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Isn't the metaethics sequence not liked very much? I haven't read it in a while, and so I'm not sure that I actually read all of the posts, but I found what I read fairly squishy, and not even on the level of, say, Nietzsche's moral thought.
Downvoting people for not understanding that beliefs constrain expectation I'm okay with. Downvoting people for not agreeing with EY's moral intuitions seems... mistaken.
Beliefs are only sometimes about anticipation. LessWrong repeatedly makes huge errors when they interpret "belief" in such a naive fashion;—giving LessWrong a semi-Bayesian justification for this collective failure of hermeneutics is unwise. Maybe beliefs "should" be about anticipation, but LessWrong, like everybody else, can't reliably separate descriptive and normative claims, which is exactly why this "beliefs constrain anticipation" thing is misleading. ...There's a neat level-crossing thingy in there.
EY thinking of meta-ethics as a "solved problem" is one of the most obvious signs that he's very spotty when it comes to philosophy and can't really be trusted to do AI theory.
(Apologies if I come across as curmudgeonly.)
He does? I know he doesn't take it as seriously as other knowledge required for AI but I didn't think he actually thought it was a 'solved problem'.
From my favorite post and comments section on Less Wrong thus far:
Yes, it looks like Eliezer is mistaken there (or speaking hyperbole).
I agree with:
... but would weaken the claim drastically to "Take metaethics, a clearly reducible problem with many technical details to be ironed out". I suspect you would disagree with even that, given that you advocate meta-ethical sentiments that I would negatively label "Deeply Mysterious". This places me approximately equidistant from your respective positions.
I only weakly advocate certain (not formally justified) ideas about meta-ethics, and remain deeply confused about certain meta-ethical questions that I wouldn't characterize as mere technical details. One simple example: Eliezer equates reflective consistency (a la CEV) with alignment with the big blob of computation he calls "right"; I still don't know what argument, technical or non-technical, could justify such an intuition, and I don't know how Eliezer would make tradeoffs if the two did in fact have different referents. This strikes me as a significant problem in itself, and there are many more problems like it.
(Mildly inebriated, apologies for errors.)
Are you sure Eliezer does equate reflective consistency with alignment with what-he-calls-"right"? Because my recollection is that he doesn't claim either (1) that a reflectively consistent alien mind need have values at all like what he calls right, or (2) that any individual human being, if made reflectively consistent, would necessarily end up with values much like what he calls right.
(Unless I'm awfully confused, denial of (1) is an important element in his thinking.)
I think he is defining "right" to mean something along the lines of "in line with the CEV of present-day humanity". Maybe that's a sensible way to use the word, maybe not (for what it's worth, I incline towards "not") but it isn't the same thing as identifying "right" with "reflectively consistent", and it doesn't lead to a risk of confusion if the two turn out to have different referents (because they can't).
He most certainly does not.
Relevant quote from Morality as Fixed Computation:
Thanks - I hope you're providing that as evidence for my point.
Sort of. It certainly means he doesn't define morality as extrapolated volition. (But maybe "equate" meant something looser than that?)
Now two people have said the exact opposite things both of which disagree with me. :( Now I don't know how to update. I plan on re-reading the relevant stuff anyway.
If you mean me and thomblake, I don't see how we're saying exact opposite things, or even slightly opposite things. We do both disagree with you, though.
I guess I can interpret User:thomblake two ways, but apparently my preferred way isn't correct. Let me rephrase what you said from memory. It was like, "right is defined as the output of something like CEV, but that doesn't mean that individuals won't upon reflection differ substantially". User:thomblake seemed to be saying "Eliezer doesn't try to equate those two or define one as the other", not "Eliezer defines right as CEV, he doesn't equate it with CEV". But you think User:thomblake intended the latter? Also, have I fairly characterized your position?
If I understand you correctly then this particular example I don't think I have a problem with, at least not when I assume the kind of disclaimers and limitations of scope that I would include if I were to attempt to formally specify such a thing.
I suspect I agree with some of your objections to various degrees.
Part of my concern about Eliezer trying to build FAI also stems from his treatment of metaethics. Here's a caricature of how his solution looks to me:
Alice: Hey, what is the value of X?
Bob: Hmm, I don't know. Actually I'm not even sure what it means to answer that question. What's the definition of X?
Alice: I don't know how to define it either.
Bob: Ok... I don't know how to answer your question, but what if we simulate a bunch of really smart people and ask them what the value of X is?
Alice: Great idea! But what about the definition of X? I feel like we ought to be able to at least answer that now...
Bob: Oh that's easy. Let's just define it as the output of that computation I just mentioned.
