Zack_M_Davis comments on David Chalmers' "The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis" - Less Wrong

33 Post author: lukeprog 29 January 2011 02:52AM

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Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 30 January 2011 01:10:13AM 7 points [-]

if human near mode provincial hyperbolic discounting algorithms make deals with human far mode universal exponential discounting algorithms, the universal (pro-coherence) algorithms will win out in the end (by taking advantage of near mode's hyperbolic discounting).

What does time discounting have to do with coherence? Of course exponential discounting is "universal" in the sense that if you're going to time-discount at all (and I don't think we should), you need to use an exponential in order to avoid preference reversals. But this doesn't tell us anything about what exponential discounters are optimizing for.

If this idea is too vague or you're interested I could expand on this elsewhere. [...] I was just afraid of italicizing and bolding the disclaimers because I thought it'd appear obnoxious, but it's probably less obnoxious than failing to emphasize really important parts of what I'm saying.

I think your comments would be better received if you just directly talked about your ideas and reasoning, rather than first mentioning your shocking conclusions ("theism might be correct," "volitions of evolved agents cohere") while disclaiming that it's not how it looks. If you make a good argument that just so happens to result in a shocking conclusion, then great, but make sure the focus is on the reasons rather than the conclusion.