RobbBB comments on The genie knows, but doesn't care - Less Wrong

54 Post author: RobbBB 06 September 2013 06:42AM

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Comment author: RobbBB 10 September 2013 02:36:14AM *  0 points [-]

Actually I do define intelligence as ability to hit a narrow outcome target relative to your own goals

Hmm. But this just sounds like optimization power to me. You've defined intelligence in the past as "efficient cross-domain optimization". The "cross-domain" part I've taken to mean that you're able to hit narrow targets in general, not just ones you happen to like. So you can become more intelligent by being better at hitting targets you hate, or by being better at hitting targets you like.

The former are harder to test, but something you'd hate doing now could become instrumentally useful to know how to do later. And your intelligence level doesn't change when the circumstance shifts which part of your skillset is instrumentally useful. For that matter, I'm missing why it's useful to think that your intelligence level could drastically shift if your abilities remained constant but your terminal values were shifted. (E.g., if you became pickier.)

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 September 2013 03:14:50AM 2 points [-]

No, "cross-domain" means that I can optimize across instrumental domains. Like, I can figure out how to go through water, air, or space if that's the fastest way to my destination, I am not limited to land like a ground sloth.

Measured intelligence shouldn't shift if you become pickier - if you could previously hit a point such that only 1/1000th of the space was more preferred than it, we'd still expect you to hit around that narrow a volume of the space given your intelligence even if you claimed afterward that a point like that only corresponded to 0.25 utility on your 0-1 scale instead of 0.75 utility due to being pickier ([expected] utilities sloping more sharply downward with increasing distance from the optimum).