= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
jsteinhardt comments on Model Uncertainty, Pascalian Reasoning and Utilitarianism - 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 (154)
Yup, my confidence in the reasoning here on LW and my own ability to judge it is very low. The main reason for this is described in your post above, taken to its logical extreme you end up doing seemingly crazy stuff like trying to stop people from creating baby universes rather than solving friendly AI.
I don't know how to deal with this. Where do I draw the line? What are the upper and lower bounds? Are risks from AI above or below the line of uncertainty that I better ignore, given my own uncertainty and the uncertainty in the meta-level reasoning involved?
I am too uneducated and probably not smart enough to figure this out, yet I face the problems that people who are much more educated and intelligent than me devised.
If a line of reasoning is leading you to do something crazy, then that line of reasoning is probably incorrect. I think that is where you should draw the line. If the reasoning is actually correct, then by learning more your intuitions will automatically fall in line with the reasoning and it will not seem crazy anymore.
In this case, I think your intuition correctly diagnoses the conclusion as crazy. Whether you are well-educated or not, the fact that you can tell the difference speaks well of you, although I think you are causing yourself way too much anxiety by worrying about whether you should accept the conclusion after all. Like I said, by learning more you will decrease the inferential distance you will have to traverse in such arguments, and better deduce whether they are valid.
That being said, I still reject these sorts of existential risk arguments based mostly on intuition, plus I am unwilling to do things with high probabilities of failure, no matter how good the situation would be in the event of success.
ETA: To clarify, I think existential risk reduction is a worthwhile goal, but I am uncomfortable with arguments advocating specific ways to reduce risk that rely on very abstract or low-probability scenarios.