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TheOtherDave comments on Solomonoff Cartesianism - Less Wrong
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Wireheading and drug addiction are superficially similar, but there are significant and relevant differences. First, drugs can have a direct negative effects on your health in ways that don't have anything to do with addiction - so, even if the effects of drugs are temporarily pleasurable, the net effect of drugs on total lifetime pleasure can be negative. Second, drugs can be physically addictive, so even if you decide to stop using them, you could feel physically ill and even die from withdrawal. Third, for some drugs, the body gets used to a drug dosage and needs a greater dose to achieve the desired effect, which presumably wouldn't be the case for wireheading.
I want to wirehead. Why do you think I'm irrational or corrupted?
It can help to unpack these terms a little.
For example, I can understand how someone who values nothing other than their own pleasure (or who approximates this state well enough by valuing pleasure much much more than anything else) can rationally choose to wirehead. And if I recall our earlier conversation correctly, you consider what people value to be equivalent to what they like, and don't believe anyone likes anything other than they like their own pleasure.
Given all of that unpacking, and taking your self-description at face value, I can understand why you would choose to wirehead... indeed, I can understand why you would find it bewildering that anyone else wouldn't, and would likely conclude that people who say stuff like that are just signalling.
But the unpacking is critical, because I don't share your (claimed) values, so will reliably misunderstand assertions that depend implicitly on those values.
Or, at least, I reliably talk as though I didn't share them, so I will predictably respond to such assertions as though I'd misunderstood them.
Good analysis.
What I'm curious about is why Eli Sennesh thinks that a value system like my own is irrational or corrupted.
I don't think they're signaling, I think they genuinely don't want to wirehead, similarly to how everyone genuinely doesn't want to be tortured. I just think that the division between wanting and liking is one of the greatest flaws of human psychology, and when they differ, wanting should be beaten into agreeing with liking.
(nods) Well, I can't speak for Eli, but judging from what they've written I conclude that you and Eli don't even agree on what a hypothetical wireheader's values are. You would say that a wireheader's values are necessarily to wirehead, since they evidently like wireheading... if they didn't, they would stop. I suspect Eli would say that a wireheader's values aren't necessarily to wirehead, since they might not want to wirehead.
Right, I understand; we've had this discussion before. I disagree with you entirely, as I value some of the things I want. But discussing value differences rarely gets anywhere, so I'm happy to leave that there.