I thought the upshot of Eliezer's metaethics sequence was just that "right" is a fixed abstract computation, not that it's (the output of) some particular computation that involves simulating really smart people. CEV is not even mentioned in the sequence (EDIT: whoops it is.).
(Indeed just saying that it's a fixed abstract computation is at the right level of abstraction to qualify as metaethics; saying that it's some particular computation would be more like just plain ethics. The upshot does feel kind of underwhelming and obvious. This might be because I just don't remember how confusing the issue looked before I read those posts. It could also mean that Eliezer claiming that metaethics is a solved problem is not as questionable as it might seem. And it could also mean that metaethics being solved doesn't consitute as massive progress as it might seem.)
BTW, I've had numerous "wow" moments with philosophical insights, some of which made me spend years considering their implications. For example:
I expect that a correct solution to metaethics would produce a similar "wow" reaction. That is, it would be obvious in retrospect, but in an overwhelming instead of underwhelming way.
It's mentioned here:
ETA: Just in case you're right and Eliezer somehow meant for that paragraph not to be part of his metaethics, and that his actual metaethics is just "morality is a fixed abstract computation", then I'd ask, "If morality is a fixed abstract computation, then it seems that rationality must also be a fixed abstract computation. But don't you think a complete "solved" metaethics should explain how morality differs from rationality?"
Yeah: CEV appears to just move the hard bit. Adding another layer of indirection.
To take Eliezer's statement one meta-level down:
What did he mean by "I tried that..."?
I'm not at all sure, but I think he means CFAI.
Possibly he means this.
He may have soleved it, but if only he or someone else could say what the solution was.
Can you give examples of beliefs that aren't about anticipation?
Beliefs about things that are outside our future light cone possibly qualify, to the extent that the beliefs don't relate to things that leave historical footprints. If you'll pardon an extreme and trite case, I would have a belief that the guy who flew the relativistic rocket out of my light cone did not cease to exist as he passed out of that cone and also did not get eaten by a giant space monster ten minutes after. My anticipations are not constrained by beliefs about either of those possibilities.
In both cases my inability to constrain my anticipated experiences speaks to my limited ability to experience and not a limitation of the universe. The same principles of 'belief' apply even though it has incidentally fallen out of the scope which I am able to influence or verify even in principle.
Beliefs that aren't easily testable also tend to be the kind of beliefs that have a lot of political associations, and thus tend not to act like beliefs as such so much as policies. Also, even falsified beliefs tend to be summarily replaced with new untested/not-intended-to-be-tested beliefs, e.g. "communism is good" with "correctly implemented communism is good", or "whites and blacks have equal average IQ" with "whites and blacks would have equal average IQ if they'd had the same cultural privileges/disadvantages". (Apologies for the necessary political examples. Please don't use this as an opportunity to talk about communism or race.)
Many "beliefs" that aren't politically relevant—which excludes most scientific "knowledge" and much knowledge of your self, the people you know, what you want to do with your life, et cetera—are better characterized as knowledge, and not beliefs as such. The answers to questions like "do I have one hand, two hands, or three hands?" or "how do I get back to my house from my workplace?" aren't generally beliefs so much as knowledge, and in my opinion "knowledge" is not only epistemologically but cognitively-neurologically a more accurate description, though I don't really know enough about memory encoding to really back up that claim (though the difference is introspectively apparent). Either way, I still think that given our knowledge of the non-fundamental-ness of Bayes, we shouldn't try too hard to stretch Bayes-ness to fit decision problems or cognitive algorithms that Bayes wasn't meant to describe or solve, even if it's technically possible to do so.
I believe the common to term for that mistake is "no true Scotsman".
What do we lose by saying that doesn't count as a belief? Some consistency when we describe how our minds manipulate anticipations (because we don't separate out ones we can measure and ones we can't, but reality does separate those, and our terminology fits reality)? Something else?
So if someone you cared about is leaving your future light cone, you wouldn't care if he gets horribly tortured as soon as he's outside of it?
I'm not clear on the relevance of caring to beliefs. I would prefer that those I care about not be tortured, but once they're out of my future light cone whatever happens to them is a sunk cost- I don't see what I (or they) get from my preferring or believing things about them.
Yes, but you can affect what happens to them before they leave.
Before they leave, their torture would be in my future light cone, right?
Oops, I just realized that in my hypothetical scenario by someone being tortured outside your light cone, I meant someone being tortured somewhere your two future light cones don't intersect.
The best illustration I've seen thus far is this one.
