notsonewuser comments on Cynical About Cynicism - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 February 2009 12:49AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (27)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: notsonewuser 25 January 2014 01:47:57PM *  0 points [-]

What about people who adopt children from a foreign country, rather than having their own biological children? I personally know a couple who did that. (I plan on doing the same if I get married - maybe not from a foreign country, but definitely adopting.)

Comment author: memoridem 25 January 2014 11:07:34PM *  0 points [-]

Does it matter really? From my perspective Tim proposes an economical tool for thinking about a system's goals, but probably won't lead to much insight and will cause bias compared to more labor intensive methods.

I think this post could clear most of your confusion about the connection between your genes and your goals.

Comment author: notsonewuser 26 January 2014 01:27:44AM 0 points [-]

What do I seem confused about to you?

Comment author: memoridem 26 January 2014 06:51:49AM *  1 point [-]

People usually ask questions to clarify some confusion. I don't know what yours is, but thought the article might be helpful since it elucidates this subject. Have you read it?

Organisms obviously don't directly optimize their genetic fitness. Deep Blue obviously doesn't directly optimize winning chess. If you want to economically predict their actions however, finding something they seem to optimize works as a rough model. This is easy if you know the process that made them. It's the nature of a rough model you can poke holes to it by finding exceptions, but this doesn't make the model useless.

Tim might be making a stronger claim than this. If that's the case I probably don't agree with it.

Comment author: notsonewuser 26 January 2014 02:12:52PM 0 points [-]

OK, I'm in complete agreement with you.