Kaj_Sotala comments on Three Approaches to "Friendliness" - Less Wrong
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Coincidentally, I ended up reading Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations today, and noticed that it makes a number of points that could be interpreted in a similar light: in that humans do not really have a "domain-general rationality", and that instead we have specialized learning and reasoning mechanisms, each of which are carrying out a specific evolutionary purpose and which are specialized for extracting information that's valuable in light of the evolutionary pressures that (used to) prevail. In other words, each of them carries out inferences that are designed to further some specific evolutionary value that helped contribute to our inclusive fitness.
The paper doesn't spell out the obvious implication, since that isn't its topic, but it seems pretty clear to me: since our various learning and reasoning systems are based on furthering specific values, our philosophy has also been generated as a combination of such various value-laden systems, and we can't expect an AI reasoner to develop a philosophy that we'd approve of unless its reasoning mechanisms also embody the same values.
That said, it does suggest a possible avenue of attack on the metaphilosophy issue... figure out exactly what various learning mechanisms we have and which evolutionary purposes they had, and then use that data to construct learning mechanisms that carry out similar inferences as humans do.
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