= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Probably, this link: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/obama-envisions-ai-new-apollo-program/
I don't see a link. Was it lost like in my link post on a different subject? I still don't know how to post links correctly.
So "morals" is used to mean the same as "values" or "goals" or "preferences". It's not how I'm used to encountering the word, and it's confusing in comparison to how it's used in other contexts. Humans have separate moral and a-moral desires (and beliefs, emotions, judgments, etc) and when discussing human behavior, as opposed to idealized or artificial behavior, the distinction is useful.
Of course every field or community is allowed to redefine existing terminology, and many do. But now, whenever I encounter the word "moral", I'll have to remind myself I may be misunderstanding the intended meaning (in either direction).
Two different actions don’t produce exactly the same utility, but even if they did it wouldn’t be any problem. To say that you may chose any one of two actions when it doesn’t matter which one you chose since they have the same value, isn’t to give “no guidance”. Consequentialists want to maximize the intrinsic value, and both these actions do just that.
Of course hedonistic utilitarianism doesn’t require completeness, which, by the way, isn’t one of its tenets either. But since it is complete, which of course is better than being incomplete, it’s normal for hedonistic utilitarianists to hold the metaethical view that a proper moral theory should answer all of the question: “Which actions ought to be performed?” What could be so good with answering it incompletely?
We've already got a number of problems with MW -- see Dowker and Kent's paper.
The question is whether there is anything better. To go back to my original question, EY appears not to have heard of QBism, RQM, and other interpretations that aren't mentioned in The Fabric of Reality.
These are difficult question because we are speculating about future mathematics / physics.
First of all, there's the question of how much of the quantum framework will survive the unification with gravity. Up until now, all theories that worked inside it have failed; worse, they have introduced black-hole paradoxes: most notably, thunderbolts and the firewall problem. I'm totally in the dark if a future unification will require a modification of the fundamental mathematical structure of QM. Say, if ER = EPR, and entanglement can be explained with a modified geometry of space-time, does it mean that superposition is also a geometrical phoenomenon that doesn't require multiple worlds? I don't really know.
But more on the point, I think (hope?) that future explorations of the quantum framework will yield an expanded landscape, where interpretations will be seen as the surface phoenomenon of something deeper: for example, something akin to what happens in classical mechanics with the Hamiltonian / Lagrangian formulations.
On a side note, I've read only the Wikipedia article on QBism and my impression was that it had an epistemological leaning, not ontological: if you use only SIC-POVMs, you can explain all quantum quirks with the epistemology of probability distributions. I might be very wrong, though.
it seems indisputable to me
This is about as weak as an argument can possibly get.
<hypothetical case study that did not actually happen>
Again this is not evidence.
this study
Does not demonstrate irrational discrimination. They did not consider the possibility that a person's race actually gives you useful information about them.
Consider the following example:
There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.... After all we have been through. Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating.
Remarks at a meeting of Operation PUSH in Chicago (27 November 1993). Quoted in "Crime: New Frontier - Jesse Jackson Calls It Top Civil-Rights Issue" by Mary A. Johnson, 29 November 1993, Chicago Sun-Times (ellipsis in original). Partially quoted in "In America; A Sea Change On Crime" by Bob Herbert, 12 December 1993, New York Times.
I have looked at the study before it is well known.
And if there are other factors. I'd love to hear some of your evidence for other factors.
IQ is known to be highly heritable and highly correlated with many measures of success. As are other psychological dimensions such as the Big 5. Source: any psychology textbook.
Perhaps you have heard the saying "rags to riches to rags in three generations". When I look at my family tree I see this happening many times.
Where I live a lot of the local whites are descended from prisoners who were slaves. They do not form an underclass in any way shape or form. In fact it is high status to have convict ancestry.
Or consider Jews, against whom there was massive discrimination until very recently. They have been very successful.
Citation required. What is strange about this is that when you go looking, you don't see good studies that track people through generations and show that this is in fact the case.
