All of ChrisA's Comments + Replies

Nick

My response is, evolution! Let's say a genuinely (what ever that means) altruistic entity exists. He then is uploaded. He then observed that not all entities are fully altruistic, in other words they will want to take resources from others. In any contest over resources this puts the altruistic entity at a disadvantage (he is spending resources helping others that he could use to defend himself). With potentially mega intelligent entities any weakness is serious. He realises that very quickly he will be eliminated if he doesn't fix this weakness. He ei... (read more)

The question Eliezer raises is the first problem any religious person has to face once he abandons the god thesis, i.e. why should I be good now? The answer, I believe, is that you cannot act contrary to your genetic nature. Our brains are wired (or have modules in Pinker terms) for various forms of altruism, for group survival reasons probably. I therefore can’t easily commit acts against my genetic nature, even if intellectually I can see they are in my best interests. (As Eliezer has already recognised this is why AI or uploaded personalities are so dan... (read more)

Eliezer “This is a black hole that sucks up arguments. Beware. I'll deal with this on Overcoming Bias eventually, but I haven't done many of the preliminary posts that would be required. Meanwhile, I hope you've noticed your confusion about personal identity.”

I look forward to the posts on consciousness, and yes, I don’t feel like I have a super coherent position on this. I struggle to understand how me is still me after I have died, my dead body is frozen, mashed up and then reconstituted some indefinite time in the future. Quarks are quarks but a human i... (read more)

Eliezer Sorry to say (because it makes me sound callous), but if someone can and is willing to create and then destroy 3^^^3 people for less than $5, then there is no value in life, and definitely no moral structure to the universe. The creation and destruction of 3^^^3 people (or more) is probably happening all the time. Therefore the AI is safe declining the wager on purely selfish grounds.

“The problem with Pascal's Wager is not the large payoff but the tiny, unsupported probability”

Why is the unsupported probability a problem? As long as there is any probability the positive nature of the wager holds. My problem with Pascal’s Wager is that there are any number of equivalent bets, so why chose Pascal’s bet over any of the others available? Better not to chose any, and spend the resources on a sure bet, i.e. utility in today’s life not a chance at a future one.

On Cryonics, while the technical nature of process is clearly more (by a huge amoun... (read more)

On cryonics, basically I understand the wager as that for a (reasonably) small sum I can obtain a small, but finite, possibility of immortality, therefore the bet has a very high return, so I should be prepared to make the bet. But this logic to me has the same flaw as Pascal’s wager. There are many bets that appear to have similar payoff. For instance, although I am an atheist, I cannot deny there is a small, probably smaller than cryonics, chance that belief in a God is correct. Could cryonics be like religion in this way, an example of exposure bias, re... (read more)

I suggest the common issue (between health care and foreign aid) is that of agents, who benefit from the current status quo, and provide arguments and generate memes to sustain the status quo. I don't mean to say that the agents are generally doing this wilfully, almost no Doctor believes that "most health care is useless but I will continue the scam to maintain my income/status", just like no aid worker believes what they are doing is useless. But human nature is very good at hiding motives and clothing them in altruistic seeming morality, even ... (read more)

I should clarify the above statement - I mean it is possible that moral rules can be derived logically, like the speed of light, from the structure of the universe.

It is possible that there are moral rules that apply universally, perhaps we just haven't discovered them yet. After all, who would have predicted that the universe had a natural speed limit. So 8 could be false. The rest of the statements assume the viewpoint that there is such a thing as universal morality, asking tricky questions about how to apply or calculate morality. I don't have answers as I predict morality is mostly a psychological device imposed by genetics to promote group genetic survival mixed with some childhood conditioning. We will find ou... (read more)

There seem to be lots of parallels between majoritarianism and the efficient market hypothesis in finance. In the efficient market hypothesis, it is entirely possible that a liquidly traded asset is mispriced, (similar to the possibility that the majority view is very wrong) however on average, according to the efficient market view, I maximise my chances of being right by accepting the current price of the asset as the correct price. Therefore the fact that a stock halved in price over a year is not a valid criticism of the efficient market theory, just a... (read more)