wedrifid comments on SotW: Be Specific - Less Wrong

37 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 April 2012 06:11AM

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Comment author: wedrifid 06 April 2012 02:13:38AM *  2 points [-]

Since it's malicious, it will probably search through all of your desires, pick one of them at random to count as "my utility function", and then reinterpret the body of the wish to maximise that one thing at the expense of all others.

It's malicious and omnipotent. It'll do far worse than that. It'll scan your preferences until it finds a contradiction. Once you have a contradiction you can derive absolutely anything. It would then proceed to calculate your Coherent Extrapolated Volition and minimise it. It may not be obliged to figure out what you actually want but it can certainly do so for the purpose of being spiteful!

Comment author: Grognor 07 April 2012 07:17:35PM 6 points [-]

I think that is the first time I've ever seen anyone accurately describe the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Comment author: Dmytry 06 April 2012 01:04:48PM 1 point [-]

What happens if you ask it to maximize your CEV, though?

Lemme remember, the idea with CEV was what you'd desired if you thought faster and more reliably. Okay I ponder what will happen to you if your mind was BusyBeaver(10) times faster (way scarier number than 3^^^^3), without your body working any faster. 1 second passes.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 April 2012 02:14:20AM 2 points [-]

What happens if you ask it to maximize your CEV, though?

It'll fuck with you. Because that is what it does. It has plenty of scope to do so because CEV is not fully defined as of now. I'm not sure precisely how it would go about doing so. I just assume it does in some way I haven't thought of yet.

The meaning it attributes to CEV when it wants to exploit it to make things terrible is very different to the meaning it attributes to CEV when we try to use it to force it to understand us. It's almost as bad as some humans in that regard!

Comment author: Dmytry 07 April 2012 04:49:48AM 0 points [-]

It has plenty of scope to do so because CEV is not fully defined as of now.

The understatement of the year. CEV is vaguest crap ever with lowest hope of becoming less vague.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 April 2012 07:08:58AM 1 point [-]

with lowest hope of becoming less vague.

That's a rather significant claim.

Comment author: Dmytry 07 April 2012 07:16:18AM *  -1 points [-]

It's very uncommon to see crap this vague in development for such a long time by such a clever person, without it becoming less vague.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 April 2012 08:46:32AM *  1 point [-]

As far as I am aware this crap isn't in development. It isn't the highest research priority so the other SingInst researchers haven't been working on it much and Eliezer himself is mostly focused on writing a rationality book. Other things like decision theory are being worked on - which has involved replacing vague as crap TDT with less-vague UDT and UDT2.

I would like to see more work published on CEV. The most recent I am familiar with is this.

Comment author: orthonormal 07 April 2012 03:16:28PM 4 points [-]

replacing vague as crap TDT with less-vague UDT and UDT2

As I've figured out while writing the last few posts, TDT hasn't been explained well, but it is a genuinely formalizable theory. (You'll have to trust me until Part III or check the decision-theory mailing list.) But it's a different theory from ADT and UDT, and the latter ones are preferable.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 April 2012 03:11:05PM 0 points [-]

You mean you have something in mind about how to handle counterfactuals over logically impossible worlds, or simply “I'm not sure it can't be done”?

Comment author: orthonormal 08 April 2012 03:26:10PM 0 points [-]

I mean, I've written an algorithm (in the context of the tournament) which does what TDT should do (just as the algorithm in my last post does what CDT should do). The nice part about specifying the context so precisely is that I can dodge many of the hairy issues which come up in practice, and just show the essence of the decision theories.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 06 April 2012 02:20:14AM 2 points [-]

Or alter my preferences so I antiprefer whatever it is able to produce the most of. Plus altering my brain such that my disutility and dishedonism are linear with that thing. Getting the attention of a Crapsack God sucks.

Comment author: wedrifid 06 April 2012 02:36:25AM 1 point [-]

Or alter my preferences so I antiprefer whatever it is able to produce the most of. Plus altering my brain such that my disutility and dishedonism are linear with that thing.

Those are actually subsumed under "mimimize CEV<TheOtherDave>". In the same way that maximising our CEV will not involve modifying our preferences drastically (unless it turns out we are into that sort of thing after all), minimising CEV would, if that turns out to be the worst way to @#$@ with us.

Getting the attention of a Crapsack God sucks.

Can't argue with that.