I actually don’t think that Alice could help a (sufficiently alien) alien. She needs an alien theory of mind to understand what the alien wants, how they would extrapolate, how to help that extrapolation without manipulating it, and so on. Without that, she’s just projecting human assumptions in alien behaviour and statements.
She needs an alien theory of mind to understand what the alien wants
Absolutely, I would think that the first order of business would be to learn that alien theory of mind (and be very conservative until that’s done).
Maybe you’re saying that this alien theory of mind is unlearnable, even for a very intelligent Alice? That seems pretty surprising, and I don’t feel the force of that intuition (despite the Occam’s razor impossibility result).
I actually don’t think that Alice could help a (sufficiently alien) alien. She needs an alien theory of mind to understand what the alien wants, how they would extrapolate, how to help that extrapolation without manipulating it, and so on. Without that, she’s just projecting human assumptions in alien behaviour and statements.
Absolutely, I would think that the first order of business would be to learn that alien theory of mind (and be very conservative until that’s done).
Maybe you’re saying that this alien theory of mind is unlearnable, even for a very intelligent Alice? That seems pretty surprising, and I don’t feel the force of that intuition (despite the Occam’s razor impossibility result).
Developing this idea a bit: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kMJxwCZ4mc9w4ezbs/how-an-alien-theory-of-mind-might-be-unlearnable