Perplexed comments on Something's Wrong - Less Wrong

82 [deleted] 05 September 2010 06:08PM

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Comment author: Will_Sawin 05 September 2010 11:25:43PM 10 points [-]

Clippy is an agent defined by a certain inhuman ethics. Therefore, your test distinguishes ethical questions from non-ethical questions.

There are meaningless non-ethical questions: "What's a froob?" Human: "I don't know." Clippy: "I don't know."

There are only non-meaningless ethical questions with some kind of assumed axiom that allows us to cross the fact-value distinction, such as Eliezer's meta-ethics or "one should always act so as to maximize paperclips."

In general: Positivism teaches us to ignore many things we should not ignore. Rationalism, however, teaches us to ignore some things, but it does not teach us to ignore ethical questions.

Experiment: ask Clippy a question about decision theory.

Hey Clippy. What decision theory do you use to determine how your actions produce paperclips?

Comment author: Perplexed 05 September 2010 11:43:20PM 3 points [-]

Hey Clippy. What decision theory do you use to determine how your actions produce paperclips?

Is this an attempt to use Riddle Theory against Clippy? Might just be the secret to defending the universe from paperclip maximizers.

Comment author: Will_Sawin 06 September 2010 01:04:51AM 0 points [-]

No, sadly.