I agree that I’m not “Eliezer”, but I don’t see what was unclear about saying that “Setting someone else’s actions” is not the same as “Predicating your actions on [reliable expectation of] someone else’s actions’ predication on [reliable expectation of] your actions”.
I agree that it is not literally correct to say that P ⇔ (Q ⇔ P) is a causal network, and that was an error of imprecision on my part. My point (in the remark you refer to) was that the decision theory I stated in the article, which you have lossily represented as P ⇔ (Q ⇔ P), obeys the rules of causal equivalence, not logical equivalence. (Applying the rules of the latter to the former results in such errors as believing that a Clippy haphazardly making paperclips implies that a paperclip truck might have overturned, or that setting others’ actions is the same as setting your actions to depend on others’ actions.)
A more rigorous specification of the decision theory corresponding to
“I would cooperate with you if and only if (you would cooperate with me if and only if I would cooperate with you).” would involve more than just P ⇔ (Q ⇔ P).
I haven’t built up the full formalism of humans credibly signaling their decision theories in this discussion, involving the roles of expectations, because that wasn’t the point of the article; it’s just to show that there are cooperation-favoring signals you can give that would favor a global move toward cooperation if you could make the signal significantly more reliable. If that point more heavily depended on stating the formalism, I would have gone into more detail on it in the discussion, if not the article.
I agree that I’m not “Eliezer”, but I don’t see what was unclear about saying that “Setting someone else’s actions” is not the same as “Predicating your actions on [reliable expectation of] someone else’s actions’ predication on [reliable expectation of] your actions”.
This is clearer, and I now think that I understand what you meant. You’re saying that humans should signal
I will cooperate with you if and only if I expect that (you will cooperate with me if and only if you expect that I will cooperate with you).
Here, the “if and only if”s can be treated as material biconditionals, but the “expect that” operators prevent the logical reduction to “you will cooperate with me” from going through.
There is a whole literature on this basic issue within analytic philosophy that is, in some sense, aimed at making that kind of logical reduction “go through”.
The efforts grew out of attempts to logically model natural language statements about “propositional attitudes”. Part of the trick is that predicates like “I believe...” or ”...implies...” or “It is possible...” generally use a sentence that has been “that quoted” (IE quoted using the word “that”).
“I believe that one plus one sums to two.”
“Tyrrell believes that Clippy is not Eliezer.”
“It is possible that Clippy is truly an artificial general intelligence.”
“Jennifer said that that quoting is complicated.”
“That that that that that person referred to, was spoken, explains much.”
Precisely how that-quoting works, and how it logically interacts with the various things that can be predicated of a proposition is, as far as I understand, still an area of active research. One of the primary methods in this area of research is to work out the logical translation of an english test sentence and then see if changes to the logical entailments are predictably explained when various substitutions occur. Sentences where seemingly innocuous substitutions raise trouble are called intensional contexts.
(NOTE: My understanding is that intension is meant here as the “opposite” of extension so that the mechanisms hiding between the “words” and the “extensive meaning” are being relied on in a way that makes the extensional definition of the words not as important as might be naively expected. Terminological confusion is possible because a sentence like “Alice intends that Bob be killed” could be both intensional (not relying solely on extensive meaning) and intentional (about the subject of planning, intent, and/or mindful action).)
Part of the difficulty in this area is that most of the mental machinery appears to be subconscious, and no one (to my knowledge) has found a single intelligible mechanism for the general human faculty. For example, there seem to be at least two different ways for noun phrases to “refer” in ways that can be logically modeled (until counter examples are found?) that are called “de re reference” or “de dicto reference”… unless the latitudinarians are right :-P
As an added layer of complexity, I’m not sure if these issues are human universal or particular to certain cultures with certain languages. I’ve noticed that in spanish there is also “that quoting” except they use “que” (literally “what”) instead of “that” but they have some idioms using “que” whose translations into english don’t involve a “that”. For example “Creo que si” translates idiomatically to “I think so” but in seems literally to translate as “I believe that yes”.
In older english I’ve seen “what” used in ways that made me think it might sometimes have been used to quote intensional sentences, and then there’s weird variations and interactions which just make the problem even more grotty:
“I believe what I believe.”
“I believe that I believe.”
“I believe that which I believe.”
