IlyaShpitser comments on Decision Theory FAQ - Less Wrong

52 Post author: lukeprog 28 February 2013 02:15PM

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Comment author: IlyaShpitser 18 March 2013 01:17:49PM * 3 points [-]

I don't follow you. What preferences I include is my business, not yours. You don't get to pass judgement on what is rational, rationality is just "accounting." We simply consult the math and check if the number is maximized. At most you can pass judgement on what is moral, but that is a complicated story.

Comment author: davidpearce 18 March 2013 01:38:39PM 0 points [-]

IlyaShpitser, you might perhaps briefly want to glance through the above discussion for some context [But don't feel obliged; life is short!] The nature of rationality is a controversial topic in the philosophy of science (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions). Let's just say if either epistemic or instrumental rationality were purely a question of maths, then the route to knowledge would be unimaginably easier.

Comment author: Desrtopa 18 March 2013 10:56:11PM 1 point [-]

Not necessarily if the math is really difficult. There are, after all, plenty of mathematical problems which have never been solved.

Comment author: davidpearce 22 March 2013 05:45:44PM 1 point [-]

True Desrtopa. But just as doing mathematics is harder when mathematicians can't agree on what constitutes a valid proof (cf. constructivists versus nonconstructivists), likewise formalising a normative account of ideal rational agency is harder where disagreement exists over the criteria of rationality.

Comment author: TobyBartels 14 October 2013 03:02:09AM 0 points [-]

True enough, but in this case the math is not difficult. It's only the application that people are arguing about.

Comment author: whowhowho 18 March 2013 01:59:23PM -2 points [-]

You are not going to ''do'' rationality unless you have a preference for it. And to have a preference for it is to have a preference for other things, like objectivity.

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 19 March 2013 01:12:05AM * 2 points [-]

Look, I am not sure exactly what you are saying here, but I think you might be saying that you can't have Clippy. Clippy worries less about assigning weight to first and third person facts, and more about the fact that various atom configurations aren't yet paperclips. I think Clippy is certainly logically possible. Is Clippy irrational? He's optimizing what he cares about..

I think maybe there is some sort of weird "rationality virtue ethics" hiding in this series of responses.

Comment author: whowhowho comment score below threshold [+] (9 children)

Comment author: Creutzer 19 March 2013 12:10:42PM * 3 points [-]

To be rational, Clippy has to care about rationality.

No. He just has to care about what he's trying to optimize for.

To care about rationality is to care about objectivity.

Taboo "objectivity". (I suspect you have a weird folk notion of objectivity that doesn't actually make much sense.)

It's Kantian rationality-based deontological ethics, and it's not weird. Everyone who has done moal philosophy 01 has heard of it.

Yes, but it's still weird. Also, no-one who has done (only) moral philosophy 101 has understood it at all; which I think is kind of telling.

Comment author: whowhowho comment score below threshold [+] (7 children)

Comment author: Creutzer 19 March 2013 12:55:37PM 6 points [-]

Clippy can care about rationality in itself, or it can care about rationality as a means to clipping, but it has to care about rationality to be optimal.

Well, if you want to put it that way, maybe it does no harm. The crucial thing is just that optimizing for rationality as an instrumental value with respect to terminal goal X just is optimizing for X.

I mean "not subjectivity". Not thinking something is true just because you do or or want to believe it. Basing beliefs on evidence. What did you mean?

I don't have to mean anything by it, I don't use the words "subjectivity" or "objectivity". But if basing beliefs on evidence is what you mean by being objective, everybody here will of course agree that it's important to be objective.

So your central claim translates to "In view of the evidence available to Clippy, there is nothing special about Clippy or clips". That's just plain false. Clippy is special because it is it (the mind doing the evaluation of the evidence), and all other entities are not it. More importantly, clips are special because it desires that there be plenty of them while it doesn't care about anything else.

Clippy's caring about clips does not mean that it wants clips to be special, or wants to believe that they are special. Its caring about clips is a brute fact. It also doesn't mind caring about clips; in fact, it wants to care about clips. So even if you deny that Clippy is special because it is at the center of its own first-person perspective, the question of specialness is actually completely irrelevant.

In what way?

By being very incomprehensible... I may well be mistaken about that, but I got the impression that even contemporary academic philosophers largely think that the argument from the Groundwork just doesn't make sense.

Comment author: whowhowho comment score below threshold [+] (4 children)

Comment author: Creutzer 22 March 2013 12:27:31PM * 1 point [-]

I have a feeling that you're overstretching this notion of objectivity. It doesn't matter, though. Specialness doesn't enter into it. What is specialness, anyway? Clippy doesn't want to do special things, or to fulfill special beings' preferences. Clippy wants there to be as many paper clips as possible.

Says who? First you say that Clippy' Clipping-drive is a brute fact, then you say it is a desire it wants to have, that is has higher-order ramifications.

It does. Clippy's stopping to care about paper clips is arguably not conducive there being more paperclips, so from Clippy's caring about paper clips, it follows that Clippy doesn't want to be altered so that it doesn't care about paper clips anymore.

Kantian ethics includes post-Kant Kant-style ethics, Rawls, Habermas, etc. Perhaps they felt they could improve on his arguments.

Yes, but those people don't try to make such weird arguments as you find in the Groundwork, where Kant essentially tries to get morality out of thin air.

Comment author: whowhowho 22 March 2013 12:38:21PM -2 points [-]

What is specialness, anyway?

I think that breaks down into what is subjective specialness, and what is objective specialness.

Clippy wants there to be as many paper clips as possible.

Which is to implicitly treat them as special or valuable in some way.

Clippy's stopping to care about paper clips is arguably not conducive there being more paperclips, so from Clippy's caring about paper clips, it follows that Clippy doesn't want to be altered so that it doesn't care about paper clips anymore.

Which leaves Clippy in a quandary. Clippy can't predict which self modifications might lead to Clippy ceasing to care about clips, so if Clippy takes a conservative approach and never self-modifies, Clippy remains inefficient and no threat to anyone.

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IlyaShpitser comments on Decision Theory FAQ - Less Wrong

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