Interestingly, I think there used to be a group of people who nominally were dedicated to doing the kind of desire-inferring with an aim at concrete progress and conceptual understanding that I can cheer for, though they didn’t have all that fancy neuroscience knowledge back then. Fun quiz: can you guess which field I’m referring to? I gave you some hints. And… here is the answer I had in mind. (Check this wiki article for the context, though.) Was that your guess? If not, what was?
(I looked at the article, and at another more specific WP article, without finding anything that looked much like what Luke was saying. Whether you’re aiming to raise the status of the field in question, to discredit Luke or what he’s saying by association with something widely disapproved of, to point out an illuminating parallel, or whatever, I think you need to be much more explicit.)
Mostly it just seemed to me like an interesting connection, especially if the notion of eugenics is generalized to be more explicitly reflective on memetics and multi-level selection—instead of the focus at the individual-biological/organismic (and to a weird extent the racial level) -- at which point it becomes reflexive, even. It has various abstract connections to FAI/CEV. Specifically what seemed cool about the vision of eugenics outlined in the diagram I linked to is that it is reflective, empirical, naturalistic meta-ethics / applied ethics, which I’m not sure went on before that and hasn’t come up again except in some very primitive complex systems and dual inheritance studies as far I know. In hindsight I should not have expected these thoughts to automatically enter peoples’ brains when they saw the diagram I linked to.
I was also hoping that other people could notice similar connections to other fields that might also be non-obviously related to this theme of refining and more effectively applying our models of morality and meta-ethics.
I think I am consistently up against Hofstadter’s law of inferential distances, or something.
Dear Will_Newsome’s brain,
Please update on the above information, or explain more clearly why you do not want to, and in any case please explain why various parts or coalitions of you do not want to change your strategy for communication or do not want to acknowledge that the lack of a changed strategy is indicative of not updating. Once such concerns are out in the open I promise to reflect carefully and explicitly on how best to reach something like a Pareto improvement, obviously with your guidance and partnership at each step of the way.
Sincerely, Will_Newsome’s executive function algorithm that likes to use public commitments as self-bargaining tactics because it read a Less Wrong post that said that was a good idea.
Yeah, they were actually the second group that came to mind in roughly that memespace, but it seems to me what they didn’t have was very clear reflection on how they got their goals and how that is relevant. I think that might have been hard to explain or examine without the idea of evolution.
Interestingly, I think there used to be a group of people who nominally were dedicated to doing the kind of desire-inferring with an aim at concrete progress and conceptual understanding that I can cheer for, though they didn’t have all that fancy neuroscience knowledge back then. Fun quiz: can you guess which field I’m referring to? I gave you some hints. And… here is the answer I had in mind. (Check this wiki article for the context, though.) Was that your guess? If not, what was?
What’s your point?
(I looked at the article, and at another more specific WP article, without finding anything that looked much like what Luke was saying. Whether you’re aiming to raise the status of the field in question, to discredit Luke or what he’s saying by association with something widely disapproved of, to point out an illuminating parallel, or whatever, I think you need to be much more explicit.)
Mostly it just seemed to me like an interesting connection, especially if the notion of eugenics is generalized to be more explicitly reflective on memetics and multi-level selection—instead of the focus at the individual-biological/organismic (and to a weird extent the racial level) -- at which point it becomes reflexive, even. It has various abstract connections to FAI/CEV. Specifically what seemed cool about the vision of eugenics outlined in the diagram I linked to is that it is reflective, empirical, naturalistic meta-ethics / applied ethics, which I’m not sure went on before that and hasn’t come up again except in some very primitive complex systems and dual inheritance studies as far I know. In hindsight I should not have expected these thoughts to automatically enter peoples’ brains when they saw the diagram I linked to.
I was also hoping that other people could notice similar connections to other fields that might also be non-obviously related to this theme of refining and more effectively applying our models of morality and meta-ethics.
I think I am consistently up against Hofstadter’s law of inferential distances, or something.
Dear Will_Newsome’s brain,
Please update on the above information, or explain more clearly why you do not want to, and in any case please explain why various parts or coalitions of you do not want to change your strategy for communication or do not want to acknowledge that the lack of a changed strategy is indicative of not updating. Once such concerns are out in the open I promise to reflect carefully and explicitly on how best to reach something like a Pareto improvement, obviously with your guidance and partnership at each step of the way.
Sincerely, Will_Newsome’s executive function algorithm that likes to use public commitments as self-bargaining tactics because it read a Less Wrong post that said that was a good idea.
Concur. Will’s brain, please update! I would like to understand Will more often. :)
I thought you may have been talking about the Epicureans.
Yeah, they were actually the second group that came to mind in roughly that memespace, but it seems to me what they didn’t have was very clear reflection on how they got their goals and how that is relevant. I think that might have been hard to explain or examine without the idea of evolution.