Which isn’t necessarily helpful here, but perhaps it provides some reading material and key words for future efforts to deal with logically modeling complex statements. Generally the solutions I’ve seen for belief involve added terms for language parsing into sentences, so that the person who is said to believe something is modeled as believing a certain sentence while having certain “word-to-actual-object mappings” in operation as something like their grounded (though possibly mistaken) mental rolodex.
I agree that I’m not “Eliezer”, but I don’t see what was unclear about saying that “Setting someone else’s actions” is not the same as “Predicating your actions on [reliable expectation of] someone else’s actions’ predication on [reliable expectation of] your actions”.
I agree that it is not literally correct to say that P ⇔ (Q ⇔ P) is a causal network, and that was an error of imprecision on my part. My point (in the remark you refer to) was that the decision theory I stated in the article, which you have lossily represented as P ⇔ (Q ⇔ P), obeys the rules of causal equivalence, not logical equivalence. (Applying the rules of the latter to the former results in such errors as believing that a Clippy haphazardly making paperclips implies that a paperclip truck might have overturned, or that setting others’ actions is the same as setting your actions to depend on others’ actions.)
A more rigorous specification of the decision theory corresponding to “I would cooperate with you if and only if (you would cooperate with me if and only if I would cooperate with you).” would involve more than just P ⇔ (Q ⇔ P).
I haven’t built up the full formalism of humans credibly signaling their decision theories in this discussion, involving the roles of expectations, because that wasn’t the point of the article; it’s just to show that there are cooperation-favoring signals you can give that would favor a global move toward cooperation if you could make the signal significantly more reliable. If that point more heavily depended on stating the formalism, I would have gone into more detail on it in the discussion, if not the article.
This is clearer, and I now think that I understand what you meant. You’re saying that humans should signal
Here, the “if and only if”s can be treated as material biconditionals, but the “expect that” operators prevent the logical reduction to “you will cooperate with me” from going through.
There is a whole literature on this basic issue within analytic philosophy that is, in some sense, aimed at making that kind of logical reduction “go through”.
The efforts grew out of attempts to logically model natural language statements about “propositional attitudes”. Part of the trick is that predicates like “I believe...” or ”...implies...” or “It is possible...” generally use a sentence that has been “that quoted” (IE quoted using the word “that”).
Precisely how that-quoting works, and how it logically interacts with the various things that can be predicated of a proposition is, as far as I understand, still an area of active research. One of the primary methods in this area of research is to work out the logical translation of an english test sentence and then see if changes to the logical entailments are predictably explained when various substitutions occur. Sentences where seemingly innocuous substitutions raise trouble are called intensional contexts.
(NOTE: My understanding is that intension is meant here as the “opposite” of extension so that the mechanisms hiding between the “words” and the “extensive meaning” are being relied on in a way that makes the extensional definition of the words not as important as might be naively expected. Terminological confusion is possible because a sentence like “Alice intends that Bob be killed” could be both intensional (not relying solely on extensive meaning) and intentional (about the subject of planning, intent, and/or mindful action).)
Part of the difficulty in this area is that most of the mental machinery appears to be subconscious, and no one (to my knowledge) has found a single intelligible mechanism for the general human faculty. For example, there seem to be at least two different ways for noun phrases to “refer” in ways that can be logically modeled (until counter examples are found?) that are called “de re reference” or “de dicto reference”… unless the latitudinarians are right :-P
As an added layer of complexity, I’m not sure if these issues are human universal or particular to certain cultures with certain languages. I’ve noticed that in spanish there is also “that quoting” except they use “que” (literally “what”) instead of “that” but they have some idioms using “que” whose translations into english don’t involve a “that”. For example “Creo que si” translates idiomatically to “I think so” but in seems literally to translate as “I believe that yes”.
In older english I’ve seen “what” used in ways that made me think it might sometimes have been used to quote intensional sentences, and then there’s weird variations and interactions which just make the problem even more grotty:
Which isn’t necessarily helpful here, but perhaps it provides some reading material and key words for future efforts to deal with logically modeling complex statements. Generally the solutions I’ve seen for belief involve added terms for language parsing into sentences, so that the person who is said to believe something is modeled as believing a certain sentence while having certain “word-to-actual-object mappings” in operation as something like their grounded (though possibly mistaken) mental rolodex.