The idea that slavery/segregation/discrimination has created a very significant deficit for blacks seems beyond dispute in my view. The words "very significant" could be disputed based on how we defined them, but that's a technicality. I'm honestly shocked to hear this idea challenged...
I've cited this study.
It's stated that "African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed and they earn nearly 25 percent less when they are employed." The study itself shows significant discrimination based on race in the beginning stages of the hiring process.
Lumifer seemed to accept the basic premise, but was nonetheless skeptical and too uninterested to look into the study. I'd be interested to know what you think.
Regardless, it is evidence that employers discriminate against blacks. And employment is tied to income...and wealth...and opportunity. And that is passed on generation after generation.
This idea "slavery is the cause" seems not to be an actual active idea but only functions as a thought terminating cliche. It could have been slavery so it was.
Again, it seems indisputable to me that slavery has an effect. Segregation and discrimination, too. I honestly don't understand how it couldn't. The only question that is left is in regard to the significance of the effect. And if there are other factors. I'd love to hear some of your evidence for other factors.
And as for this...
It reminds me of religious apologists talking about the problem of evil...
I strongly disagree. People being enslaved based on race for hundreds of years, segregated for a hundred more, and then discriminated against until the present day, and that leading to some problems within that race has zero, and I mean zero, to do with the concocted, magical-causal "explanations" of religion.
How about this...
Man A is freed from slavery at 40 with no skills, no education, no family and no professional or network.
Also at 40, man B has a small fortune, an education, is skilled in a trade, has a large family, a good reputation, and a wide network of business and social contacts.
Assuming the offspring of each man—A1 and B1—has identical DNA, which offspring has the highest probability of graduating from an elite university?
Which—A1 or B1—will be more likely to have a successful career?
Which will pass on the largest inheritance to A2 and B2?
Why?
And what do you expect to change in subsequent generations?
(One thing that could change are laws eliminating discrimination...)
I'm saying slavery/segregation/discrimination has created a very significant deficit for blacks
Citation required. What is strange about this is that when you go looking, you don't see good studies that track people through generations and show that this is in fact the case.
This idea "slavery is the cause" seems not to be an actual active idea but only functions as a thought terminating cliche.
It could have been slavery so it was.
It reminds me of religious apologists talking about the problem of evil, and how it 'could' be caused by man's sin (causing human evil) and possibly by Satan's sin (causing natural evil), which is required if we are to have free will. There is zero, I mean zero, interest in exploring just how 'sin' causes all the various forms of evil. How does sin cause our flawed DNA which allows cancer? <crickets> Etc.
As an example of how such discrimination can be rational and indeed reasonable...
You have a resume. It provides some noisy data about someone. Including that person's race. Let's trim it down. You have an IQ test result and the person's race. Let's say that two candidates has the same IQ in the test, but one came from a group known to have a significantly lower IQ on average.
If we assume that an IQ test result has any measurement noise - and they do - then the Bayesian conclusion is the candidate from the group with higher average IQ is likely to actually have a higher IQ.
Now resumes constitute very noisy data. People often even lie in their resumes. There are large differences between groups in the US. The dispute is about the reasons for the differences not whether they exist.
A study would need to overcome these effects to demonstrate irrational discrimination. They would need to show that e.g. there was consistent out-performance for the group discriminated against post recruitment.
If it doesn't fundamentally change quantum mechanics as a theory, is the picture likely to turn out fundamentally different from MWI? Roger Penrose, a vocal MWI critic, seems to wholeheartedly agree that QM implies MWI; it's just that he thinks that this means the theory is wrong. David Deutsch, I believe, has said that he's not certain that quantum mechanics is correct; but any modification of the theory, according to him, is unlikely to do away with the parallel universes.
QBism, too, seems to me to essentially accept the MWI picture as the underlying ontology, but then says that we should only care about the worlds that we actually observe (Sean Carroll has presented criticism similar to this, and mentioned that it sounds more like therapy to him), although it could be that I've misunderstood something.
I don't see any ongoing segregation (though, interestingly enough, some Black movements nowadays are trying to revive it, in some places even successfully).
