I must say I feel rather cheated. When I saw this, I was under the impression that Eliezer had composed this post for Less Wrong, and had posted it to Less Wrong; I assumed that there was therefore some chance he might respond to comments. But that seems not to be the case. (Is it even Eliezer who posted it? Or someone else using his account, as happened, IIRC, with Inadequate Equilibria?)
I, too, would like to know what the purpose of this post is.
I asked Eliezer if it made sense to cross-post this from Arbital, and did the cross-posting when he approved. I’m sorry it wasn’t clear that this was a cross-post! I intended to make this clearer, but my idea was bad (putting the information on the sequence page) and I also implemented it wrong (the sequence didn’t previously display on the top of this post).
This post was originally written as a nontechnical introduction to expected utility theory and coherence arguments. Although it begins in media res stylistically, it doesn’t have any prereqs or context beyond “this is part of a collection of introductory resources covering a wide variety of technical and semitechnical topics.”
Per the first sentence, the main purpose is for this to be a linkable resource for conversations/inquiry about human rationality and conversations/inquiry about AGI:
So we’re talking about how to make good decisions, or the idea of ‘bounded rationality’, or what sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligences might be like; and somebody starts dragging up the concepts of ‘expected utility’ or ‘utility functions’. And before we even ask what those are, we might first ask, Why?
There have been loose plans for a while to cross-post content from Arbital to LW (maybe all of it; maybe just the best or most interesting stuff), but as I mentioned downthread, we’re doing more cross-post experiments sooner than we would have because Arbital’s been having serious performance issues.
Some questions occur to me, which I don’t expect you necessarily to answer at once, but hope you (and/or whoever is responsible for the Arbital content or the decisions to post it to LW) will consider:
In your opinion, does this post (still? ever?) work well as a “linkable resource for conversations about human rationality and … AGI”?
Are there plans (by Eliezer, or by anyone else) to revise this content? Or is it meant to stand unchanged, as a matter of “historical interest” only, so to speak?
Relatedly to #2, is it productive to engage with this post, by commenting, discussing, critiquing? (In any sense other than “it’s fun and/or personally edifying to do so”?) That is: is there anyone “on the other end”, so to speak, who might read (and possibly even participate in) such discussions, and take action (such as writing an updated version of this material, to pick a simple example) as a result?
For whom is this post intended, and by whom? Whose purposes does it serve, whom is it meant to benefit, and who may reasonably judge whether it is serving its purpose?
I believe the intention was for this post to appear as part of a sequence that more clearly situated it as part of a series of re-posts from Arbital, but there were some mix-ups that made the sequence title not show up by default. I agree the current implementation is confusing.
Huh, you’re right: this is just a re-post of an Arbital article.
I must say I feel rather cheated. When I saw this, I was under the impression that Eliezer had composed this post for Less Wrong, and had posted it to Less Wrong; I assumed that there was therefore some chance he might respond to comments. But that seems not to be the case. (Is it even Eliezer who posted it? Or someone else using his account, as happened, IIRC, with Inadequate Equilibria?)
I, too, would like to know what the purpose of this post is.
I asked Eliezer if it made sense to cross-post this from Arbital, and did the cross-posting when he approved. I’m sorry it wasn’t clear that this was a cross-post! I intended to make this clearer, but my idea was bad (putting the information on the sequence page) and I also implemented it wrong (the sequence didn’t previously display on the top of this post).
This post was originally written as a nontechnical introduction to expected utility theory and coherence arguments. Although it begins in media res stylistically, it doesn’t have any prereqs or context beyond “this is part of a collection of introductory resources covering a wide variety of technical and semitechnical topics.”
Per the first sentence, the main purpose is for this to be a linkable resource for conversations/inquiry about human rationality and conversations/inquiry about AGI:
There have been loose plans for a while to cross-post content from Arbital to LW (maybe all of it; maybe just the best or most interesting stuff), but as I mentioned downthread, we’re doing more cross-post experiments sooner than we would have because Arbital’s been having serious performance issues.
I see, thanks. That does explain things.
Some questions occur to me, which I don’t expect you necessarily to answer at once, but hope you (and/or whoever is responsible for the Arbital content or the decisions to post it to LW) will consider:
In your opinion, does this post (still? ever?) work well as a “linkable resource for conversations about human rationality and … AGI”?
Are there plans (by Eliezer, or by anyone else) to revise this content? Or is it meant to stand unchanged, as a matter of “historical interest” only, so to speak?
Relatedly to #2, is it productive to engage with this post, by commenting, discussing, critiquing? (In any sense other than “it’s fun and/or personally edifying to do so”?) That is: is there anyone “on the other end”, so to speak, who might read (and possibly even participate in) such discussions, and take action (such as writing an updated version of this material, to pick a simple example) as a result?
For whom is this post intended, and by whom? Whose purposes does it serve, whom is it meant to benefit, and who may reasonably judge whether it is serving its purpose?
Presumably to keep morale up by making it look like the rightful Caliph is still alive and producing output.
I believe the intention was for this post to appear as part of a sequence that more clearly situated it as part of a series of re-posts from Arbital, but there were some mix-ups that made the sequence title not show up by default. I agree the current implementation is confusing.