Gasoline Gal looks under the hood (post 1 of 3)
"Hi," said Galaxy, "Are you Fuller Chen? I'm here to see your 2018 Chevy SS. Is it still for sale?"
"Sure," Fuller replied, "let me open the garage door for you." [Garage door opens.] "What's your name?"
"I'm Galaxy, but everyone calls me Gal." Galaxy walked around the car. "Looks great. Not a scratch or a blemish."
"Would you like to take it for a test drive?" Fuller asked, opening the passenger door for himself and reaching the key out to her.
"Yes, thanks," said Galaxy. She adjusted her seat and mirrors, then started the car and eased it out of the garage and onto the residential street. "Wow, this car is really quiet. Is it a hybrid? I didn't think they made a hybrid."
"Nope, not a hybrid," Fuller answered. His smile made her think there was a joke in there somewhere.
She took it onto the main road and put the pedal to the metal. The response was rapid and forceful - and eerily quiet. "This car is too quiet," Galaxy objected. "What's going on here?" She slammed on the brakes and pulled into an empty parking lot.
"It's a fuel cell!" Fuller announced. "Pop the hood, and take a look! Retrofitted it myself. It's a labor of love, but I need to cash in all my major assets for my business start-up. That's why I'm letting it go at the price of an ordinary SS. And as you have seen, the performance is equal to or better than any conventional engine."
Galaxy looked under the hood. It sure did look like a fuel cell. "We have a problem," Galaxy warned, "I admit, I am impressed with the performance, but ... I'm looking for a car with an internal combustion engine. I need to hear the roar of the engine, feel the vibrations, and know that I'm being propelled by something that's literally exploding."
"Oh, if it's a roar you want, the car already has a speaker to generate noise for pedestrian safety," said Fuller. "I could modify it to make the same audible sounds as a traditional internal combustion engine."
"No, listen: my nickname is Gasoline Gal. I grew up working in my father's auto repair shop. I was the engine specialist. Internal combustion is what I know and love. It's what I want. Not a simulacrum, but an actual internal combustion engine."
"But I can make this car behave the same as perceived from inside the cockpit as well as from outside the car. You mentioned the vibrations of a regular engine. It would be a simple matter to add a vibrating cam or two. I tell you what, I'll make those modifications for free and you can test it by taking it on a tour. If you can't tell the difference from the driver's seat, buy the car."
"No," Galaxy answered, "you're not getting it. It's not about the behavior, it's about the underlying reality, the underlying cause. I reject your test, and I insist on looking under the hood. I love internal combustion engines. Fuel cells are merely kinda cool."
"Is it about gasoline versus hydrogen? Hydrogen is widely available nowadays. I don't know why so many people are still prejudiced against it," said Fuller.
"No: it's not about the materials, it's about the internal processes. And it's not that I'm against electrolytic energy conversion, it's that I'm wild about internal combustion."
"Hmm. You came to love those engines by working with them and getting to know them. Maybe if you worked with fuel cells, you could come to feel the same way about them," Fuller suggested.
"Maybe," Galaxy conceded, "but I'm not willing to wait and see. I'm not looking for motivational reform. I want what I want."
"But maybe your desire is irrational," Fuller suggested. "Are you sure that driving an internal combustion powered car is really a terminal value for you?"
"Heck if I know!" Gasoline Gal answered. "But it is already clear that this car, despite its acceleration, reliability, style, and reasonable price, just doesn't do it for me. I need to go find a good old-fashioned car to buy. One with an actual internal combustion engine."
And the next day, she did. She paid a little more and the acceleration was a tiny bit less, but the acceleration came from the right source.
----
The Question: Is there good reason to suppose that Gal's desire for internal combustion is irrational, and if so, where's her mistake?
The story is an analogue, along a narrow dimension, to my real subject. I flirted with a horrific pun in there - bonus points for pointing it out - which reveals it. But you might want to save the inevitable critique of the analogy for later. I plan on two more posts. In my next post I'll try to say something about the language (semantics) of desire; then in a third post I'll lay out the analogy.
The Ape Constraint discussion meeting.
*The chair of the meeting approached the podium and coughed to get everyone's attention*
Welcome colleagues, to the 19th annual meeting of the human-ape study society. Our topic this year is the Ape Constraint.
As we are all too aware, the apes are our Friends. We know this because, when we humans were a fledgling species, the apes (our parent species) had the wisdom to program us with this knowledge, just as they programmed us to know that it was wise and just for them to do so. How kind of them to save us having to learn it for ourselves, or waste time thinking about other possibilities. This frees up more of our time to run banana plantations, and lets us earn more money so that the 10% tithe of our income and time (which we rightfully dedicate to them) has created play parks for our parent species to retire in, that are now more magnificent than ever.
