devoting your life to philosophy in the quest of achieving a technical, non-philosphical goal
Less Wrong reads like philosophy, but that’s because it’s made up of words. As I understand it, Eliezer’s real quest is writing an ideal decision theory, set of goals, and rigorously proving the safety of self-modifying code for optimizing that decision theory. All of this philosophy is necessary in order to settle down on what it even means to have an ideal decision theory or set of goals.
Less Wrong reads like philosophy, but that’s because it’s made up of words. As I understand it, Eliezer’s real quest is writing an ideal decision theory, set of goals, and rigorously proving the safety of self-modifying code for optimizing that decision theory. All of this philosophy is necessary in order to settle down on what it even means to have an ideal decision theory or set of goals.