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TimS comments on Why Politics are Important to Less Wrong... - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: OrphanWilde 21 February 2013 04:24PM

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Comment author: TimS 22 February 2013 02:47:09AM 2 points [-]

For reasons related to Hidden Complexity of Wishes, I don't think weak-FAI actually is likely to prevent "wireheading, UFAI, and nuclear winter." At best, it prohibits the most obvious implementations of those problems. And it is terribly unlikely to be helpful in creating strong-FAI.

And your original claim was that common human preferences already implement weak-FAI preferences. I think that the more likely reason why we haven;t had the disasters you reference is that for most of human history, we lacked the capacity to cause those problems. As actual society shows, hidden complexity of wishes make implementing social consensus hopeless, much less whatever smaller set of preferences is weak-FAI preferences.

Comment author: handoflixue 22 February 2013 07:37:00PM 1 point [-]

As actual society shows, hidden complexity of wishes make implementing social consensus hopeless

My basic point was that we shouldn't worry about politics, at least not yet, because politics is a wonderful example of all the hard questions in CEV, and we haven't even worked out the easy questions like how to prevent nuclear winter. My second point was that humans do seem to have a much clearer CEV when it comes to "prevent nuclear winter", even if it's still not unanimous.

Implicit in that should have been the idea that CEV is still ridiculously difficult. Just like intelligence, it's something humans seem to have and use despite being unable to program for it.

So, then, summarized, I'm saying that we should perhaps work out the easy problems first, before we go throwing ourselves against harder problems like politics.

Comment author: TimS 23 February 2013 03:11:01AM *  1 point [-]

There's not a clear dividing line between "easy" moral questions and hard moral questions. The Cold War, which massively increased the risk of nuclear winter, was a rational expression of Great Power relations between two powers.

Until we have mutually acceptable ways of resolving disputes when both parties are rationally protecting their interests, we can't actually solve the easy problems either.

Comment author: handoflixue 25 February 2013 07:25:25PM 0 points [-]

from you:

we can't actually solve the easy problems either.

and from me:

Implicit in that should have been the idea that CEV is still ridiculously difficult.

So, um, we agree, huzzah? :)