going into any detail about it doesn’t feel like a useful way to spend weirdness points.
That may be a reasonable consequentialist decision given your goals, but it’s in tension with your claim in the post to be disregarding the advice of people telling you to “hoard status and credibility points, and [not] spend any on being weird.”
Whatever they’re trying to do, there’s almost certainly a better way to do it than by keeping Matrix-like human body farms running.
You’ve completely ignored the arguments from Paul Christiano that Ryan linked to at the top of the thread. (In case you missed it: 12.)
The claim under consideration is not that “keeping Matrix-like human body farms running” arises as an instrumental subgoal of “[w]hatever [AIs are] trying to do.” (If you didn’t have time to read the linked arguments, you could have just said that instead of inventing an obvious strawman.)
Rather, the claim is that it’s plausible that the AI we build (or some agency that has decision-theoretic bargaining power with it) cares about humans enough to spend some tiny fraction of the cosmic endowment on our welfare. (Compare to how humans care enough about nature preservation and animal welfare to spend some resources on it, even though it’s a tiny fraction of what our civilization is doing.)
Maybe you think that’s implausible, but if so, there should be a counterargument explaining why Christiano is wrong. As Ryan notes, Yudkowsky seems to believe that some scenarios in which an agency with bargaining power cares about humans are plausible, describing one example of such as “validly incorporat[ing] most all the hopes and fears and uncertainties that should properly be involved, without getting into any weirdness that I don’t expect Earthlings to think about validly.” I regard this statement as undermining your claim in the post that MIRI’s “reputation as straight shooters [...] remains intact.” Withholding information because you don’t trust your audience to reason validly (!!) is not at all the behavior of a “straight shooter”.
I think it makes sense to state the more direct threat-model of literal extinction; though I am also a little confused by the citing of weirdness points… I would’ve said that it makes the whole conversation more complex in a way that (I believe) everyone would reliably end up thinking was not a productive use of time.
(Expanding on this a little: I think that literal extinction is a likely default outcome, and most people who are newly coming to this topic would want to know that this is even in the hypothesis-space and find that to be key information. I think if I said “also maybe they later simulate us in weird configurations like pets for a day every billion years while experiencing insane things” they would not respond “ah, never mind then, this subject is no longer a very big issue”, they would be more like “I would’ve preferred that you had factored this element out of our discussion so far, we spent a lot of time on it yet it still seems to me like the extinction event being on the table is the primary thing that I want to debate”.)
Withholding information because you don’t trust your audience to reason validly (!!) is not at all the behavior of a “straight shooter”.
Hmm, I’m not sure I exactly buy this. I think you should probably follow something like onion honesty which can involve intentionally simplifying your message to something you expect will give the audience more true views. I think you should lean on the side of stating things, but still, sometimes stating a thing which is true can be clearly distracting and confusing and thus you shouldn’t.
That may be a reasonable consequentialist decision given your goals, but it’s in tension with your claim in the post to be disregarding the advice of people telling you to “hoard status and credibility points, and [not] spend any on being weird.”
You’ve completely ignored the arguments from Paul Christiano that Ryan linked to at the top of the thread. (In case you missed it: 1 2.)
The claim under consideration is not that “keeping Matrix-like human body farms running” arises as an instrumental subgoal of “[w]hatever [AIs are] trying to do.” (If you didn’t have time to read the linked arguments, you could have just said that instead of inventing an obvious strawman.)
Rather, the claim is that it’s plausible that the AI we build (or some agency that has decision-theoretic bargaining power with it) cares about humans enough to spend some tiny fraction of the cosmic endowment on our welfare. (Compare to how humans care enough about nature preservation and animal welfare to spend some resources on it, even though it’s a tiny fraction of what our civilization is doing.)
Maybe you think that’s implausible, but if so, there should be a counterargument explaining why Christiano is wrong. As Ryan notes, Yudkowsky seems to believe that some scenarios in which an agency with bargaining power cares about humans are plausible, describing one example of such as “validly incorporat[ing] most all the hopes and fears and uncertainties that should properly be involved, without getting into any weirdness that I don’t expect Earthlings to think about validly.” I regard this statement as undermining your claim in the post that MIRI’s “reputation as straight shooters [...] remains intact.” Withholding information because you don’t trust your audience to reason validly (!!) is not at all the behavior of a “straight shooter”.
I think it makes sense to state the more direct threat-model of literal extinction; though I am also a little confused by the citing of weirdness points… I would’ve said that it makes the whole conversation more complex in a way that (I believe) everyone would reliably end up thinking was not a productive use of time.
(Expanding on this a little: I think that literal extinction is a likely default outcome, and most people who are newly coming to this topic would want to know that this is even in the hypothesis-space and find that to be key information. I think if I said “also maybe they later simulate us in weird configurations like pets for a day every billion years while experiencing insane things” they would not respond “ah, never mind then, this subject is no longer a very big issue”, they would be more like “I would’ve preferred that you had factored this element out of our discussion so far, we spent a lot of time on it yet it still seems to me like the extinction event being on the table is the primary thing that I want to debate”.)
Hmm, I’m not sure I exactly buy this. I think you should probably follow something like onion honesty which can involve intentionally simplifying your message to something you expect will give the audience more true views. I think you should lean on the side of stating things, but still, sometimes stating a thing which is true can be clearly distracting and confusing and thus you shouldn’t.
Passing the onion test is better than not passing it, but I think the relevant standard is having intent to inform. There’s a difference between trying to share relevant information in the hopes that the audience will integrate it with their own knowledge and use it to make better decisions, and selectively sharing information in the hopes of persuading the audience to make the decision you want them to make.
An evidence-filtering clever arguer can pass the onion test (by not omitting information that the audience would be surprised to learn was omitted) and pass the test of not technically lying (by not making false statements) while failing to make a rational argument in which the stated reasons are the real reasons.
Man I just want to say I appreciate you following up on each subthread and noting where you agree/disagree, it feels earnestly truthseeky to me.