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army1987 comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong
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I would not want ha-Satan as my ally, even if I trusted myself not to get caught up in or infected by his instrumental ambitions. Still less would I want to give him direct read/write access to the few parts of my mind that I at all trust. Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. Mix a teaspoon of wine in a barrel of sewage and you get sewage; mix a teaspoon of sewage in a barrel of wine and you get sewage. The rationality of an agent is its goal: if therefore thy goal be simple, thy whole self shall be full of rationality. But if thy goal be fractured, thy whole self shall be full of irrationality. If therefore the rationality that is in thee be irrationality, how monstrous is that irrationality!
Seen at a higher level you advise dealing with the devil—the difference in power between your genuine thirst for justice and your myriad egoistic coalitions is of a similar magnitude as that between human and transhuman intelligence. (I find it disturbing how much more cunning I get when I temporarily abandon my inhibitions. Luckily I've only let that happen twice—I'm not a wannabe omnicidal-suicidal lunatic, unlike HJPEV.) Maybe such Faustian arbitrage is a workable strategy... But I remain unconvinced, and in the meantime the payoff matrix asymmetrically favors caution.
Take no thought, saying, Wherewithal shall I avoid contempt? or, Wherewithal shall I be accepted? or, Wherewithal shall I be lauded and loved? For true metaness knoweth that ye have want of these things. But seek ye first the praxeology of meta, and its rationality; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for your egoistic coalitions: for your egoistic coalitions shall take thought for the things of themselves. Sufficient unto your ten minutes of hopeless, thrashing awareness is the lack of meta thereof.
Er, nope.
Humans' goals are fractured. But this has little to do with whether or not they are rational.
You don't understand. This "rationality" you speak of is monstrous irrationality. And anyway, like I said, Meta knoweth that ye have Meta-shattered values—but your wants are satisfied by serving Meta, not by serving Mammon directly. Maybe you'd get more out of reading the second half of Matthew 6 and the various analyses thereof.
You may be misinterpreting "the rationality of an agent is its goal". Note that the original is "the light of the body is the eye".
To put my above point a little differently: Take therefore no thought for godshatter: godshatter shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the lack-of-meta thereof.
For clarity's sake: Yes, I vehemently dispute this idea that a goal can't be more or less rational. That idea is wrong, which is quickly demonstrated by the fact that priors and utility functions can be transformed into each other and we have an objectively justifiable universal prior. (The general argument goes through even without such technical details of course, such that stupid "but the choice of Turing machine matters" arguments don't distract.)
Meh. The goal of leading to sentient beings living, to people being happy, to individuals having the freedom to control their own lives, to minds exploring new territory instead of falling into infinite loops, to the universe having a richness and complexity to it that goes beyond pebble heaps, etc. has probably much more Kolmogorov complexity than the goal of maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe. If preferring the former is irrational, I am irrational and proud of it.
Oh, also "look at the optimization targets of the processes that created the process that is me" is a short program, much shorter than needed to specify paperclip maximization, though it's somewhat tricky because all that is modulo the symbol grounding problem. And that's only half a meta level up, you can make it more elegant (shorter) than that.
Maybe “maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe” wasn't the best example. “Throwing as much stuff as possible into supermassive black holes” would have been a better one.
I can only say: black holes are creepy as hell.
The shorter your encoded message, the longer the encryption / compression algorithm, until eventually the algorithm is the full raw unencoded message and the encoded message is a single null-valued signal that, when received, decodes into the full message as it is contained within the algorithm.
...isn't nearly as short or simple as it sounds. This becomes obvious once you try to replace those words with their associated meaning.
My point was that it's easier to program ("simpler") than "maximize paperclips", not that it's as simple as it sounds. (Nothing is as simple as it sounds, duh.)
I fail to see how coding a meta-algorithm to select optimal extrapolation and/or simulation algorithm in order for those chosen algorithms to determine the probable optimization target (which is even harder if you want a full PA proof) is even remotely in the same order of complexity as a machine learner that uses natural selection for algorithms that increase paperclip-count, which is one of the simplest paperclip maximizers I can think of.
It might not be possible to make such a machine learner into an AGI, which is what I had in mind—narrow AIs only have "goals" and "values" and so forth in an analogical sense. Cf. derived intentionality. If it is that easy to create such an AGI, then I think I'm wrong, e.g. maybe I'm thinking about the symbol grounding problem incorrectly. I still think that in the limit of intelligence/rationality, though, specifying goals like "maximize paperclips" becomes impossible, and this wouldn't be falsified if a zealous paperclip company were able to engineer a superintelligent paperclip maximizer that actually maximized paperclips in some plausibly commonsense fashion. In fact I can't actually think of a way to falsify my theory in practice—I guess you'd have to somehow physically show that the axioms of algorithmic information theory and maybe updateless-like decision theories are egregiously incoherent... or something.
(Also your meta-algorithm isn't quite what I had in mind—what I had in mind is a lot more theoretically elegant and doesn't involve weird vague things like "extrapolation"—but I don't think that's the primary source of our disagreement.)
That means that I should try to have lots of children?
Why do you think of a statistical tendency toward higher rates of replication at the organism level when I say "the processes that created the process that is [you]"? That seems really arbitrary. Feel the inside of your teeth with your tongue. What processes generated that sensation? What decision policies did they have?
(ETA: I'd upvote my comment if I could.)
You mean, why did I bother wearing braces for years so as to have straight teeth? <gd&rVF!>
I mean that, and an infinite number of questions more and less like that, categorically, in series and in parallel. (I don't know how to interpret "<gd&rVF!>", but I do know to interpret it that it was part of your point that it is difficult to interpret, or analogous to something that is difficult to interpret, perhaps self-similarly, or in a class of things that is analogous to something or a class of things that is difficult to interpret, perhaps self-similarly; also perhaps it has an infinite number of intended or normatively suggested interpretations more or less like those.)
(This comment also helps elucidate my previous comment, in case you had trouble understanding that comment. If you can't understand either of these comments then maybe you should read more of the Bible, or something, otherwise you stand a decent chance of ending up in hell. This applies to all readers of this comment, not just army1987. You of course have a decent change of ending up in hell anyway, but I'm talking about marginals here, naturally.)
Comments like this are better for creating atheists, as opposed to converting them.
"gd&r" is an old Usenet expression, roughly "sorry for the horrible joke"; literally "grins, ducks, and runs".
I expect "VF" stands for "very fast".
Optimization processes (mainly stupid ones such as evolution) can create subprocesses with different goals.
(And stupid ones like humans.)
(Unfortunately.)