pjeby might be being a bit light-handed when he dismisses concerns over changing preferences as “irrational”
I didn’t (explicitly) dismiss those concerns; I said that away-from reasoning has a higher rationality standard to meet, in part because it’s likely to be vague.
I wasn’t even thinking about preference-changing being dangerous, because our preferences are largely independent and mostly don’t “auto-update” when we change one—there’s a LOT of redundancy. So if a specific change isn’t compatible with your overall morality, you’ll note the dissonance, and change your preferences again to tune things better.
Science-fictional evidence of preference-changing is about as far off as science-fictional evidence of AI behavior… and for the same reasons. The built-in models our brain uses to understand minds and their preferences, are simpler than the models the brain uses to create a mind… and its preferences.
Offtopic: Shortly after you posted this, it appears that someone undertook a massive vote-down campaign, systematically searching for every comment I’ve ever posted to LW, and voting it down by 1. I don’t know if, or how these events are correlated.
But, if the person who undertook that campaign was trying to send me a message of some sort, they neglected to include any actionable information content. I only noticed because the karma number suddenly and dramatically changed when I clicked through from one page to another, reading this morning’s new comments.… and that sudden large drop was weird enough to make me investigate.
Otherwise, I probably never would’ve been aware of their action, as an action, let alone as any sort of feedback! If you want to communicate something to someone, it’s probably best to be more explicit. Or, in the alternative, contribute a patch to the LW software to let you filter out posts by people you don’t like, or perhaps the entire subthreads they participate in.
I wish this place worked like StackOverflow, where you can only downvote once you have 100 karma; that would probably reduce the background noise in the voting …
I didn’t (explicitly) dismiss those concerns; I said that away-from reasoning has a higher rationality standard to meet, in part because it’s likely to be vague.
I wasn’t even thinking about preference-changing being dangerous, because our preferences are largely independent and mostly don’t “auto-update” when we change one—there’s a LOT of redundancy. So if a specific change isn’t compatible with your overall morality, you’ll note the dissonance, and change your preferences again to tune things better.
Science-fictional evidence of preference-changing is about as far off as science-fictional evidence of AI behavior… and for the same reasons. The built-in models our brain uses to understand minds and their preferences, are simpler than the models the brain uses to create a mind… and its preferences.
Offtopic: Shortly after you posted this, it appears that someone undertook a massive vote-down campaign, systematically searching for every comment I’ve ever posted to LW, and voting it down by 1. I don’t know if, or how these events are correlated.
But, if the person who undertook that campaign was trying to send me a message of some sort, they neglected to include any actionable information content. I only noticed because the karma number suddenly and dramatically changed when I clicked through from one page to another, reading this morning’s new comments.… and that sudden large drop was weird enough to make me investigate.
Otherwise, I probably never would’ve been aware of their action, as an action, let alone as any sort of feedback! If you want to communicate something to someone, it’s probably best to be more explicit. Or, in the alternative, contribute a patch to the LW software to let you filter out posts by people you don’t like, or perhaps the entire subthreads they participate in.
Well, it wasn’t me :)
I wish this place worked like StackOverflow, where you can only downvote once you have 100 karma; that would probably reduce the background noise in the voting …