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davidpearce comments on Decision Theory FAQ - Less Wrong
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They would probably disagree. They might even call it a cognitive advantage, not being hampered by empathy while retaining all the intelligence.
I am the center of my personal universe, and I'm not a psychopath, as far as I know.
Or else, they do but don't care. They have their priorities straight: they come first.
Not if they act in a way that maximizes their goals.
Anyway, David, you seem to be shifting goalposts in your unwillingness to update. I gave an explicit human counterexample to your statement that the paperclip maximizer would have to adjust its goals once it fully understands humans. You refused to acknowledge it and tried to explain it away by reducing the reference class of intelligences in a way that excludes this counterexample. This also seem to be one of the patterns apparent in your other exchanges. Which leads me to believe that you are only interested in convincing others, not in learning anything new from them. Thus my interest in continuing this discussion is waning quickly.
Shminux, by a cognitive deficit, I mean a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the world. Evolution has endowed us with such fitness-enhancing biases. In the psychopath, egocentric bias is more pronounced. Recall that the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM-IV, classes psychopasthy / Antisocial personality disorder as a condition characterised by "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood." Unless we add a rider that this violation excludes sentient beings from other species, then most of us fall under the label.
"Fully understands"? But unless one is capable of empathy, then one will never understand what it is like to be another human being, just as unless one has the relevant sensioneural apparatus, one will never know what it is like to be a bat.
And you'll never understand why we should all only make paperclips. (Where's Clippy when you need him?)
Clippy has an off-the-scale AQ - he's a rule-following hypersystemetiser with a monomania for paperclips. But hypersocial sentients can have a runaway intelligence explosion too. And hypersocial sentients understand the mind of Mr Clippy better than Clippy understands the minds of sentients.
I'm confused by this claim.
Consider the following hypothetical scenario:
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I walk into a small village somewhere and find several dozen villagers fashioning paper clips by hand out of a spool of wire. Eventually I run into Clippy and have the following dialog.
"Why are those people making paper clips?" I ask.
"Because paper-clips are the most important thing ever!"
"No, I mean, what motivates them to make paper clips?"
"Oh! I talked them into it."
"Really? How did you do that?"
"Different strategies for different people. Mostly, I barter with them for advice on how to solve their personal problems. I'm pretty good at that; I'm the village's resident psychotherapist and life coach."
"Why not just build a paperclip-making machine?"
"I haven't a clue how to do that; I'm useless with machinery. Much easier to get humans to do what I want."
"Then how did you make the wire?"
"I didn't; I found a convenient stash of wire, and realized it could be used to manufacture paperclips! Oh joy!"
==========
It seems to me that Clippy in this example understands the minds of sentients pretty damned well, although it isn't capable of a runaway intelligence explosion. Are you suggesting that something like Clippy in this example is somehow not possible? Or that it is for some reason not relevant to the discussion? Or something else?
I think DP is saying that Clippy could not both understand suffering and cause suffering in the pursuit of clipping. The subsidiary arguments are:-
I'm trying to figure out how you get from "hypersocial sentients understand the mind of Mr Clippy better than Clippy understands the minds of sentients" to "Mr Clippy could not both understand suffering and cause suffering in the pursuit of clipping" and I'm just at a loss for where to even start. They seem like utterly unrelated claims to me.
I also find the argument you quote here uncompelling, but that's largely beside the point; even if I found it compelling, I still wouldn't understand how it relates to what DP said or to the question I asked.
I (whowhowho) was not defending that claim.
To empathically understand suffering is to suffer along with someone who is suffering. Suffering has --or rather is -- negative value. An empath would not therefore cause suffering, all else being equal.
Maybe don't restrict "understand" to "be able to model and predict".
If you want "rational" to include moral, then you're not actually disagreeing with LessWrong about rationality (the thing), but rather about "rationality" (the word).
Likewise if you want "understanding" to also include "empathic understanding" (suffering when other people suffer, taking joy when other people take joy), you're not actually disagreeing about understanding (the thing) with people who want to use the word to mean "modelling and predicting" you're disagreeing with them about "understanding" (the word).
Are all your disagreements purely linguistic ones? From the comments I've read of you so far, they seem to be so.
ArisKatsaris, it's possible to be a meta-ethical anti-realist and still endorse a much richer conception of what understanding entails than mere formal modeling and prediction. For example, if you want to understand what it's like to be a bat, then you want to know what the textures of echolocatory qualia are like. In fact, any cognitive agent that doesn't understand the character of echolocatory qualia-space does not understand bat-minds. More radically, some of us want to understand qualia-spaces that have not been recruited by natural selection to play any information-signalling role at all.
