gjm comments on Inferring Our Desires - Less Wrong

37 Post author: lukeprog 24 May 2011 05:33AM

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Comment author: gjm 24 May 2011 08:56:08AM 4 points [-]

What's your point?

(I looked at the article, and at another more specific WP article, without finding anything that looked much like what Luke was saying. Whether you're aiming to raise the status of the field in question, to discredit Luke or what he's saying by association with something widely disapproved of, to point out an illuminating parallel, or whatever, I think you need to be much more explicit.)

Comment author: Will_Newsome 24 May 2011 09:06:58AM *  -1 points [-]

Mostly it just seemed to me like an interesting connection, especially if the notion of eugenics is generalized to be more explicitly reflective on memetics and multi-level selection -- instead of the focus at the individual-biological/organismic (and to a weird extent the racial level) -- at which point it becomes reflexive, even. It has various abstract connections to FAI/CEV. Specifically what seemed cool about the vision of eugenics outlined in the diagram I linked to is that it is reflective, empirical, naturalistic meta-ethics / applied ethics, which I'm not sure went on before that and hasn't come up again except in some very primitive complex systems and dual inheritance studies as far I know. In hindsight I should not have expected these thoughts to automatically enter peoples' brains when they saw the diagram I linked to.

I was also hoping that other people could notice similar connections to other fields that might also be non-obviously related to this theme of refining and more effectively applying our models of morality and meta-ethics.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 24 May 2011 09:18:33AM *  7 points [-]

I think I am consistently up against Hofstadter's law of inferential distances, or something.

Dear Will_Newsome's brain,

Please update on the above information, or explain more clearly why you do not want to, and in any case please explain why various parts or coalitions of you do not want to change your strategy for communication or do not want to acknowledge that the lack of a changed strategy is indicative of not updating. Once such concerns are out in the open I promise to reflect carefully and explicitly on how best to reach something like a Pareto improvement, obviously with your guidance and partnership at each step of the way.

Sincerely, Will_Newsome's executive function algorithm that likes to use public commitments as self-bargaining tactics because it read a Less Wrong post that said that was a good idea.

Comment author: lukeprog 24 May 2011 02:44:57PM *  3 points [-]

I think I am consistently up against Hofstadter's law of inferential distances

Concur. Will's brain, please update! I would like to understand Will more often. :)