Quintin—yes, indeed, one of the reasons I was excited about Shard Theory was that it has these different emphases you mention (e.g. ‘multi-optimizer dynamics, values handshakes among shards, origins of self-reflective modeling, origins of biases, moral reflection as shard deliberation’), which I thought might actually be useful to develop and integrate with in evolutionary psychology and other branches of psychology, not just in AI alignment.
So I wanted to see if Shard Theory could be made a little more consistent with behavior genetics and ev psych theories and findings, so it could have more impact in those fields. (Both fields can get a little prickly about people ignoring their theories and findings, since they’ve been demonized for ideological reasons since the 1970s and 1990s, respectively).
Indeed, you might find quite a few similarities and analogies between certain elements of Shard Theory and certain traditional notions in evolutionary psychology, such as domain-specificity, adaptive hypocrisy and adaptive self-deception, internal conflicts between different adaptive strategies, satisficing of fitness proxies as instrumental convergent goals rather than attempting to maximize fitness itself as a terminal value, etc. Shard Theory can potentially offer some new perspectives on those traditional concepts, in the light of modern reinforcement learning theory in machine learning.
Quintin—yes, indeed, one of the reasons I was excited about Shard Theory was that it has these different emphases you mention (e.g. ‘multi-optimizer dynamics, values handshakes among shards, origins of self-reflective modeling, origins of biases, moral reflection as shard deliberation’), which I thought might actually be useful to develop and integrate with in evolutionary psychology and other branches of psychology, not just in AI alignment.
So I wanted to see if Shard Theory could be made a little more consistent with behavior genetics and ev psych theories and findings, so it could have more impact in those fields. (Both fields can get a little prickly about people ignoring their theories and findings, since they’ve been demonized for ideological reasons since the 1970s and 1990s, respectively).
Indeed, you might find quite a few similarities and analogies between certain elements of Shard Theory and certain traditional notions in evolutionary psychology, such as domain-specificity, adaptive hypocrisy and adaptive self-deception, internal conflicts between different adaptive strategies, satisficing of fitness proxies as instrumental convergent goals rather than attempting to maximize fitness itself as a terminal value, etc. Shard Theory can potentially offer some new perspectives on those traditional concepts, in the light of modern reinforcement learning theory in machine learning.