simon2

Psy-Kosh: I was using the example of pure baby eater values and conscious babies to illustrate the post Nick Tarleton linked to rather than apply it to this one.

Michael: if it's "inevitable" that they will encounter aliens then it's inevitable that each fragment will in turn encounter aliens, unless they do some ongoing pre-emptive fragmentation, no? But even then, if exponential growth is the norm among even some alien species (which one would expect) the universe should eventually become saturated with civilizations. In the long run, the only e... (read more)

Nick, note that he treats the pebblesorters in parallel with the humans. The pebblesorters' values lead them to seek primeness and Eliezer optimistically supposes that human values lead humans to seek an analogous rightness.

What Eliezer is trying to say in that post, I think, is that he would not consider it right to eat babies even conditional on humanity being changed by the babyeaters to have their values.

But the choice to seek rightness instead of rightness' depends on humans having values that lead to rightness instead of rightness'.

It's evidence of my values which are evidence of typical human values. Also, I invite other people to really think if they are so different.

Eliezer tries to derive his morality from human values, rather than simply assuming that it is an objective morality, or asserting it as an arbitrary personal choice. It can therefore be undermined in principle by evidence of actual human values.

Also, I think I would prefer blowing up the nova instead. The babyeater's children's suffering is unfortunate no doubt but hey, I spend money on ice cream instead of saving starving children in Africa. The superhappies' degrading of their own, more important, civilization is another consideration.

(you may correctly protest about the ineffectiveness of aid - but would you really avoid ice cream to spend on aid, if it were effective and somehow they weren't saved already?)

If blowing up Huygens could be effective, why did it even occur to you to blow up Earth before you thought of this?

Sure it's a story, but one with an implicit idea of human terminal values and such.

I'm actually inclined to agree with Faré that they should count the desire to avoid a few relatively minor modifications over the eternal holocaust and suffering of baby-eater children.

I originally thought Eliezer was a utilitarian, but changed my mind due to his morality series.

(Though I still thought he was defending something that was fairly similar to utilitarianism. But he wasn't taking additivity as a given but attempting to derive it from human terminal values themse... (read more)

...with babyeater values.

Actually, I'm not sure if that's what I thought about their intentions towards the babyeaters, but I at least didn't originally expect them to still intend to modify themselves and humanity.

John Maxwell:

No, they are simply implementing the original plan by force.

When I originally read part 5, I jumped to the same conclusion you did, based presumably on my prior expectations of what a reasonable being would do. But then I read nyu2's comment which assumed the opposite and went back to look at what the text actually said, and it seemed to support that interpretation.

It seems we are at a disadvantage relative to Eliezer in thinking of alternative endings, since he has a background notion of what things are possible and what aren't, and we have to guess from the story.

Things like:

How quickly can you go from star to star?
Does the greater advancement of the superhappies translate into higher travel speed, or is this constrained by physics?
Can information be sent from star to star without couriering it with a ship, and arrive in a reasonable time?
How long will the lines connected to the novaing star remain open?
Can inf... (read more)

... but relative to simply cooperating, it seems a clear win. Unless the superhappies have thought of it and planned a response.

Of course, the corollary for the real world would seem to be: those people who think that most people would not converge if "extrapolated" by Eliezer's CEV ought to exterminate other people who they disagree with on moral questions before the AI is strong enough to stop them, if Eliezer has not programmed the AI to do something to punish that sort of thing.

Hmm. That doesn't seem so intuitively nice. I wonder if it's just... (read more)

If the humans know how to find the babyeaters' star,
and if the babyeater civilization can be destroyed by blowing up one star,

then I would like to suggest that they kill off the babyeaters.

Not for the sake of the babyeaters (I consider the proposed modifications to them better than annihilation from humanity's perspective)
but to prevent the super-happies from making even watered down modifications adding baby-eater values -
not so much to humans, since this can also be (at least temporarily) prevented by destroying Huygens -
but to themselves, as they ar... (read more)

James Andrix: I don't claim that the aliens would prefer modification over death, only that it is more consonant with my conception of human values to modify them than exterminate them, notwithstanding that the aliens may prefer the latter.

Akon claims this is a "true" prisoner's dilemma situation, and then tries to add more values to one side of the scale. If he adds enough values to make cooperation higher value than defecting, then he was wrong to say it was a true prisoner's dilemma. But the story has made it clear that the aliens appear to be not smart enough to accurately anticipate human behaviour (or vice versa for that matter), so this is not a situation where it is rational to cooperate in a true prisoner's dilemma. If it really is a true prisoner's dilemma, they should ju... (read more)

Strong enough to disrupt personal identity, if taken in one shot? That's a difficult question to answer, especially since I don't know what experiment to perform to test any hypotheses. On one hand, billions of neurons in my visual cortex undergo massive changes of activation every time my eyes squeeze shut when I sneeze - the raw number of flipped bits is not the key thing in personal identity. But we are already talking about serious changes of information, on the order of going to sleep, dreaming, forgetting your dreams, and waking up the next mornin

Eliezer, whenever you start thinking about people who are completely causally unconnected with us as morally relevant, alarm bells should go off.

What's worse though, is that if your opinion on this is driven by a desire to justify not agreeing with the "repugnant conclusion", it may signify problems with your morality that could annihilate humanity if you give your morality to an AI. The repugnant conclusion requires valuing the bringing into existence of hypothetical people with total utility x by as much as reducing the utility of existing peop... (read more)

I think what he means by "calibrated" is something like it not being possible for someone else to systematically improve the probabilities you give for the possible answers to a question just from knowing what values you've assigned (and your biases), without looking at what the question is.

I suppose the improvement would indeed be measured in terms of relative entropy of the "correct" guess with respect to the guess given.

Responding to Gaffa (I kind of intended to respond right after the comment, bot got sidetracked):

When approaching a scientific or mathematical problem, I often find myself trying hard to avoid having to calculate and reason, and instead try to reach for an "intuitive" understanding in the back of my mind, but that understanding, if I can even find it, is rarely sufficient when dealing with actual problems.

I would advise you to embrace calculation and reason, but just make sure you think about what you are doing and why. Use the tools, but try... (read more)

It might make an awesome movie, but if it were expected behaviour, it would defeat the point of the injunction. In fact if rationalists were expected to look for workarounds of any kind it would defeat the point of the injunction. So the injunction would have to be, not merely to be silent, but not to attempt to use the knowledge divulged to thwart the one making the confession in any way except by non-coercive persuasion.

Or alternatively, not to ever act in a way such that if the person making the confession had expected it they would have avoided making the confession.

To the extent that a commitment to ethics is externally verifiable, it would encourage other people to cooperate, just as a tendency to anger (a visible commitment to retribution) is a disincentive to doing harm.

Also, even if it is not verifiable, a person who at least announces their intention to hold to an ethical standard has raised the impact their failure to do so will have on their reputation, and thus the announcement itself should have some impact on the expectation that they will behave ethically.