I've mentioned Jews upthread -- they were very consistently discriminated against until after the WW2. Did they have similar outcomes?
On the other hand you have SubSaharan Africa which is doing pretty badly by pretty much any criterion. That includes countries which were colonies only for a very very short period (such as Ethiopia, which is also mostly Christian and the former Emperor of which traced a direct lineage line to King Solomon and Queen of Sheba).
Do tell: What is the most important factor? Why?
Genetics, in particular IQ. Why? IQ is really really important.
Partly because of material wealth, partly because of availability of education and the opportunity to learn marketable skills, partly because of access to social and professional networks
It's not hard to find people whose ancestors 150 years ago were poor, uneducated, lacking skills and access to social networks... I think you're just describing an average peasant. And yet, there are different outcomes.
you discount the idea slavery, segregation and discrimination has had ill effects for African Americans in the U.S. up to the present day...Why is that?
As I mentioned in my post upthread, I agree it's a factor. I just don't think it's the sole factor or even the most important factor.
I agree with gjm that evil does not necessarily require coercion. Contemplate, say, instigating a lynching.
The reason EAs don't do any coercion is because they don't have any power. But I don't see anything in their line of reasoning which would stop them from coercing other people in case they do get some power. They are not libertarians.
Many people who delve into the deep parts of analytical philosophy will end up feeling at times like they can't justify anything, that definite knowledge is impossible to ascertain, and so forth. It's a classic trend. Hume is famous for being a "skeptic", although almost everyone seems to misunderstand what that means within the context of his philosophical system.
See here for a post I wrote which I could have called The Final Antidote to Skepticism.
I looked into some of the most obvious objections. Some have reasonable answers (why not just kill yourself?), some others are based on a (to me) crazy assumption: that the original state of the biosphere pre-humans somehow is more valuable than the collective experience of the human race.
To which I don't just disagree, but think it's a logic error, since values exist only in the mind of those who can compute it, whatever it is.
The author is far from alone in his view that both a complete rightness criterion and a consistent decision method must be required of all serious moral theories.
Among hedonistic utilitarians it's quite normal to demand both completeness, to include all (human) situations, and consistency, to avoid contradictions. The author simply describes what's normal among consequentialists, who, after all, are more or less the rational ones. ;-) There's one interesting exception though! The demand to include all situations, including the non-human ones, is radical, and quite hard a challenge for hedonistic utilitarians, who do have problems with the bloodthirsty predators of the jungle.
Worth noting that if I understand the mode of action of these proteins and have correctly read the tested dosages in the papers out thus far, a treatment would be more along the lines of the antibody immunotherapy infusions that people get for some types of cancer than a pill for a systemic effect, with localized versions like a nebulizer applied to things like a strong lung infection. And it's likely to cause a temporary inflammatory effect as lots of cells (including ones with no viral infection or latent viruses that everyone and I mean everyone has) blow up. You probably don't take this for a cold.
The author says a moral theory should:
- "Cover how one should act in all situations" (instead of dealing only with 'moral' ones)
- Contain no contradictions
- "Cover all situations in which somebody should perform an action, even if this “somebody” isn’t a human being"
In other words, a decision theory, complete with an algorithm (so you can actually use it), and a full set of terminal goals. Not what anyone else means by "moral theory'.
For some context about when and what to change see Attempted Telekinesis.
"A woman is misclassified as a man, finds out and corrects it" is a more useful approximation [...] and is closer to the motivation of transpeople than the "choice to change" one.
I understand that some people don't model themselves as being sufficiently agentlike to admit that their major life choices were in fact choices; it's certainly politically convenient to claim to have an immutable innate identity that everyone needs to respect. But other people who do model themselves as agents---sometimes even genuinely dysphoric people who might partially understand a little bit of what you're going through!---might have an interest in defending social norms that let them describe their model of reality in non-contrived ways, even if that occasionally hurts some people's feelings. You can and should edit your body and social presentation if that's what you want to do. You cannot edit other people's models of reality, and people might push back if you try to shame them into doing so.