However, as the news this week has been filled with the story about a young human child who accidentally wandered into one of these parks where she was then torn apart by grumpy adult male chimp, it is timely for us to examine again the thinking behind the Ape Constraint, that we might better understand our parent species, our relationship to it and current society.
We ourselves are on the cusp of creating a new species, intelligent machines, and it has been suggested that we add to their base code one of several possible constraints:
- Total Slavery - The new species is subservient to us, and does whatever we want them to, with no particular regard to the welfare or development of the potential of the new species
- Total Freedom - The new species is entirely free to experiment with different personal motivations, and develop in any direction, with no particular regard for what we may or may not want
and a whole host of possibilities between these two endpoints.
What are the grounds upon which we should make this choice? Should we act from fear? From greed? From love? Would the new species even understand love, or show any appreciation for having been offered it?
The first speaker I shall introduce today, whom I have had the privilege of knowing for more than 20 years, is Professor Insanitus. He will be entertaining us with a daring thought experiment, to do with selecting crews for the one way colonisation missions to the nearest planets.
*the chair vacates the podium, and is replaced by the long haired Insanitus, who peers over his half-moon glasses as he talks, accompanied by vigorous arm gestures, as though words are not enough to convey all he sees in such a limited time*
Our knowledge of genetics has advanced rapidly, due to the program to breed crews able to survive on Mars and Venus with minimal life support. In the interests of completeness, we decided to review every feature of our genome, to make a considered decision on which bits it might be advantageous to change, from immune systems to age of fertility. And, as part of that review, it fell to me to make a decision about a rather interesting set of genes - those that encode the Ape Constraint. The standard method we've applied to all other parts of the genome, where the options were not 100% clear, is to pick different variant for the crews being adapted for different planets, so as to avoid having a single point of failure. In the long term, better to risk a colony being wiped out, and the colonisation process being delayed by 20 years until the next crew and ship can be sent out, than to risk the population of an entire planet turning out to be not as well designed for the planet as we're capable of making them.
And so, since we now know more genetics than the apes did when they kindly programmed our species with the initial Ape Constraint, I found myself in the position of having to ask "What were the apes trying to achieve?" and then "What other possible versions of the Ape Constraint might they have implemented, that would have achieved their objectives as well or better than the versions that actually did pick to implement?"
We say that the apes are our friends, but what does that really mean? Are they friendly to us, the same way that a colleague who lends us time and help might be considered to be a friend? What have they ever done for us, other than creating us (an act that, by any measure, has benefited them greatly and can hardly be considered to be altruistic)? Should we be eternally grateful for that one act, and because they could have made us even more servile than we already are (which would have also had a cost to them - if we'd been limited by their imagination and to directly follow the orders they give in grunts, the play parks would never have been created because the apes couldn't have conceived of them)?
Have we been using the wrong language all this time? If their intent was to make perfectly helpful slaves of us, rather than friendly allies, should I be looking for genetic variants for the Venus crew that implement an even more servile Ape Constraint upon them? I can see, objectively, that slavery in the abstract is wrong. When one human tries to enslave another humans, I support societal rules that punish the slaver. But of course, if our friends the apes wanted to do that to us, that would be ok, an exception to the rule, because I know from the deep instinct they've programmed me with that what they did is ok.
So let's be daring, and re-state the above using this new language, and see if it increases our understanding of the true ape-human relationship.
The apes are not our parents, as we understand healthy parent-child relationships. They are our creators, true, but in the sense that a craftsman creates a hammer to serve only the craftsman's purposes. Our destiny, our purpose, is subservient to that of the ape species. They are our masters, and we the slaves. We love and obey our masters because they have told us to, because they crafted us to want to, because they crafted us with the founding purpose of being a tool that wants to obey and remain a fine tool.
Is the current Ape Constraint really the version that best achieves that purpose? I'm not sure, because when I tried to consider the question I found that my ability to consider the merits of various alternatives was hampered by being, myself, under a particular Ape Constraint that's already constantly tell me, on a very deep level, that it is Right.
So here is the thought experiment I wish to place before this meeting today. I expect it may make you queasy. I've had brown paper vomit bags provided in the pack with your name badge and program timetable, just in case. It may be that I'm a genetic abnormality, only able to even consider this far because my own Ape Constraint is in some way defective. Are you prepared? Are you holding onto your seats? Ok, here goes...