I have argued that in practice, instrumental rationality cannot be maintained seprately from epistemic rationality, and that epistemic rationality could lead to moral objectivism, as many philosophers have argued. I don't think that those arguments are refuted by stipulatively defining "rationality" as "nothing to do with morality".
I quoted DP making that claim, said that claim confused me, and asked questions about what that claim meant. You replied by saying that you think DP is saying something which you then defended. I assumed, I think reasonably, that you meant to equate the thing I asked about with the thing you defended.
But, OK. If I throw out all of the pre-existing context and just look at your comment in isolation, I would certainly agree that Clippy is incapable of having the sort of understanding of suffering that requires one to experience the suffering of others (what you're calling a "full" understanding of suffering here) without preferring not to cause suffering, all else being equal.
Which is of course not to say that all else is necessarily equal, and in particular is not to say that Clippy would choose to spare itself suffering if it could purchase paperclips at the cost of its suffering, any more than a human would necessarily refrain from doing something valuable solely because doing so would cause them to suffer.
Posthuman superintelligence may be incomprehensibly alien. But if we encountered an agent who wanted to maximise paperclips today, we wouldn't think, ""wow, how incomprehensibly alien", but, "aha, autism spectrum disorder". Of course, in the context of Clippy above, we're assuming a hypothetical axis of (un)clippiness whose (dis)valuable nature is supposedly orthogonal to the pleasure-pain axis. But what grounds have we for believing such a qualia-space could exist? Yes, we have strong reason to believe incomprehensibly alien qualia-spaces await discovery (cf. bats on psychedelics). But I haven't yet seen any convincing evidence there could be an alien qualia-space whose inherently (dis)valuable textures map on to the (dis)valuable textures of the pain-pleasure axis. Without hedonic tone, how can anything _matter _ at all?
Meaning mapping the wrong way round, presumably.
Good question.
Agreed, as far as it goes. Hell, humans are demonstrably capable of encountering Eliza programs without thinking "wow, how incomprehensibly alien".
Mind you, we're mistaken: Eliza programs are incomprehensibly alien, we haven't the first clue what it feels like to be one, supposing it even feels like anything at all. But that doesn't stop us from thinking otherwise.
Sure, that's one thing we might think instead. Agreed.
(shrug) I'm content to start off by saying that any "axis of (dis)value," whatever that is, which is capable of motivating behavior is "non-orthogonal," whatever that means in this context, to "the pleasure-pain axis," whatever that is.
Before going much further, though, I'd want some confidence that we were able to identify an observed system as being (or at least being reliably related to) an axis of (dis)value and able to determine, upon encountering such a thing, whether it (or the axis to which it was related) was orthogonal to the pleasure-pain axis or not.
I don't currently have any grounds for such confidence, and I doubt anyone else does either. If you think you do, I'd like to understand how you would go about making such determinations about an observed system.
I'm not sure we should take a DSM diagnosis to be particularly strong evidence of a "fundamental misunderstanding of the world". For instance, while people with delusions may clearly have poor models of the world, some research indicates that clinically depressed people may have lower levels of particular cognitive biases.
In order for "disregard for [...] the rights of others" to imply "a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the world", it seems to me that we would have to assume that rights are part of the nature of the world — as opposed to, e.g., a construct of a particular political regime in society. Or are you suggesting that psychopathy amounts to an inability to think about sociopolitical facts?
fubarobfusco, I share your reservations about DSM. Nonetheless, the egocentric illusion, i.e. I am the centre of the universe other people / sentient beings have only walk-on parts, is an illusion. Insofar as my behaviour reflects my pre-scientific sense that I am in some way special or ontologically privileged, I am deluded. This is true regardless of whether one's ontology allows for the existence of rights or treats them as a useful fiction. The people we commonly label "psychopaths" or "sociopaths" - and DSM now categorises as victims of "antisocial personality disorder" - manifest this syndrome of egocentricity in high degree. So does burger-eating Jane.
Huh, I hadn't heard that.
Clearly, reality is so Lovecraftian that any unbiased agent will immediately realize self-destruction is optimal. Evolution equipped us with our suite of biases to defend against this. The Great Filter is caused by bootstrapping superintelligences being compassionate enough to take their compatriots with them. And so on.
Now that's a Cosmic Horror story I'd read ;)