Today's post, Heading Toward Morality was originally published on 20 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
A description of the last several months of sequence posts, that identifies the topic that Eliezer actually wants to explain: morality.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was LA-602 vs RHIC Review, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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Well, it's not that I made it to self-organize, it is information coming from the real world that did the trick. I only used a conventional programming language to implement a mechanism for such self-organization (neural network). But I'm not programming the way how this network is going to function. It is rather "programmed" by reality itself. The reality can be considered as a giant supercomputer constantly generating consistent streams of information. Some of that information is fed to a network and makes it to self-organize.
Fair enough... so, OK, "I made it to self-organize" isn't right either.
That said, I'll point out that that was your own choice of words ("You've implemented a neural network [..] and made it to self-organize").
I mention this, not to criticize your choice of words, but to point out that you have experience with the dynamic that causes people to choose a brief not-quite-right phrase that more-or-less means what we want to express, rather than a paragraph of text that is more precise.
Which is exactly what's going on when people talk ab... (read more)