More general populace one: The idea that society can be improved or harmed, especially abstract groupings, can’t actually work. That’s because most agents within the proposed group aren’t aligned with each other, so there is no way to improve everyone. There is no real world pointer to the concept of society
This cashes out in 2 important claims:
The AI Alignment field needs more modest goals, like aligning it to a single individual.
It gives a justification to why Western culture works better than Eastern culture: It grudgingly and halfheartedly accepts that the individual matters more than society.
A post that shows why this is the case will be linked below:
You have a some/none/all problem. If every agent has a set of preferences that is disjoint from every other, then there is no pleasing all the people. But that is vanishingly likely, as is every agent having identical preferences...in all likelihood, agents have some preferences in common.
It gives a justification to why Western culture works better than Eastern culture: It grudgingly and halfheartedly accepts that the individual matters more than society.
This is just different tendencies. I’m not sure when and where this notion has appeared in public discourse, but it’s safe to say that both value statements appeal to the individuals in the said culture.
Western culture speaker: “we value individuals!” Western people liked that.
Eastern culture speaker: “we value the group!” Eastern people liked that.
I’m not sure one works better than the other if applied to the other cultural environment though.
I think the distractions of nations competing against each other, which they always have, is blinding people from seeing domestic divisions within its own country. I really doubt the current geopolitical climate has any impact on unifying the people within each country given how public discourse has been carried out in the last few years. It’s like people are punching the air in the comfort of their own homes hoping their punches will hit the people on the other side of the planet.
Eastern culture speaker: “we value the group!” Eastern people liked that.
Uhm, shouldn’t this be “Eastern groups liked that”? I mean, applying this logic consistently to itself, it is completely irrelevant how Eastern individuals feel about these things, as long as the groups are happy...
Or you can say the western groups liked the statement about individuals. When you say a group agrees on a decision, that’s a statistical statement. Here we are asking the individuals of the respective cultures, and we are generalizing the individual responses to “these individuals when added together form this generic preference.”
When you say a group agrees on a decision, that’s a statistical statement.
Ah. My model of “a group says X” is that the leader or an otherwise high-status member of the group says X, and everyone else is too afraid to disagree publicly. (Privately they may either agree, or disagree, or just want to be left alone.)
The idea that a group belief is a statistical statement about the opinions of the individuals already assumes that the (low-status) individuals matter.
That is a very valid concern regarding sampling and group bias in decision theory. This is also why studies in social sciences tend to have a lot of unaccounted confounding variables, which makes it hard to draw broad conclusions from the data. People who read social science papers probably understand the caveats that the general public don’t have the knowledge and experience of. r/science
More general populace one: The idea that society can be improved or harmed, especially abstract groupings, can’t actually work. That’s because most agents within the proposed group aren’t aligned with each other, so there is no way to improve everyone. There is no real world pointer to the concept of society
This cashes out in 2 important claims:
The AI Alignment field needs more modest goals, like aligning it to a single individual.
It gives a justification to why Western culture works better than Eastern culture: It grudgingly and halfheartedly accepts that the individual matters more than society.
A post that shows why this is the case will be linked below:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YYuB8w4nrfWmLzNob/thatcher-s-axiom
You have a some/none/all problem. If every agent has a set of preferences that is disjoint from every other, then there is no pleasing all the people. But that is vanishingly likely, as is every agent having identical preferences...in all likelihood, agents have some preferences in common.
This is just different tendencies. I’m not sure when and where this notion has appeared in public discourse, but it’s safe to say that both value statements appeal to the individuals in the said culture.
Western culture speaker: “we value individuals!” Western people liked that.
Eastern culture speaker: “we value the group!” Eastern people liked that.
I’m not sure one works better than the other if applied to the other cultural environment though.
I think the distractions of nations competing against each other, which they always have, is blinding people from seeing domestic divisions within its own country. I really doubt the current geopolitical climate has any impact on unifying the people within each country given how public discourse has been carried out in the last few years. It’s like people are punching the air in the comfort of their own homes hoping their punches will hit the people on the other side of the planet.
Uhm, shouldn’t this be “Eastern groups liked that”? I mean, applying this logic consistently to itself, it is completely irrelevant how Eastern individuals feel about these things, as long as the groups are happy...
Or you can say the western groups liked the statement about individuals. When you say a group agrees on a decision, that’s a statistical statement. Here we are asking the individuals of the respective cultures, and we are generalizing the individual responses to “these individuals when added together form this generic preference.”
Ah. My model of “a group says X” is that the leader or an otherwise high-status member of the group says X, and everyone else is too afraid to disagree publicly. (Privately they may either agree, or disagree, or just want to be left alone.)
The idea that a group belief is a statistical statement about the opinions of the individuals already assumes that the (low-status) individuals matter.
That is a very valid concern regarding sampling and group bias in decision theory. This is also why studies in social sciences tend to have a lot of unaccounted confounding variables, which makes it hard to draw broad conclusions from the data. People who read social science papers probably understand the caveats that the general public don’t have the knowledge and experience of. r/science