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Mitchell_Porter comments on Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers - Less Wrong Discussion

62 Post author: Louie 09 January 2013 02:33PM

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Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 09 January 2013 03:48:32PM *  11 points [-]

Friendliness researchers also need to study what human values actually are and how they are implemented in the brain.

There is apparently a pervasive assumption (not quite spelled out) that a general theory of reflective ethical idealization will be found, and also a general method of inferring the state-machine structure of human cognition, and then Friendliness will be obtained by applying the latter method to human cognitive and neuroscientific data, and then using the general theory to extrapolate a human-relative ideal decision theory from the relevant aspects of the inferred state machine.

I think this is somewhat utopian, and the efficient path forward will involve close engagement with the details of moral cognition (and other forms of decision-making cognition) as ascertained by human psychologists and neuroscientists. The fallible, evolving "first draft" of human state-machine architecture that they produce should offer profound guidance for anyone trying to devise rigorous computational-epistemic methods for going from raw neuro-cognitive data, to state-machine model of the generic human brain, to idealized value system suitable for implementing friendly AI. (For that matter, the whole process also needs to consider the environmental, social, and cultural embedding of human cognition - the brains whose volitions we want to extrapolate are human brains that grow up in humane supportive societies, not feral wolf-child Robinson-Crusoe brains that never learn language or socialization.)

So the ideal curriculum needs to contain an element, not just of formal decision theory, but of the empirical study of human decision-making. But I'm not sure where that is best covered.

Comment author: Louie 09 January 2013 04:21:22PM 11 points [-]

But I'm not sure where that is best covered.

Yeah, universities don't reliably teach a lot of things that I'd want people to learn to be Friendliness researchers. Heuristics and Biases is about the closest most universities get to the kind of course you recommend... and most barely have a course on even that.

I'd obviously be recommending lots of Philosophy and Psychology courses as well if most of those courses weren't so horribly wrong. I looked through the course handbooks and scoured them for courses I could recommend in this area that wouldn't steer people too wrong. As Luke has mentioned (partially from being part of this search with me), you can still profitably take a minority of philosophy courses at CMU without destroying your mind, a few at MIT, and maybe two or three at Oxford. And there are no respectable, mainstream textbooks to recommend yet.

Believe me, Luke and I are sad beyond words every day of our lives that we have to continue recommending people read a blog to learn philosophy and a ton of other things that colleges don't know how to teach yet. We don't particularly enjoy looking crazy to everyone outside of the LW bubble.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 10 January 2013 01:13:16AM *  18 points [-]

Believe me, Luke and I are sad beyond words every day of our lives that we have to continue recommending people read a blog to learn philosophy and a ton of other things that colleges don't know how to teach yet. We don't particularly enjoy looking crazy to everyone outside of the LW bubble.

This doesn't look as bad as it looks like it looks. Among younger mathematicians, I think it's reasonably well-known that the mathematical blogosphere is of surprisingly high quality and contains many insights that are not easily found in books (see, for example, Fields medalist Terence Tao's blog). So I would expect that younger mathematicians would not care so much about the difference between a good blog recommendation and a good book recommendation. I, for one, have been learning math from blog posts for years, but I might be an outlier in this regard.

Comment author: Halfwitz 28 July 2013 06:41:19PM *  0 points [-]

Believe me, Luke and I are sad beyond words every day of our lives that we have to continue recommending people read a blog to learn philosophy and a ton of other things that colleges don't know how to teach yet. We don't particularly enjoy looking crazy to everyone outside of the LW bubble.

One hack for this would be to roll the blogposts into an ebook. A small change in title and presentation can make a big difference in terms of perception.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 28 July 2013 06:51:47PM *  1 point [-]

Good idea, and people at MIRI already thought of it.

Comment author: ESRogs 09 January 2013 10:19:12PM 5 points [-]

Please consider using paragraphs. :)