Motivation and intelligence don't have to be orthogonal; they just have to not be parallel.
Exactly. The orthogonality thesis is far stronger than what is needed. And that's important, because orthogonality looks quite simply false. Intelligence is fostered by specific motivations: curiosity, truth-seeking, a search for simple and elegant explanations, and so on. Of course you could redefine "motivation" so that these "don't count", and make orthogonality a tautology, but that doesn't seem productive.
In Tim Tyler's reply he quotes someone, I know not who, saying
Intelligence and final goals are orthogonal axes along which possible agents can freely vary. In other words, more or less any level of intelligence could in principle be combined with more or less any final goal.
But the "other words" could be interpreted to state a new thesis. It is a weaker and more general hypothesis that is actually relevant to FAI. If we read "any final goal" as indicating perhaps one of many goals, then an intelligent agent can have multiple final goals. And although the goals that are partly constitutive of intelligence must be among its goals, it can combine these with any others. Furthermore, the intelligence-related goals need not even be final ("terminal value") goals.
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.