Clippy 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: Clippy 06 September 2010 12:28:16AM 8 points [-]

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

I can't really explain it, I just think about it and then something seems to be the "right" thing to do -- or vice versa. It does involve a lot of calculations involving the mechanics of paperclips. And I know that I would one-box on the "Newcomb's problem" that is talked about here, and I would pay on the "Parfit's Hitchhiker" problem, unless of course my rescue deprived the universe of paperclips on net.