It is possible to be mistaken about your own utility function.
For sure.
It’s entirely consistent for the vast majority of humans to have a large shared portion of their built-in utility function (built-in by their genes), even though many of them seemingly want to do bad things
I’d agree if humans were like dishwashers. There are templates for dishwashers, ways they are supposed to work. If you came across a broken dishwasher, there could be a case for the dishwasher to be repaired, to go back to “what it’s supposed to be”.
However, that is because there is some external authority (exasparated humans who want to fix their damn dishwasher, dirty dishes are piling up) conceiving of and enforcing such a purpose. The fact that genes and the environment shape utility functions in similar ways is a description, not a prescription. It would not be a case for any “broken” human to go back to “what his genes would want him to be doing”. Just like it wouldn’t be a case against brain uploading.
Some of the discussion seems to me like saying that “deep down in every flawed human, there is ‘a figure of light’, in our community ‘a rational agent following uniform human values with slight deviations accounting for ice-cream taste’, we just need to dig it up”. There is only your brain. With its values. There is no external standard to call its values flawed. There are external standards (rationality = winning) to better its epistemic and instrumental rationality, but those can help the serial killer and the GiveWell activist equally. (Also, both of those can be ‘mistaken’ about their values.)
For sure.
I’d agree if humans were like dishwashers. There are templates for dishwashers, ways they are supposed to work. If you came across a broken dishwasher, there could be a case for the dishwasher to be repaired, to go back to “what it’s supposed to be”.
However, that is because there is some external authority (exasparated humans who want to fix their damn dishwasher, dirty dishes are piling up) conceiving of and enforcing such a purpose. The fact that genes and the environment shape utility functions in similar ways is a description, not a prescription. It would not be a case for any “broken” human to go back to “what his genes would want him to be doing”. Just like it wouldn’t be a case against brain uploading.
Some of the discussion seems to me like saying that “deep down in every flawed human, there is ‘a figure of light’, in our community ‘a rational agent following uniform human values with slight deviations accounting for ice-cream taste’, we just need to dig it up”. There is only your brain. With its values. There is no external standard to call its values flawed. There are external standards (rationality = winning) to better its epistemic and instrumental rationality, but those can help the serial killer and the GiveWell activist equally. (Also, both of those can be ‘mistaken’ about their values.)