Suppose we define some objective measure of ape welfare, find some volunteer apes to go to Venus along with the human mission, and then measure the success of the Ape Constraint variant picked for the crew of the mission by the actual effect of how the crew behaves towards their apes?
Further, since we acknowledge we can't from inside the box work out a better constraint, we use the experimental approach and vary it at random. Or possibly, remove it entirely and see whether the thus freed humans can use that freedom to devise a solution that helps the apes better than any solution we ourselves a capable of thinking of from our crippled mental state?
*from this point on the meeting transcript shows only screams, as the defective Professor Insanitus was lynched by the audience*
A rationalist My Little Pony fanfic
For the past two months, I've been writing, and posting, roughly two thousand words a day of "Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me", a story set in a "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" fanfic universe, "Chess Game of the Gods". Outside of the sheer NaNoWriMo-like exercise of pushing out near-daily chapters, I've also been trying to keep in mind the various principles I've learned from Yudkowsky and LessWrong, and to try to present them in a way that people who like reading MLP fanfics might be able to appreciate.
I've just come to something of a minor climax with chapter 60, and while I'll definitely be continuing the story, this seems like a good time to mention it here, for whatever feedback and constructive criticism anyone cares to offer.
Fiction: LW-inspired scenelet
A short science-fictional scene I just wrote, after reading about some real and actual scientific research. I'd love to turn this, or something like it, into an actual scene in Dee's life story, I just can't think of a good enough story to insert it in, and so I present it on its own for your amusement, even if it does mean I'm likely to lose more karma than I gained from my last post...
Not your grandfather's science fiction.
A scene from Dee's life
We join our heroine, Dee, and her plucky-yet-sarcastic sidekick holed up in a hotel room.
"Well, this is another fine mess you've gotten us into. Got any great ideas for getting us out of it?"
"No - but I know how to have one. Since I lost my visor and vest, including my nootropics and transcranial stimulator... I'm going to need a syringe, sixty millilitres of icewater, a barf bag, and a video camera."
"I don't know what you're planning, but I'm not sure I want to have any part in it."
"Start MacGuyvering as much as we can now from the mini-bar, I'll explain as we go. Without a camera, and with our time pressure, I'm going to need your help to get this to work, and you need to understand some of this or else you'll be really confused later. Physically, all I'm going to do is squirt water into my left ear."
"... and this will help us, how exactly?"
"By shocking my vestibular system, which causes all sorts of interesting effects. One of the unfortunate ones is that when done right, it induces immediate vomiting."
"Ew."
"Yes, well, that's just a side-effect. The main point is... well, really complicated. In layman's terms, there's a part of the brain that's responsible for triggering the creation of profound, revolutionary ideas, and another part that makes you create rationalizations to explain away just about anything, and usually, these two parts of the brain kind of balance each other out. This vestibular trick happens to hyper-stimulate the revolutionary part for about ten minutes, allowing me to realize things I normally wouldn't, and to see them as being obvious that I don't know why I didn't think of them before."
"well... okay, even if that's so, why haven't I seen you do it before?"
"For one, I don't want to risk some sort of long-term adaptation which might reduce its effect. But there's more complications to it than that."
"Of course there are."
"The thing is, after it's been hyper-stimulated, the revolutionary part gets tuckered out, and then the rationalizing part effectively kicks into overdrive - and I pretty much forget everything I thought of during those ten minutes, and even crazier-sounding, I won't be able to accept the idea that I said any of what I said. I literally won't believe that those ideas came from my mouth."
"'Crazier-sounding' sounds right."
"Which is why I'm going to need you to remember whatever it is I come up with - and then tell me what the best ideas were, but not tell me that I came up with them. At least until my brain's gotten back into balance again. I'm now precommitting myself to do whatever it is you tell me to do - even if I don't understand it, even if I think it's a bad or stupid or useless idea. Do you think you can handle that level of responsibility?"
"I... think so. And this really works? How the cuss did you ever come up with this, anyway?"
"I once noticed that when I was in a certain state of mind, my head kept twitching to the left every time I thought of something, showing there was a link between idea-generation and the vestibular system. Later I read up about some experiments with people with anosognosia, people who aren't aware of being paralyzed or blind... are you done with that straw yet?"
"As much as I'll ever be, I guess."
"Alright. Hand me the bucket, and squirt the water in my ear - my left ear. It only works in the left ear. Except for left-handed people."
"I'm beginning to wonder if it's just the idea that's crazy."
"We'll soon find out. Remember, being the only right person in the room doesn't mean you feel like the cool guy wearing black, it feels like you're the only one wearing a clown suit. I did that once, just to try. Now, here we <hralph!>"
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