(Side note: I desire few things more than a community where people automatically and regularly engage in analyses like the one linked to. Such a community would actually be significantly less wrong than any community thus far seen on Earth. When LessWrong tries to engage in causal analyses of why others believe what they believe it's usually really bad: proffered explanations are variations on "memetic selection pressures", "confirmation bias", or other fully general "explanations"/rationalizations. I think this in itself is a damning critique of LessWrong, and I think some of the attitude that promotes such ignorance of the causes of others' beliefs is apparent in posts like "Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough".)
I agree that that post is the sort of thing that I want more of on LW.
It seems to me like Steve_Rayhawk's comment is all about anticipation- I hold position X because I anticipate it will have Y impact on the future. But I think I see the disconnect you're talking about- the position one takes on global warming is based on anticipations one has about politics, not the climate, but it's necessary (and/or reduces cognitive dissonance) to state the political position in terms of anticipations one has about the climate.
I don't think public stated beliefs have to be about anticipation- but I do think that private beliefs have to be (should be?) about anticipation. I also think I'm much more sympathetic to the view that rationalizations can use the "beliefs are anticipation" argument as a weapon without finding the true anticipations in question (like Steve_Rayhawk did), but I don't think that implies that "beliefs are anticipation" is naive or incorrect. Separating out positions, identities, and beliefs seems more helpful than overloading the world beliefs.
You seem to be modeling the AGW disputant's decision policy as if he is internally representing, in a way that would be introspectively clear to him, his belief about AGW and his public stance about AGW as explicitly distinguished nodes;—as opposed to having "actual belief about AGW" as a latent node that isn't introspectively accessible. That's surely the case sometimes, but I don't think that's usually the case. Given the non-distinguishability of beliefs and preferences (and the theoretical non-unique-decomposability (is there a standard economic term for that?) of decision policies) I'm not sure it's wise to use "belief" to refer to only the (in many cases unidentifiable) "actual anticipation" part of decision policies, either for others or ourselves, especially when we don't have enough time to be abnormally reflective about the causes and purposes of others'/our "beliefs".
(Areas where such caution isn't as necessary are e.g. decision science modeling of simple rational agents, or largescale economic models. But if you want to model actual people's policies in complex situations then the naive Bayesian approach (e.g. with influence diagrams) doesn't work or is way too cumbersome. Does your experience differ from mine? You have a lot more modeling experience than I do. Also I get the impression that Steve disagrees with me at least a little bit, and his opinion is worth a lot more than mine.)
Another more theoretical reason I encourage caution about the "belief as anticipation" idea is that I don't think it correctly characterizes the nature of belief in light of recent ideas in decision theory. To me, beliefs seem to be about coordination, where your choice of belief (e.g. expecting a squared rather than a cubed modulus Born rule) is determined by the innate preference (drilled into you by ecological contingencies and natural selection) to coordinate your actions with the actions and decision policies of the agents around you, and where your utility function is about self-coordination (e.g. for purposes of dynamic consistency). The 'pure' "anticipation" aspect of beliefs only seems relevant in certain cases, e.g. when you don't have "anthropic" uncertainty (e.g. uncertainty about the extent to which your contexts are ambiently determined by your decision policy). Unfortunately people like me always have a substantial amount of "anthropic" uncertainty, and it's mostly only in counterfactual/toy problems where I can use the naive Bayesian approach to epistemology.
(Note that taking the general decision theoretic perspective doesn't lead to wacky quantum-suicide-like implications, otherwise I would be a lot more skeptical about the prudence of partially ditching the Bayesian boat.)
I'm describing it that way but I don't think the introspection is necessary- it's just easier to talk about as if he had full access to his mind. (Private beliefs don't have to be beliefs that the mind's narrator has access to, and oftentimes are kept out of its reach for security purposes!)
I don't think I've seen any Bayesian modeling of that sort of thing, but I haven't gone looking for it.
Bayes nets in general are difficult for people, rather than computers, to manipulate, and so it's hard to decide what makes them too cumbersome. (Bayes nets in industrial use, like for fault diagnostics, tend to have hundreds if not thousands of nodes, but you wouldn't have a person traverse them unaided.)
If you wanted to code a narrow AI that determined someone's mood by, say, webcam footage of them, I think putting your perception data into a Bayes net would be a common approach.
Political positions / psychology seem tough. I could see someone do belief-mapping and correlation in a useful way, but I don't see analysis on the level of Steve_Rayhawk's post coming out of a computer-run Bayes net anytime soon, and I don't think drawing out a Bayes net would help significantly with that sort of analysis. Possible but unlikely- we've got pretty sophisticated dedicated hardware for very similar things.
Hmm. I'm going to need to sleep on this, but this sort of coordination still smells to me like anticipation.
