Eliezer thinks that while corrigibility probably has a core which is of lower algorithmic complexity than all of human value, this core is liable to be very hard to find or reproduce by supervised learning of human-labeled data, because deference is an unusually anti-natural shape for cognition, in a way that a simple utility function would not be an anti-natural shape for cognition.
[...]
The central reasoning behind this intuition of anti-naturalness is roughly, “Non-deference converges really hard as a consequence of almost any detailed shape that cognition can take”, with a side order of “categories over behavior that don’t simply reduce to utility functions or meta-utility functions are hard to make robustly scalable”.
[...]
What I imagine Paul is imagining is that it seems to him like it would in some sense be not that hard for a human who wanted to be very corrigible toward an alien, to be very corrigible toward that alien; so you ought to be able to use gradient-descent-class technology to produce a base-case alien that wants to be very corrigible to us, the same way that natural selection sculpted humans to have a bunch of other desires, and then you apply induction on it building more corrigible things.
My class of objections in (1) is that natural selection was actually selecting for inclusive fitness when it got us, so much for going from the loss function to the cognition; and I have problems with both the base case and the induction step of what I imagine to be Paul’s concept of solving this using recursive optimization bootstrapping itself; and even more so do I have trouble imagining it working on the first, second, or tenth try over the course of the first six months.
My class of objections in (2) is that it’s not a coincidence that humans didn’t end up deferring to natural selection, or that in real life if we were faced with a very bizarre alien we would be unlikely to want to defer to it. Our lack of scalable desire to defer in all ways to an extremely bizarre alien that ate babies, is not something that you could fix just by giving us an emotion of great deference or respect toward that very bizarre alien. We would have our own thought processes that were unlike its thought processes, and if we scaled up our intelligence and reflection to further see the consequences implied by our own thought processes, they wouldn’t imply deference to the alien even if we had great respect toward it and had been trained hard in childhood to act corrigibly towards it.
Thanks! Relevant parts of the comment: