I’d never actually heard of Quine’s indeterminacy of translation before. It sounds interesting, so thank you for that.
But I don’t understand how Quine’s arguement leads to the next step. It sounds discrete, absolute, and has no effect on the outward behaviour of entities. And later you use some statements about the difficulty of translation between entities which sure sound continuous to me.
If I understand correctly, by “discreteness” you mean that it simply says that one agent can know neither the meaning of symbols used by another agent nor the “degree” of grokking the meaning. Just cannot say anything.
This is correct, but the underlying reason why this is correct is the same as why solipsism or the simulation hypothesis cannot be disproven (or proven!).
So yeah, I think there is no tangible relationship to the alignment problem, except that it corroborates that we couldn’t have 100% (literally, probability=1) certainty of alignment or safety of whatever we create, but it was obvious even without this philosophical argument.
So, I removed that paragraph about Quine’s argument from the post.
I’d never actually heard of Quine’s indeterminacy of translation before. It sounds interesting, so thank you for that.
But I don’t understand how Quine’s arguement leads to the next step. It sounds discrete, absolute, and has no effect on the outward behaviour of entities. And later you use some statements about the difficulty of translation between entities which sure sound continuous to me.
If I understand correctly, by “discreteness” you mean that it simply says that one agent can know neither the meaning of symbols used by another agent nor the “degree” of grokking the meaning. Just cannot say anything.
This is correct, but the underlying reason why this is correct is the same as why solipsism or the simulation hypothesis cannot be disproven (or proven!).
So yeah, I think there is no tangible relationship to the alignment problem, except that it corroborates that we couldn’t have 100% (literally, probability=1) certainty of alignment or safety of whatever we create, but it was obvious even without this philosophical argument.
So, I removed that paragraph about Quine’s argument from the post.