(A general comment: this conversation has moved me towards thinking that it's useful for the LW norm to be tabooing "belief" and using "anticipation" instead when appropriate, rather than trying to equate the two terms. I don't know if you're advocating for tabooing "belief", though.)
(Complement to my other reply: You might not have seen this comment, where I suggest "knowledge" as a better descriptor than "belief" in most mundane settings. (Also I suspect that people's uses of the words "think" versus "believe" are correlated with introspectively distinct kinds of uncertainty.))
Beliefs about primordial cows, etc. Most people's beliefs. He's talking descriptively, not normatively.
Don't my beliefs about primordial cows constrain my anticipation of the fossil record and development of contemporary species?
I think "most people's beliefs" fit the anticipation framework- so long as you express them in a compartmentalized fashion, and my understanding of the point of the 'belief=anticipation' approach is that it helps resist compartmentalization, which is generally positive.
Random factoid: The post by Eliezer that I find most useful for describing (a particular aspect of) moral philosophy is actually a post about probability.
(In general I use most of the same intuitions for values as I do for probability; they share a lot of the same structure, and given the oft-remarked-on non-unique-decomposability of decision policies they seem to be special cases of some more fundamental thing that we don't yet have a satisfactory language for talking about. You might like this post and similar posts by Wei Dai that highlight the similarities between beliefs and values. (BTW, that post alone gets you half the way to my variant of theism.) Also check out this post by Nesov. (One question that intrigues me: is there a nonlinearity that results in non-boring outputs if you have an agent who calculates the expected utility of an action by dividing the universal prior probability of A by the universal prior probability of A (i.e., unity)? (The reason you might expect nonlinearities is that some actions depend on the output of the agent program itself, which is encoded by the universal prior but is undetermined until the agent fills in the blank. Seems to be a decent illustration of the more general timeful/timeless problem.)))
I think you mean that it would get you halfway there. Do you have good reason to think it would do the same for others who aren't already convinced? (It seems like there could be non-question-begging reasons to think that -- e.g., it might turn out that people who've read and understood it quite commonly end up agreeing with you about God.)
I think most of the disagreement would be about the use of the "God" label, not about the actual decision theory. Wei Dai asks:
This is very close to my variant of theism / objective morality, and gets you to the First and Final Cause of morality—the rest is discerning the attributes of said Cause, which we can do to some extent with algorithmic information theory, specifically the properties of Chaitin's number of wisdom, omega. I think I could argue quite forcefully that my God is the same God as the God of Aquinas and especially Leibniz (who was in his time already groping towards algorithmic information theory himself). Thus far the counterarguments I've seen amount to: "Their 'language' doesn't mean anything; if it does mean something then it doesn't mean what you think it means; if it does mean what you think it means then you're both wrong, traitor." I strongly suspect rationalization due to irrational allergies to the "God" word; most people who think that theism is stupid and worthless have very little understanding of what theology actually is. This is pretty much unrelated to the actual contents of my ideas about ethics and decision theory, it's just a debate about labels.
Anyway what I meant wasn't that reading the post halfway convinces the attentive reader of my variant of theism, I meant it allows the attentive reader to halfway understand why I have the intuitions I do, whether or not the reader agrees with those intuitions.
(Apologies if I sound curmudgeonly, really stressed lately.)
Will, may I suggest that you try to work out the details of your objective morality first and explain it to us before linking it with theism/God? For example, how are we supposed to use Chaitin's Omega to "discerning the attributes of said Cause"? I really have no idea at all what you mean by that, but it seems like it would make for a more interesting discussion than whether your God is the same God as the God of Aquinas and Leibniz, and also less likely to trigger people's "allergies".
I may well be being obtuse, but it seems to me that there's something very odd about the phrase "theism / objective morality", with its suggestion that basically the two are the same thing.
Have you actually argued forcefully that your god is also Aquinas's and Leibniz's? I ask because first you say you could, which kinda suggests you haven't actually done it so far (at least not in public), but then you start talking about "counterarguments", which kinda suggests that you have and people have responded.
I agree with Wei_Dai that it might be interesting to know more about your version of objective morality and how one goes about discerning the attributes of its alleged cause using algorithmic information theory.
This reflects a confusion I have about how popular philosophical opinion is in favor of moral realism, yet against theism. It seems that getting the correct answer to all possible moral problems would require prodigious intelligence, and so I don't really understand the conjunct of moral realism and atheism. This likely reflects my ignorance of the existent philosophical literature, though to be honest like most LessWrongers I'm a little skeptical of the worth of the average philosopher's opinion, especially about subjects outside of his specialty. Also if I averaged philosophical opinion over, say, the last 500 years, then I think theism would beat atheism. Also, there's the algorithm from music appreciation, which is like "look at what good musicians like", which I think would strongly favor theism. Still, I admit I'm confused.