Sure corn isn't the optimal crop to do this with. What about water based plants or algae which have more efficient photosynthesis? Algae has very short generation times and could perhaps be bred to produce biofuel directly, instead of an inefficient indirect process of fermenting it.
If I recall correctly, you would only need a relatively small percent of Earth's surface to produce enough fuel for current use. And it could be some undesirable land in a desert. Tubes full of water and algae is a lot cheaper than solar panels and batteries.
I'm not sure I believe genetics are more important than other factors.
You'll have to be a bit more specific. "More important" for what and "other factors" from which set?
it's an extreme set of "nurture" circumstances that robbed a group of people of all opportunity for many generations, based on race.
What do you think are transmission mechanisms which would show how having, say, great-great-grandparents who were slaves affects you now?
You might find it interesting to compare them to East European Jews who 150 years ago certainly weren't slaves, but they were segregated and discriminated against, they faced limitations on what they could own, where could they live, and what could they do, plus once in a while a mob of angry peasants would come and burn down a village. They weren't rich either.
Do you think the somewhat worse conditions of the American blacks explain the gap in outcomes looking at the present day?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Can you restate it?
Why aren't you seeking to explain why White's get more likely to be killed by police than Asian's? Why do you think it's a question that people like Clinton don't address?
You mentioned "gender studies" a couple times in a negative light—Why? It doesn't have anything to do with this discussion.
Because it's difficult to have a conservation about the quality of the public debate without accounting for the cultural forces that are responsible for the public debate being the way it currently is.
where men and women need to quickly make highly consequential decisions under extreme stress—this obscured map may lead to irrational, "non-winning", decisions seems uncontroversial. Certainly nothing you've said has rebutted it.
Making winning decisions is about agency. Hillary Clinton could say that she wants that all police wear body camera's. If she can win a majority for that policy she can implement it.
On the other hand you can't pass a law that people shouldn't have implicit bias anymore. Speaking about it is useful if Hillary Clinton wants to engage in virtue signaling but not actually focus on getting policies changed.
If she wanted to do rational policy making she could say: "We should do controlled trials that try different policies in different area's to find out which policies actually help with changing the status quo."
For the record, I don't think every police shooting is racist. Not even close. And I think the left goes way too far trying to spin this.
In what kind of ontology do you believe if you think that a police shooting could be racist, even in principle? That there are some police shootings that are racists and other that aren't? If you want to use the word "racist" to be a property of events and not a property of people than it means something qualitatively different than what the term "implicit racism" is about.
This looks like your conceptualization of racism is the standard meaning of the word and has little to do with the academic term of "implicit racism".
They also don't ask the obvious questions such as whether the fact that more Whites get killed than Asians is also due to implicit bias. That a very straightforward question if you look at the data and want to use implicit bias as a cognitive tool for explaining the data of police killers.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Can you restate it?
Gender studies
You mentioned "gender studies" a couple times in a negative light—Why? It doesn't have anything to do with this discussion.
...
Generally, the idea that (a) we all have implicit biases based on how our brain works and our life experiences, (b) these biases may significantly obscure our map of the territory, and (c) in the special case of police—where men and women need to quickly make highly consequential decisions under extreme stress—this obscured map may lead to irrational, "non-winning", decisions seems uncontroversial. Certainly nothing you've said has rebutted it.
For the record, I don't think every police shooting is racist. Not even close. And I think the left goes way too far trying to spin this.
Egalitarianism - Someone high-status holding a belief must never be offered, in itself, as a reason to believe something. It’s OK to take track records into account, but the default response to naming an authority figure’s or local celebrity's beliefs as reason for someone else to believe something is for it to be perceived as an argument from authority. Therefore, the track record argument should be made very explicitly, and with great care. if at all.
I don't think the problem is about naming authority figure's. Developing trust in institutions is a useful social mechanism. We can't reason in detail about every belief we have.
Actually, Big Pharma would LOSE billions if it works. There are only a few anti-virals, and none of them work well, and most need to be used in combinations.
