as negative emotions accompanying an otherwise desirable transition, FAI is going to invent a way of avoiding that aspect, if that's desirable.
This is actually wrong. Whatever the AI starts with is its formal preference, it never changes, it never depends on anything. That this formal preference was actually intended to copycat an existing pattern in environment is a statement about what sorts of formal preference it is, but it is enacted the same way, in accordance with what should be done in that particular case based on what formal preference tells. Thus, what you've highlighted in the quote is a special case, not an additional feature. Also, I doubt it can work this way.
True, but implicit preference is not something that person realizes to be preferable, and not something expressed in terms of confused "ontology" believed by that person. The implicit preference is a formal object that isn't built from fuzzy patterns interpreted in the person's thoughts. When you speak of "contradictions" in person't beliefs, you are speaking on a wrong level of abstraction, like if you were discussing parameters in a clustering algorithm as being relevant to reliable performance of hardware on which that algorithm runs.
A belief system can't be "fundamentally contradictory" because it's not "fundamental" to begin with. What do you mean by "bad"? Bad according to what? It doesn't follow from confused thoughts that preference is somehow brittle.
A Friendly AI might also resolve the situation by presenting itself as god, eliminating suffering in the world, and then giving out genuine revelations with adequately good advice.
In that case, eliminate actual suffering as fast as possible, then rapidly reduce the appearance of suffering in ways calculated to make it seem like the theist's own actions are a significant factor, and eventually substitute some other productive activity.
To get back at this point: This depends on how we understand "values". Let's not conceptualize values is being defined in terms of an "ontology".
You do not lose any options by gaining more knowledge. If the optimal response to have when your values are defined in terms of an inconsistent ontology is to go ahead and act as if the ontology is consistent then you can still choose to do so even once you find out the dark secret. You can only gain from knowing more.
If your values are such that they do not even allow a mechanism for creating an best effort approximation of values in the case of ontological enlightenment then you are out of luck no matter what you do. Even if you explicitly value ignorance of the fact that nothing you value can have coherent value, the incoherency of your value system makes the ignorance value meaningless too.
Make the most basic parts of the value system in an ontology that has as little chance as possible of being inconsistent. Reference to actual humans can ensure that a superintelligent FAI's value system will be logically consistent if it is in fact possible for a human to have a value system defined in a consistent ontology. If that is not possible then humans are in a hopeless position. But at least I (by definition) wouldn't care.
If preference is expressed in terms of what you should do, not what's true about the world, new observations never influence preference, so we can fix it at the start and never revise it (which is an important feature for constructing FAI, since you only ever have a hand in its initial construction).
(To whoever downvoted this without comment -- it's not as stupid an idea as it might sound; what's true about the world doesn't matter for preference, but it does matter for decision-making, as decisions are made depending on what's observed. By isolating preference from influence of observations, we fix it at the start, but since it determines what should be done depending on all possible observations, we are not ignoring reality.)
In the situation described by Roko the agent has doubt about its understanding of the very ontology that its values are expressed in. If it were an AI that would effectively mean that we designed it using mathematics that we thought was consistent but turns out to have a flaw. The FAI has self improved to a level where it has a suspicion that the ontology that is used to represent its value system is internally inconsistent and must decide whether to examine the problem further. (So we should have been able to fix it at the start but couldn't because we just weren't smart enough.)
If its values are not represented in terms of an "ontology", this won't happen.
How could it be otherwise? His confusion doesn't define his preference, and his preference doesn't set this particular form of confusion as being desirable. Maybe Wei Dai's post is a better way to communicate the distinction I'm making: A Master-Slave Model of Human Preferences (though it's different, the distinction is there as well).
No, I think his values are defined in terms of a consistent ontology in which ignorance may result in a higher value outcome. If his values could not in fact be expresesd consistently then I do hold that (by definition) he doesn't lose by knowing more.