Yes, I agree that this conditional statement is obvious. But while we’re on the general topic of whether Earth will be kept alive, it would be nice to see some engagement with Paul Christiano’s arguments (which Carl Shulman “agree[s] with [...] approximately in full”) that superintelligences might care about what happens to you a little bit, articulated in a comment thread on Soares’s “But Why Would the AI Kill Us?” and another thread on “Cosmopolitan Values Don’t Come Free”,
Nate Soares engaged extensively with this in reasonable-seeming ways that I’d thus expect Eliezer Yudkowsky to mostly agree with. Mostly it seems like a disagreement where Paul Christiano doesn’t really have a model of what realistically causes good outcomes and so he’s really uncertain, whereas Soares has a proper model and so is less uncertain.
But you can’t really argue with someone whose main opinion is “I don’t know”, since “I don’t know” is just garbage. He’s gotta at least present some new powerful observable forces, or reject some of the forces presented, rather than postulating that maybe there’s an unobserved kindness force that arbitrarily explains all the kindness that we see.
It’s totally wrong that you can’t argue against someone who says “I don’t know”, you argue against them by showing how your model fits the data and how any plausible competing model either doesn’t fit or shares the salient features of yours. It’s bizarre to describe “I don’t know” as “garbage” in general, because it is the correct stance to take when neither your prior nor evidence sufficiently constrain the distribution of plausibilities. Paul obviously didn’t posit an “unobserved kindness force” because he was specifically describing the observation that humans are kind. I think Paul and Nate had a very productive disagreement in that thread and this seems like a wildly reductive mischaracterization of it.
Nate Soares engaged extensively with this in reasonable-seeming ways that I’d thus expect Eliezer Yudkowsky to mostly agree with. Mostly it seems like a disagreement where Paul Christiano doesn’t really have a model of what realistically causes good outcomes and so he’s really uncertain, whereas Soares has a proper model and so is less uncertain.
But you can’t really argue with someone whose main opinion is “I don’t know”, since “I don’t know” is just garbage. He’s gotta at least present some new powerful observable forces, or reject some of the forces presented, rather than postulating that maybe there’s an unobserved kindness force that arbitrarily explains all the kindness that we see.
It’s totally wrong that you can’t argue against someone who says “I don’t know”, you argue against them by showing how your model fits the data and how any plausible competing model either doesn’t fit or shares the salient features of yours. It’s bizarre to describe “I don’t know” as “garbage” in general, because it is the correct stance to take when neither your prior nor evidence sufficiently constrain the distribution of plausibilities. Paul obviously didn’t posit an “unobserved kindness force” because he was specifically describing the observation that humans are kind. I think Paul and Nate had a very productive disagreement in that thread and this seems like a wildly reductive mischaracterization of it.
But this assumes a model should aim to fit all data, which is a waste of effort.
I’m confused about what you mean & how it relates to what I said.