It is true that the specifics of body and environment drive some specific human values, but those are just side effects of X in that environment and X in different environments only changes so much and in predictable ways.

When you say "predictable", do you mean in principle or actually predictable?

That is, are you claiming that you can predict what any human values given their environment, and furthermore that the environment can be easily and compactly specified?

Can you give an example?

Because it is the proxy for survival.

I'm not at all sure I understand what you mean. I don't see the connection between familiarity and survival. Moreover, Not all general intelligences will be interested in survival.

I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to use terminology to misstate your position.

What are three values that a GIA must have, and why must they have them?

Name three values all agents must have, and explain why they must have them.

EDIT: To edit and simplify my thoughts, in order to get a General Intelligence Algorithm Instance to do anything requires masterful manipulation of parameters with full knowledge of generally how it is going to behave as a result. A level of understanding of psychology of all intelligent (and sub-intelligent) behavior. It is not feasible that someone would accidentally program something that would become an evil mastermind. GIA instances could easily be made to behave in a passive manner even when given affordances and output, kind of like a person that was happy to assist in any way possible because they were generally warm or high or something.

You can define the most important elements of human values for a GIA instance, because most of human values are a direct logical consequence of something that cannot be separated from the GIA... IE if general motivation X accidentally drove intelligence (see: Orthogonality Thesis ) and it also drove positive human values, then positive human values would be unavoidable. It is true that the specifics of body and environment drive some specific human values, but those are just side effects of X in that environment and X in different environments only changes so much and in predictable ways.

You can directly implant knowledge/reasoning into a GIA instance. The easiest way to do this is to train one under very controlled circumstances, and then copy the pattern. This reasoning would then condition the GIA instance's interpretation of future input. However, under conditions which directly disprove the value of that reasoning in obtaining X the GIA instance would un-integrate that pattern and reintegrate a new one. This can be influenced with parameter weights.

I suppose this could be a concern regarding the potential generation of an anger instinct. This HEAVILY depends on all the parameters however, and any outputs given to the GIA instance. Also, robots and computers do not have to eat, and have no associated instincts with killing things in order to do so... Nor do they have reproductive instincts...

This one is actually true.

I know 2 reasons why people suck at bringing theory to practice, neither of which completely validates your claim.

1) They suck at it. They are lost in a sea of confusion, and never get to a valuable deduction which can then be returned to the realm of practicality. But they are still intrigued and still get better a little bit at a time with each new revelation granted by internal thought or sites like Less Wrong.

2) They are too good at it. Before going to implement all the wonderful things they have learned, they figure out something new that would require updating their implementation approach. Then another thing. And another. Then they die.

I suffered from 1 for a while when I was younger, and now from 2. I have found the best way to overcome this is to convince other people of what I have figured out thus far. They take what I give them and they run with it in their practical applications.

The act of explaining it to others is the thing that survives from your "dojo" model into the optimal approach to theory. It causes you to better understand it yourself and have more things to explain. It is this which brought me from identifying myself as an epistemologist to a mathematician who could create problem statements from the knowledge I had and provide functional solutions that could be programmed into computers or analyzed by computers to create optimal solutions. Before that I felt I was at my best when providing concise and elegant descriptions of functional knowledge that people could easily integrate into their approach.

A lot of that knowledge was thought experiment versions of the type of stuff you read on LessWrong. So to sum up, this site presents ready to consume concise functional knowledge, and promotes communication between people on interesting subjects. I understand a lot of people are going to be stuck at 1 for the foreseeable future, but so was I at one point. In the meantime, they can spread the ready to consume concise functional knowledge.