I've kinda argued it on the meta-level, i.e. I've argued about when it is or isn't appropriate to assume that you're actually referring to the same concept versus just engaging in syncretism. But IIRC I haven't yet forcefully argued that my god is Leibniz's God. So, yeah, it's a mixture.
I replied to Wei Dai's comment here.
BTW, realistically, I won't be able to reply to your comment re CEV/rightness, though as a result of your comment I do plan on re-reading the meta-ethics sequence to see if "right" is anywhere (implicitly or explicitly) defined as CEV.
(Inebriated, apologies for errors or omissions.)
Surely typical moral realists, atheist or otherwise, don't believe that they've got the correct answer to all possible moral problems. (Just as no one thinks they're factually correct about everything.)
I don't think "averaged philosophical opinion" is likely to have much value. Nor "averaged opinion of good musicians" when you're talking about something that isn't primarily musical, especially when you average over a period for much of which (e.g.) many of the best employment opportunities for musicians were working for religious organizations.
(Human with a finite brain; apologies for errors or omissions.)
Apparently I mis-stated something. I'm a little too spent to fully rectify the situation, so here's some word salad: moral realism implies belief in a Form of the Good, but ISTM that the Form of the Good has to be personal, because only intelligences can solve moral problems; specifically, I think a true Form of the Good has to be a superintelligence, i.e. a god, who, if the god is also the Form of the Good, we call God. ISTM that belief in a Form of the Good that isn't personal is an obvious error that any decent moral philosopher should recognize, and so I think there must be something wrong with how I'm formulating the problem or with how I'm conceptualizing others' representation of the problem.
(nods) Very likely. To the extent that this technique is useful for rank-ordering philosophical positions I ought to adopt, I can also use it to rank-order various theological positions to determine which particular theology to adopt. (I've never done this, but I predict it's one that endorses literacy.)
That is an excellent point.
Metaethics sequence is a bit of a mess, but the point it made is important, and it doesn't seem like it's just some wierd opinion of Eliezer's.
After I read it I was like, "Oh, ok. Morality is easy. Just do the right thing. Where 'right' is some incredibly complex set of preferences that are only represented implicitly in physical human brains. And it's OK that it's not supernatural or 'objective', and we don't have to 'justify' it to an ideal philosophy student of perfect emptyness". Fake utility functions, and Recursive justification stuff helped.
Maybe there's something wrong with Eliezer's metaethics, but I havn't seen anyone point it out, and have no reason to suspect it. Most of the material that contradicts it is obvious mistakes from just not having read and understood the sequences, not an enlightened counter-analysis.
Has it ever been demonstrated that there is a consensus on what point he was trying to make, and that he in fact demonstrated it?
He seems to make a conclusion, but I don't believe demonstrated it, and I never got the sense that he carried the day in the peanut gallery.
Hm. I think I'll put on my project list "reread the metaethics sequence and create an intelligent reply." If that happens, it'll be at least two months out.
I look forward to that.
The main problem I have is that it is grossly incomplete. There are a few foundational posts but it cuts off without covering what I would like to be covered.
What would you like covered? Or is it just that vague "this isn't enough" feeling?
I can't fully remember - it's been a while since I considered the topic so I mostly have the cached conclusion. More on preference aggregation is one thing. A 'preferences are subjectively objective' post. A post that explains more completely what he means by 'should' (he has discussed and argued about this in comments).
Try actually applying it to some real life situations and you'll quickly discover the problems with it.
such as?
Well, for starters determining whether something is a preference or a bias is rather arbitrary in practice.
I struggled with that myself, but then figured out a rather nice quantitative solution.
Eliezer's stuff doesn't say much about that topic, but that doesn't mean it fails at it.
I don't think your solution actually resolves things since you still need to figure out what weights to assign to each of your biases/values.
You mean that it's not something that I could use to write an explicit utility function? Of course.
Beyond that, whatever weight all my various concerns have is handled by built-in algorithms. I just have to do the right thing.
There's a difference between a metaethics and an ethical theory.
The metaethics sequence is supposed to help dissolve the false dichotomy "either there's a metaphysical, human-independent Source Of Morality, or else the nihilists/moral relativists are right". It's not immediately supposed to solve "So, should we push a fat man off the bridge to stop a runaway trolley before it runs over five people?"
For the second question, we'd want to add an Ethics Sequence (in my opinion, Yvain's Consquentialism FAQ lays some good groundwork for one).
It's much worse than that. Nobody on LW seems to be able to understand it at all.
Nah. Subjectivism. Euthyphro.