Jef_Allbright

I think it bears repeating here:

Influence is only one aspect of the moral formula; the other aspect is the particular context of values being promoted.

These can be quite independent, as with a tribal chief, with substantial influence, acting to promote the perceived values of his tribe, vs. the chief acting to promote his narrower personal values. [Note that the difference is not one of fitness but of perceived morality. Fitness is assessed only indirectly within an open context.]

Excellent advice Eliezer!

I have a game I play ever few months or so. I get on my motorcycle, usually on a Friday, pack spare clothes and toiletries, and head out in a random direction. At most every branch in the road I choose randomly, and take my time exploring and enjoying the journey. After a couple of days, I return hugely refreshed, creative potential flowing.

But we already live in a world, right now, where people are less in control of their social destinies than they would be in a hunter-gatherer band... If you lived in a world the size of a hunter-gatherer band, then it would be easier to find something important at which to be the best - or do something that genuinely struck you as important, without becoming lost in a vast crowd of others with similar ideas.

Can you see the contradiction, bemoaning that people are now "less in control" while exercising ever-increasing freedom of expression? Ha... (read more)

Ironic, such passion directed toward bringing about a desirable singularity, rooted in an impenetrable singularity of faith in X. X yet to be defined, but believed to be [meaningful|definable|implementable] independent of future context.

It would be nice to see an essay attempting to explain an information or systems-theoretic basis supporting such an apparent contradiction (definition independent of context.)

Or, if the one is arguing for a (meta)invariant under a stable future context, an essay on the extended implications of such stability, if the one wou... (read more)

Coming from a background in scientific instruments, I always find this kind of analysis a bit jarring with its infinite regress involving the rational, self-interested actor at the core.

Of course two instruments will agree if they share the same nature, within the same environment, measuring the same object. You can map onto that a model of priors, likelihood function and observed evidence if you wish. Translated to agreement between two agents, the only thing remaining is an effective model of the relationship of the observer to the observed.

I'll second jb's request for denser, more highly structured representations of Eliezer's insights. I read all this stuff, find it entertaining and sometimes edifying, but disappointing in that it's not converging on either a central thesis or central questions (preferably both.)

Crap. Will the moderator delete posts like that one, which appear to be so off the Mark?

billswift wrote:

…but the self-taught will simply extend their knowledge when a lack appears to them.

Yes, this point is key to the topic at hand, as well as to the problem of meaningful growth of any intelligent agent, regardless of its substrate and facility for (recursive) improvement. But in this particular forum, due to the particular biases which tend to predominate among those whose very nature tends to enforce relatively narrow (albeit deep) scope of interaction, the emphasis should be not on "will simply extend" but on "when a lack a... (read more)

A few posters might want to read up on Stochastic Resonance, which was surprisingly surprising a few decades ago. I'm getting a similar impression now from recent research in the field of Compressive Sensing, which ostensibly violates the Nyquist sampling limit, highlighting the immaturity of the general understanding of information-theory.

In my opinion, there's nothing especially remarkable here other than the propensity to conflate the addition of noise to data, with the addition of "noise" (a stochastic element) to (search for) data.

This confusion appears to map very well onto the cybernetic distinction between intelligently knowing the answer and intelligently controlling for the answer.

Jo -

Above all else, be true to yourself. This doesn't mean you must or should be bluntly open with everyone about your own thoughts and values; on the contrary, it means taking personal responsibility for applying your evolving thinking as a sharp instrument for the promotion of your evolving values.

Think of your values-complex as a fine-grained hierarchy, with some elements more fundamental and serving to support a wider variety of more dependent values. For example, your better health, both physical and mental, is probably more fundamental and necessar... (read more)

In my opinion, EY's point is valid—to the extent that the actor and observer intelligence share neighboring branches of their developmental tree. Note that for any intelligence rooted in a common "physics", this says less about their evolutionary roots and more about their relative stages of development.

Reminds me a bit of the jarred feeling I got when my ninth grade physics teacher explained that a scrambled egg is a clear and generally applicable example of increased entropy. [Seems entirely subjective to me, in principle.] Also reminiscent of Kardashev with his "obvious" classes of civilization, lacking consideration of the trend toward increasing ephemeralization of technology.

@pk I don't understand. Am I too dumb or is this gibberish?

It's not so complicated; it's just that we're so formal...

It might be worthwhile to note that cogent critiques of the proposition that a machine intelligence might very suddenly "become a singleton Power" do not deny the inefficacies of the human cognitive architecture offering improvement via recursive introspection and recoding, nor do they deny the improvements easily available via hardware substitution and expansion of more capable hardware and I/O.

The do, however, highlight the distinction between a vastly powerful machine madly exploring vast reaches of a much vaster "up-arrow" space of ... (read more)

Frelkins and Marshall pretty well sum up my impressions of the exchange between Jaron and EY.

Perhaps pertinent, I'd suggest an essay on OvercomingBias on our unfortunate tendency to focus on the other's statements, rather than focusing on a probabilistic model of the likelihood function generating those statements. Context is crucial to meaning, but must be formed rather than conveyed. Ironically—but reflecting the fundamentally hard value of intelligence—such contextual asymmetry appears to work against those who would benefit the most.

More concretely, ... (read more)

My (not so "fake") hint:

Think economics of ecologies. Coherence in terms of the average mutual information of the paths of trophic I/O provides a measure of relative ecological effectiveness (absent prediction or agency.) Map this onto the information I/O of a self-organizing hierarchical Bayesian causal model (with, for example, four major strata for human-level environmental complexity) and you should expect predictive capability within a particular domain, effective in principle, in relation to the coherence of the hierarchical model over it... (read more)

@Tim Tyler: "That's no reason not to talk about goals, and instead only mention something like "utility"."

Tim, the problem with expected utility maps directly onto the problem with goals. Each is coherent only to the extent that the future context can be effectively specified (functionally modeled, such that you could interact with it and ask it questions, not to be confused with simply pointing to it.) Applied to a complexly evolving future of increasingly uncertain context, due to combinatorial explosion but also due to critical und... (read more)

@Eliezer: There's emotion involved. I enjoy calling people's bluffs.

Jef, if you want to argue further here, I would suggest explaining just this one phrase "functional self-similarity of agency extended from the 'individual' to groups".

Eliezer, it's clear that your suggestion isn't friendly, and I intended not to argue, but rather, to share and participate in building better understanding. But you've turned it into a game which I can either play, or allow you to use it against me. So be it.

The phrase is a simple one, but stripped of context, as... (read more)

Mathew C: "And the biggest threat, of course, is the truth that the self is not fundamentally real. When that is clearly seen, the gig is up."

Spot on. That is by far the biggest impasse I have faced anytime I try to convey a meta-ethics denying the very existence of the "singularity of self" in favor of the self of agency over increasing context. I usually to downplay this aspect until after someone has expressed a practical level of interest, but it's right there out front for those who can see it.

Thanks. Nice to be heard...

Based on the disproportionate reaction from our host, I'm going to sit quietly now.

@Cyan: "... you're going to need more equations and fewer words."

Don't you see a lower-case sigma representing a series every time I say "increasingly"? ;-)

Seriously though, I read a LOT of technical papers and it seems to me much of the beautiful LaTex equations and formulas are only to give the impression of rigor. And there are few equations that could "prove" anything in this area of inquiry.

What would help my case, if it were not already long lost in Eliezer's view, is to have provided examples, references, and commenta... (read more)