All they manage to do is convince those who already hold the same set of beliefs or who fit a certain mindset.
It's perhaps worth noting that this observation is true of most discussion about most even-mildly-controversial subjects on LessWrong—quantum mechanics, cryonics, heuristics and biases, ethics, meta-ethics, theology, epistemology, group selection, hard takeoff, Friendliness, et cetera. What confuses me is that LessWrong continues to attract really impressive people anyway; it seems to be the internet's biggest/best forum for interesting technical discussion about epistemology, Schellingian game theory, the singularity, &c., even though most of the discussion is just annoying echoes. One of a hundred or so regular commenters is actually trying or is a real intellectual, not a fountain of cultish sloganeering and cheering. Others are weird hybrids of cheerleader and actually trying / real intellectual (like me, though I try to cheer on a higher level, and about more important things). Unfortunately I don't know of any way to raise the "sanity waterline", if such a concept makes sense, and I suspect that the new Center for Modern Rationality is going to make things worse, not better. I hope I'm wrong. ...I feel like there's something that could be done, but I have no idea what it is.
I just reread this post yesterday and found it to be a very convincing counter-argument against the idea that we should solely act on high stakes.
Eh, I think Vassar's reply is more to the point.
I just reread this post yesterday and found it to be a very convincing counter-argument against the idea that we should solely act on high stakes.
Eh, I think Vassar's reply is more to the point.
I think Wei_Dai's reply does trump that.
What Vassar is saying sounds to me like a justification of Pascal's Wager by arguing that some God's have more measure than others and that therefore we can rationally decide to believe into a certain God and live accordingly.
That is like saying that a biased coin does not have a probability of 1/2 and that we can ther...
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.