Regarding #23, I’m working on a friendly critique of shard theory, but it won’t be ready to share for a few weeks.
Preview: as currently framed, shard theory seems to involve a fairly fundamental misconception about the nature of genotype-phenotype mappings and the way that brain systems evolve, with the result that it radically under-estimates the diversity, complexity, and adaptiveness of our evolved motivations, preferences, and values.
In other words, it prematurely rejects the ‘massive modularity’ thesis of evolutionary psychology, and it largely ignores the last three decades of research on the adaptive design details of human emotions and motivations.
I think it’ll be important for AI alignment researchers (and AI systems themselves) to take evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology more seriously in trying to understand and model human nature and human preferences. (But then, I’m possibly biased, since I’ve been doing machine learning research since the late 1980s, and evolutionary psychology research since the early 90s....)
Regarding #23, I’m working on a friendly critique of shard theory, but it won’t be ready to share for a few weeks.
Preview: as currently framed, shard theory seems to involve a fairly fundamental misconception about the nature of genotype-phenotype mappings and the way that brain systems evolve, with the result that it radically under-estimates the diversity, complexity, and adaptiveness of our evolved motivations, preferences, and values.
In other words, it prematurely rejects the ‘massive modularity’ thesis of evolutionary psychology, and it largely ignores the last three decades of research on the adaptive design details of human emotions and motivations.
I think it’ll be important for AI alignment researchers (and AI systems themselves) to take evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology more seriously in trying to understand and model human nature and human preferences. (But then, I’m possibly biased, since I’ve been doing machine learning research since the late 1980s, and evolutionary psychology research since the early 90s....)