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cupholder comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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What if Dr. Evil publishes a book or makes a movie that rewires humanity's brains in a predetermined manner?
Yep, I made a reference to cultural influence here. That's why I suspect CEV should be applied uniformly to the identity-space of all possible humans rather than the subset of humans that happen to exist when it gets applied. In that case defining humanity becomes very, very important.
Of course, perhaps the current formulation of CEV covers the entire identity-space equally and treats the living population as a sample, and I have misunderstood. But if that is the case, Wei Dai's last article is also bunk, and I trust him to have better understanding of all things FAI than myself.
Heh - my first instinct is to bite the bullet and apply CEV to existing humans only. I couldn't give a strong argument for that, though; I just can't immediately think of a reason to exclude non-culturally influenced humans while including culturally influenced humans.
It's hard to tell what counts as an influence and what doesn't.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the effects of parasites could be identified and reversed. The results wouldn't necessarily all be good, though.
I am not sure I follow your last sentence. Can you elaborate?
I'll give it a try. A human's mind and preferences might be influenced by cultural things like books and TV, and they might be influenced by non-cultural things like parasites. (And of course a lot of people will be influenced by both.) I can't think of a reason to include the former in CEV and exclude the latter that feels non-arbitrary to me, so I don't feel as if parasitically modified brains warrant different treatment, such as altering CEV to cover the space of all possible humans. My gut evaluates the prospect of parasite-driven brains as just another kind of human brain. (I'm presuming as well that CEV as currently formulated is just meant to cover existing humans, not all possible humans.) That makes me content to apply CEV to existing humans only - I don't feel I have to try to account for brain changes due to culture or parasites or what have you by expanding it to incorporate all of brain space.