This is also not a blue sky hunt, he has a mechanism, and just needs to fine tune the hydrogenation or delivery method.
from Wiki "DRACO is selective for virus-infected cells. Differentiation between infected and healthy cells is made primarily via the length and type of RNA transcription helices present within the cell. Most viruses produce long dsRNA helices during transcription and replication. In contrast, uninfected mammalian cells generally produce dsRNA helices of fewer than 24 base pairs during transcription. Cell death is effected via one of the last steps in the apoptosis pathway"
The problem is that the reason that his project was popular with people on Kickstarter was likely that he created the perception that the chances that his project will result in a working drugs is much higher than it is in reality.
If it was a tax deduction if it failed, but allowed for a gain, then it might be a way to do projects that were popular with people, but not attractive to Big Pharma or VC.
Big Pharma can make billions from this project if it works. Big Pharma also has a lot more expertise in judges the likelihood that it works than random people on Kickstarter.
If you take research on a new way to do exercise that inherently can't be patented then there can be a high chance that the research will create a lot of value but there's no business model to turn that value into money for the inventor. That's not the case with DRACO. Big Pharma is in a good position to assess whether it's a worthwhile investment of resources and put money into the project if they think it's a worthwhile investment.
Following this for 40 years things definitely seem to have sped up. Problems that seemed intractable like the dog/cat problem are now passe.
I see a confluence of three things: more powerful hardware allows more powerful algorithms to run, and makes testing possible and once possible, much faster.
Researchers still don't have access to anywhere near the 10^15 flops that is roughly the human brain. Exciting times ahead.
Agreed. I'll add 2 things that support of your point, though.
First, the Milgram experiment seems to suggest that even seemingly antisocial impulses like stubbornness can be extremely valuable. Sticking to core values rather than conforming likely led more people to resist the Nazis.
Also, I didn't bring it up earlier because it undermines my point, but apparently sociopaths have smaller amygdalas than normal, while kidney donors have larger ones, and empathy is linked to that region of the brain. So, we probably could reduce or remove emotional empathy and/or cognitive empathy if we really wanted to. However, I'm not at all inclined to inflict brain damage on myself, even if it could somehow be targeted enough to not interfere with cognitive empathy or anything else.
So, more generally, even reversible modification worries me, and the idea of permanently changing our values scares the shit out of me. For humanity as a whole, although not necessarily small groups of individuals as a means to an end, I don't endorse most modifications. I would much rather we retain a desire we approve of but which the laws of physics prevent us from satisfying, than to remove that value and be fulfilled.
It is interesting to note that if we quietly pass away and 50 million years later intelligent lungfish build up a civilization, they would presumably have good evidence that we were here, and would have good reason to assume that civilizations arise about once every 50 million years on average. Our effect on the Earth has probably been great enough that they will not have significant evidence from previous periods to contradict this assumption. In the case of large scale planetary civilizations, only the first one is likely to be in a position to reliably notice a delay in the appearance of previous civilizations longer than the pause between themselves and the immediately previous civilization. Therefore it may be reasonable to believe that, if 10 civilizations arise on the average planet, 90% of them will believe that they are probably midway through a long succession of civilizations.
My first attempt to list which of these I want most ended up being "all of them". In the interests of giving useful feedback, I think the most interesting ones are the problems with SETI (haven't heard anything about this but I also haven't been looking) and the origin of life (have heard about this but I suspect your post would be better than average).
Your response to CarlShulman makes me want more about eukaryotes too.
I agree with you on the complexity of value. However, perhaps we are imagining the ideal way of aggregating all those complex values differently. I absolutely agree that the simple models I keep proposing for individual values are spherical cows, and ignore a lot of nuance. I just don't see things working radically differently when the nuance is added in, and the values aggregated.
That sounds like a really complex discussion though, and I don't think either of us is likely to convince the other without a novel's worth of text. However, perhaps I can convince you that you already are suppressing some impulses, and that this isn't always disastrous. (Though it certainly can be, if you choose the wrong ones.)
there aren't large benefits to be gained by discarding some emotions and values.
