Paul_Gowder
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Eliezer: the rationality of defection in these finitely repeated games has come under some fire, and there's a HUGE literature on it. Reading some of the more prominent examples may help you sort out your position on it.
Start here:
Robert Aumann. 1995. "Backward Induction and Common Knowledge of Rationality." Games and Economic Behavior 8:6-19.
Cristina Bicchieri. 1988. "Strategic Behavior and Counterfactuals." Synthese 76:135-169.
Cristina Bicchieri. 1989. "Self-Refuting Theories of Strategic Interaction: A Paradox of Common Knowledge." Erkenntnis 30:69-85.
Ken Binmore. 1987. "Modeling Rational Players I." Economics and Philosophy 3:9-55.
Jon Elster. 1993. "Some unresolved problems in the theory of rational behaviour." Acta Sociologica 36: 179-190.
Philip Reny. 1992. "Rationality in Extensive-Form Games." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 6:103-118.
Phillip Petit and Robert Sugden. 1989. "The Backward Induction Paradox." The Journal of Philosophy 86:169-182.
Brian Skyrms. 1998. "Subjunctive Conditionals and Revealed Preference." Philosophy of Science 65:545-574
Robert Stalnaker. 1999. "Knowledge, Belief and Counterfactual Reasoning in Games." in Cristina Bicchieri, Richard Jeffrey, and Brian Skyrms, eds., The Logic of Strategy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nick,
Fair enough, but consider the counterfactual case: suppose we believed that there were some fact about a person that would permit enslaving that person, but learned that the set of people to whom those facts applied was the null set. It seems like that would still represent moral progress in some sense.
Perhaps not the sort that Eliezer is talking about, though. But I'm not sure that the two can be cleanly separated. Consider slavery again, or the equality of humanity in general. Much of the moral movement there can be seen as changing interpretations of Christianity -- that is, people thought the Bible justified slavery, then they stopped thinking that. Is that a purely moral change? Or is that a better interpretation of a body of religious thought?
Nick:
I don't think discovering better instrumental values toward the same terminal values you always had counts as moral progress, at least if those terminal values are consciously, explicitly held.
Why on earth not? Aristotle thought some people were naturally suited for slavery. We now know that's not true. Why isn't that moral progress?
(Similarly, general improvements in reasoning, to the extent they allow us to reject bad moral arguments as well as more testable kinds of bad arguments, could count as moral progress.)
One possibility: we can see a connection between morality and certain empirical facts -- for example, if we believe that more moral societies will be more stable, we might think that we can see moral progress in the form of changes that are brought about by previous morally related instability. That's not very clear -- but a much clearer and more sophisticated variant on that idea can perhaps be seen in an old paper by Joshua Cohen, "The Arc of the Moral Universe" (google scholar will get it, and definitely read it, because a) it's brilliant, and b) I'm not representing it very well).
Or we might think that some of our... (read more)
So here's a question Eliezer: is Subhan's argument for moral skepticism just a concealed argument for universal skepticism? After all, there are possible minds that do math differently, that do logic differently, that evaluate evidence differently, that observe sense-data differently...
Either Subhan can distinguish his argument from an argument for universal skepticism, or I say that it's refuted by reductio, since universal skepticism fails to the complete impossibility of asserting it consistently + things like moorean facts.
Suppose that 98% of humans, under 98% of the extrapolated spread, would both choose a certain ordering of arguments, and also claim that this is the uniquely correct ordering. Is this sufficient to just go ahead and label that ordering the rational one? If you refuse to answer that question yourself, what is the procedure that answers it?
Again, this is why it's irreducibly social. If there isn't a procedure that yields a justified determinate answer to the rationality of that order, then the best we can do is take what is socially accepted at the time and in the society in which such a superintelligence is created. There's nowhere else to look.
Eleizer,
Things like the ordering of arguments are just additional questions about the rationality criteria, and my point above applies to them just as well -- either there's a justifiable answer ("this is how arguments are to be ordered,") or it's going to be fundamentally socially determined and there's nothing to be done about it. The political is really deeply prior to the workings of a superintelligence in such cases: if there's no determinate correct answer to these process questions, then humans will have to collectively muddle through to get something to feed the superintelligence. (Aristotle was right when he said politics was the ruling science...)
On the humans for humans point,... (read more)
Right, but those questions are responsive to reasons too. Here's where I embrace the recursion. Either we believe that ultimately the reasons stop -- that is, that after a sufficiently ideal process, all of the minds in the relevant mind design space agree on the values, or we don't. If we do, then the superintelligence should replicate that process. If we don't, then what basis do we have for asking a superintelligence to answer the question? We might as well flip a coin.
Of course, the content of the ideal process is tricky. I'm hiding the really hard questions in there, like what counts as rationality, what... (read more)
Eliezer,
The resemblance between my second suggestion and your thing didn't go unnoticed -- I had in fact read your coherent extrapolated volition thing before (there's probably an old e-mail from me to you about it, in fact). I think it's basically correct. But the method of justification is importantly different, because the idea is that we're trying to approximate something with epistemic content -- we're not just trying to do what you might call a Xannon thing -- we're not just trying to model what humans would do. Rather, we're trying to model and improve a specific feature of humanity that we see as morally relevant -- responsiveness to... (read more)
He put up a very good fight.