= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
itaibn0 comments on No Universally Compelling Arguments in Math or Science - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (227)
...And that way you turn the problem of making an AI that won't kill you into one of making a society of AIs that won't kill you.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I am not multiplying by N the problem of solving and hardwiring friendliness. I am letting them sort it our for themselves. Like an evolutionary algorithm.
Well, how are you going to force them into a society in the first place? Remember, each individual AI is presumed to be intelligent enough to escape any attempt to sandbox it. This society you intend to create is a sandbox.
(It's worth mentioning now that I don't actually believe that UFAI is a serious threat. I do believe you are making very poor arguments against that claim that merit counter-arguments.)
I am assuming they are seeds, not superintelligences
If Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters?
It requires a population that's capable cumulatively, it doesn't require that each member of the population be capable.
It's like arguing a command economy versus a free economy and saying that if the dictator in the command economy doesn't know how to run an economy, how can each consumer in a free economy know how to run the economy? They don't, individually, but as a group, the economy they produce is better than the one with the dictatorship.
Democracy has nothing to do with capable populations. It definitely has nothing to do with the median voter being smarter than the average politician. It's just about giving the population some degree of threat to hold over politicians.
"Smarter" and "capable" aren't the same thing. Especially if "more capable" is interpreted to be about practicalities: what we mean by "more capable" of doing X is that the population, given a chance is more likely to do X than politicians are. There are several cases where the population is more capable in this sense. For instance, the population is more capable of coming up with decisions that don't preferentially benefit politicians.
Furthermore, the median voter being smarter and the voters being cumulatively smarter aren't the same thing either. It may be that an average individual voter is stupider than an average individual politician, but when accumulating votes the errors cancel out in such a manner that the voters cumulatively come up with decisions that are as good as the decisions that a smarter person would make.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the "real" point of democracy is something entirely aside from the rhetoric used to support it ... but you of all people should know that averaging the estimates of how many beans are in the jar does better than any individual guess.
Systems with humans as components can, under the right conditions, do better than those humans could do alone; several insultingly trivial examples spring to mind as soon as it's phrased that way.
Is democracy such a system? Eh.
Democracy requires capable voters in the same way capitalism requires altruistic merchants.
In other words, not at all.
The grandparent is wrong, but I don't think this is quite right either. Democracy roughly tracks the capability (at the very least in the domain of delegation) and preference of the median voter, but in a capitalistic economy you don't have to buy services from the median firm. You can choose to only purchase from the best firm or no firm at all if none offer favorable terms.
In the equilibrium, the average consumer buys from the average firm. Otherwise it doesn't stay average for long.
However the core of the issue is that democracy is a mechanism, it's not guaranteed to produce optimal or even good results. Having "bad" voters will not prevent the mechanism of democracy from functioning, it just might lead to "bad" results.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." -- H.L.Mencken.
The median consumer of a good purchases from (somewhere around) the median firm selling a good. That doesn't necessarily aggregate, and it certainly doesn't weigh all consumers or firms equally. The consumers who buy the most of a good tend to have different preferences and research opportunities than average consumers, for example.
You could get similar results in a democracy, but most democracies don't really encourage it : most places emphasize voting regardless of knowledge of a topic, and some jurisdictions mandate it.
Could you clarify? Are you saying that for democracy to exist it doesn't require capable voters, or that for democracy to work well that it doesn't?
In the classic free-market argument, merchants don't have to be altruistic to accomplish the general good, because the way to advance their private interest is to sell goods that other people want. But that doesn't generalize to democracy, since there isn't trading involved in democratic voting.
See here
However there is the question of what "working well" means, given that humans are not rational and satisfying expressed desires might or might not fall under the "working well" label.
Ah, I see. You're just saying that democracy doesn't stop happening just because voters have preferences I don't approve of. :)
Actually, I'm making a stronger claim -- voters can screw themselves up in pretty serious fashion and it's still will be full-blown democracy in action.