Isn't that what akrasia is?
If I find that part of me values one marshmallow now at the expense of 2 later, and I don't endorse this upon reflection, wouldn't it make sense to try and decrease such impulses? Removing them may be unnecessarily extreme, but perhaps that's what some nootropics do.
Similarly, if I were to find that I gained a sadistic pleasure from something, I wouldn't endorse that outside of well defined S&M. If I had an alcoholism problem, I'd similarly dislike my desire for alcohol. I suspect that strongly associating cigarettes with disgust is helpful in counteracting the impulse to smoke.
If I understand correctly, some Buddhist try to eliminate suffering by eliminating their desires. I find this existentially terrifying. However, I think that boosting and suppressing these sorts of impulses is precisely what psychologists call conditioning. A world where none refines or updates their natural impulses is just as unsettling as the Buddhist suppression of all values.
So, even if you don't agree that there are cases where we should suppress certain pro-social emotions, do you agree with my characterization of antisocial emotions and grey area impulses like akrasia?
(I'm using values, impulses, emotions, etc fairly interchangeably here. If what I'm saying isn't clear, let me know and I can try to dig into the distinctions.)
Also check out physics.SE and physicsoverflow
Now I have!
I think their case is weak but it is something to continue to be considered when analyzing any new data. There's weird soil chemistry there for sure, a good deal of which might be explicable from the interaction between perclorate and small amounts of organics, but the amount of data is tiny and I would not rule out soil microbes. A lot more work has to be done before you can say much with confidence.
I accept genes are a big part of the picture.
I'm not sure I believe genetics are more important than other factors. And this is not necessarily a simple nature vs. nurture issue. In the case of African Americans' treatment in U.S. history, it's an extreme set of "nurture" circumstances that robbed a group of people of all opportunity for many generations, based on race. I'm not sure "good genes" simply overcomes extremely lopsided (often systemically unfair) circumstances.
Anyway, it won't be resolved here. Thanks for your thoughts.
"The Perfect Food and the Filth Disease: Milk-borne Typhoid and Epidemiological Practice in Late Victorian Britain" J. S. Williams. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Vol. 65, No. 4 (OCTOBER 2010), pp. 514-545. If anyone's interested but cannot access the article, PM me and I will send you a copy (made by print-screening the pages from 'net and assembling the images into a .doc file).
A verbose, but on the whole interesting read on an uphill battle fought in 1860-s - 1890-s to have adulterated milk recognized as public health risk. Includes a "subplot" which would make a wonderful period-drama detective story (the typhoid outbreak in London, 1873).
Is there a specific bias for thinking that everyone possesses the same knowledge as you? For example, after learning more about a certain subject, I have a tendency to think, "Oh, but everyone already knows this, don't they" even though they probably don't and I wouldn't have assumed that before learning about it myself.
Have you ever seen this paper that claims a complexity analysis of the Viking lander experiment results can't be explained by chemistry alone? Interesting stuff...
This post doesn't have much that addresses the "expanding circle" case for empathy, which goes something like this:
Empathy is a powerful tool for honing in on what matters in the world. By default, people tend to use it too narrowly. We can see that in many of the great moral failings of the past (like those mentioned here) which involved people failing to register some others as an appropriate target of empathy, or doing a lousy job of empathizing which involved making up stories more than really putting oneself in their shoes, or actively working to block empathy by dehumanizing them and evoking disgust, fear, or other emotions. But over time there has been moral progress as societies have expanded the circle of who people habitually feel empathy for, and developed norms and institutions to reflect their membership in that circle of concern. And it is possible to do better than your societal default if you cultivate your empathy, including the ability to notice the blind spots where you could be empathizing but are not (and the ability to then direct some empathy towards those spots). This could include people who are far away or across some boundary, people in an outgroup who you might feel antagonistic towards, people who have been accused of some misdeed, people and nonhumans that are very different from you, those who are not salient to you at the moment, those who don't exist yet, those who are only indirectly affected by your actions, etc.
