= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
orthonormal comments on Two questions about CEV that worry me - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (137)
I don't think anyone here would have raised their hand at the first prompt, with the exceptions of Tim Tyler and Clippy.
Omohundro's rationality in a nutshell reads:
Step 1 seems to be a fairly basic and fundamental one to me.
If you don't know what you are trying to do, it is not easy to know whether you are succeeding at it - or not.
I think rational agents should try and figure out what they want. "It's complicated" is a kind of answer - but not a very practical or useful one.
I suspect failures at step 1 are mostly to do with signalling. For example, Tom Lehrer once spoke of "a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience". If you publish your goals, that limits your ability to signal motives that are in harmony with those of your audience - reducing your options for deceptive signalling.
I doubt this very strongly, and can say with the an extremely high level of confidence that I fail at step 1 even when I don't have to tell anyone my answer. What humans mean by "clearly specified" is completely different than what is required to write down some program whose output you would like an omnipotent agent to maximize. There are other reasons to argue that CEV is not a useful concept, but this is really a bad one.
FWIW, I wasn't talking about CEV or superintelligent agents. I was just talking about the task of figuring out what your own goals were.
We can't really coherently discuss in detail the difficulties of programming goals into superintelligent agents until we know how to build them. Programming one agent's goals into a different agent looks challenging. Some devotees attempt to fulfill their guru's desires - but that is a trickier problem than fulfilling their own desires - since they don't get direct feedback from the guru's senses. Anyway, these are all complications that I did not even pretend to be going into.
What do you actually mean when you say you "fail at step 1". You have no idea what your own goals are?!? Or just that your knowledge of your own goals is somewhat incomplete?
I wasn't talking about CEV or superintelligent agents either. I mean that I have no idea how to write down my own goals. I am nowhere close to having clearly specified goals for myself, in the sense that I as a mathematician usually mean "clearly specified". The fact that I can't describe my goals well enough that I could tell them to someone else and trust them to do what I want done is just one indication that my own conception of my goals is significantly incomplete.
OK. You do sound as though you don't have very clearly-defined goals - though maybe there is some evasive word-play around the issue of what counts as a "clear" specification. Having goals is not rocket science! In any case, IMO, you would be well advised to start at number 1 on the above list.