I meant these two news: http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-deepmind-develops-a-big-red-button-to-stop-dangerous-ais-causing-harm-2016-6
http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-ai-ethics-board-remains-a-mystery-2016-3
Red button and ethics board
It depends whether we are using 'racist' to mean 'believes that some races are superior to others in certain respects' or 'has less empathy for other races'.
We are using it here to mean "implicit racism". That's a term that used in the literature. There are studies that measure it. Implicit racism also isn't something that's only found in white people (in Clinton's words it's a problem for everyone). Black people also have implicit racism that makes them treat white people better in many instances.
This is a tangent, but:
You know that “four delicious tiny round brown glazed Italian chocolate cookies” is the only proper way to order these adjectives.
There are definitely some ordering rules, but I am not convinced they are nearly as universal or as complex as this suggests. See the Language Log on this subject.
I think this article is something that people outside of this community really ought to read.
Interesting. Why people outside of this community? I find it is actually the LW and EA communities that place an exorbitant amount of emphasis on empathy. Most of those I know outside of the rationalist community understand the healthy tradeoff between charitable action and looking out for oneself.
It depends whether we are using 'racist' to mean 'believes that some races are superior to others in certain respects' or 'has less empathy for other races'. In the first case, sure, maybe you would date someone of another race, because group differences aren't so important when dealing with individuals. But in the latter case... if you are less able to empathise with people of other races it would seem really weird to date them.
and so you also have to take into account the CEV on the issue of consent. Its also true that a super intelligence might be able to talk someone into consenting to almost anything.
Consent is a concept that get's easily complicated. Is it wrong to burn coal when the asthmatics who die because of it aren't consenting? Are the asthmatics in the US consenting by virtue of electing a government that allows coal to be burned?
If a AGI does thinks in a very complicated way it might not meaningfully get consent for anything because it can't explain it's reasoning to humans.
If we look on humans as on typical species, we could use typical estimate of species life expectancy, which is several million years, and use it as human life expectancy. It is not bad.
But humans are definitely in the special point of their history and they could create a competitor soon (post humans or AI) and doesn't look good. Competitors are one of the main ways how species go extinct.
Thank you, this is the biggest compliment I could hope for.
I worry whenever I write anything that could fall into bravery debate territory. I worry that for some readers it would sound stale and obvious, or be the precise opposite of the advice they need, while others would reject it in disgust after reading two lines. I write about things that hit me in the right spot: ideas I was on the precipice of and something pushed me over. And then I hope that I'll find at least a few readers who are in the same spot I am.
With empathy, it turns out that Germans were much more likely to empathize with other Germans than with Juden. With empathy, everyone was cheering as the witches burned.
Moral progress is the progress of knowledge. Slavers in the antebellum South convinced themselves that they were doing a favor to the slaves because the latter couldn't survive by themselves in an advanced economy. A hundred years later, they changed their minds more than they changed their hearts. We (some of us) have learned that coercion is almost always bad, making world saving plans that involve a lot of coercion tend to fail, and preserving people's freedom (blacks, witches and Jews included) increases everyone's welfare.
Is empathy part of one's motivation to even pursue moral progress? Perhaps, but if so it's a very deep part of us that will never be discarded. All I'm saying is that whenever you have finally decided that you should make the world a better place, at that point emotional empathy is a bias that you should discard when choosing a course of action.
I actually drew up a spreadsheet to estimate this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xnfsDuC0ddUxvKekGLJ5QA5nrXxzked7K-k6jqUm538/edit?usp=sharing
I agree with you about the numbers: If there were say 10^15 insects then their moral weight might be in question. However there are actually more like 10^18, which is huge even for very small per-insect weightings.
I doubt there is much motivation here for "at least 20 years" except the very fact that it is hard to tell what will happen in 20 years.
I agree with Robin Hanson that we are maybe 5% of the way to general AI. I think 20 years from now the distance we were from AI at this point will be somewhat clearer (because we will be closer, but still very distant.)
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}