But that’s not general intelligence; general intelligence requires considering a wider range of problems holistically, and drawing connections among them.
ArisC
Karma: 30
Not an explicit map; I’m raising the possibility that capability leads to malleable goals.
I don’t see how this relates to the Orthogonality Thesis.
It relates to it because it’s an explicit component of it, no? The point being that if there is only one way of general cognition to work, perhaps that way by default involves self-reflection, which brings us to the second point...
Do you believe that an agent which terminally values tiny molecular squiggles would “question its goals and motivations” and conclude that creating squiggles is somehow “unethical”?
Yes, that’s what I’m suggesting; not saying it’s definitely true; but it’s not obviously wrong, either. Haven’t read the sequence, but I’ll try to find the time to do so—but basically I question the wording ‘terminally values’. I think that perhaps general intelligence tends to avoid valuing anything terminally (what do we humans value terminally?)
I think reflective stability, as it is usually used on LW, means something more narrow than how you’re interpreting it
Possibly, but I’m responding to its definition in the OT post I linked to, in which it’s used to mean that agents will avoid making changes that may affect their dedication to their goals.
A rejection of the Orthogonality Thesis
Of course they are wrong. Because if you examine everything at the meta-level, and forget about being pragmatic, you will starve.
I haven’t posted the question there.
For the love of… problem solved = the problem I asked for people to help me solve. I.e. finding metrics. If you don’t want to help, fine. But as I said, being inane in attempt to appear smart is just stupid, counterproductive and frankly annoying.
Look, someone asks for your help with something. There are two legitimate responses: a) you actually help them achieve their goal or b) you say, “sorry, not my problem”. Your response is to be pedantic about the question itself. What good does that do?
My metrics are likely to be quite different from yours
And that’s fine! If everyone here gave me a list of 5-10 metrics instead of pedantic responses, I’d be able to choose a few I like, and boom, problem solved.
The job was, evaluate a presidency. What metrics would you, as an intelligent person, use to evaluate a presidency. How much simpler can I make it? I didn’t ask you to read my mind or anything like that.
It’s easy to generate tons of metrics, what’s hard is generating a relatively small list that does the job. If you are too lazy to contribute to the discussion, fine. But contributing just pedantic remarks is a waste of everyone’s time.
My parents always told me “we only compare ourselves to the best”. I am only making these criticisms because rationalists self-define as, well, rational. And to be, rationality also has to do with achieving something. Pedantry, sophistry &c are unwelcome distractions.
I apologize for assuming you meant something semi-reasonable by what you wrote, I will refrain from making that assumption in the future.
Okay, let’s go into “talking to a 5yo mode”. We have these facts: a) the vast majority of people use “gender inequality” to refer to the fact that women are disadvantaged. b) terms like this are defined by common usage. c) since common usage means “women are disadvantaged”, the reasonable think to do is that when a random person utters the phrase, they refer to that. Whether women are in fact disadvantaged doesn’t matter. What matters is what information I was trying to convey. I used a common phrase. It’s not rocket science.
And why would this be obviously desirable? I didn’t say it would be. I said it would mean feminists would have to admit Trump did well by women.
So “women are more equal than men” it is. I have not done an extensive analysis to see in which fields men are disadvantaged and in which fields women are, then weighted them by importance to determine what’s the fact here. I assume that neither have you. So to be overly aggressive with people who believe in the common knowledge that women are disadvantaged (again, even if that isn’t so), is not productive. It’s pedantic, juvenile. It doesn’t achieve anything. If you just want to shout “MEN ARE OPPRESSED!!!”, fine. Don’t be surprised when no-one takes you seriously.
I was being facetious, of course I still believe in rationality. But you know, I was reading Slate Star Codex, which basically represents the rationalist community as an amazing group of people committed to truth and honesty and the scientific approach—and though I appreciate how open these discussions are, I am a bit disappointed at how pedantic some of the comments are.
Jesus Christ. This is beyond derailed. For what it’s worth, gjm is right, people are either purposefully misrepresenting what I wrote (in which case they are pedantic and juvenile) or they didn’t understand what I meant (in which case, you know, go out and interact with people outside your bubble).
And anyway—the reason I want to measure progress towards closing the gap where women have it worse is so that I can fairly evaluate feminist arguments about Trump in 4 years time. If in 4 years time it turns out that women earn more than men across the board, that >50% of governors are women and that women are CEOs of like 80% of the Fortune 500, you will be able to say “rhetoric aside, it looks like Trump actually helped women”.
Going for “aha! Trump improved men’s lot in these fields where they were disadvantaged” will only increase polarisation. Maybe worth tracking, in the name of truth and science; but again, not what I was going for.
Guys, come on. I am not setting up a formal tribunal for Trump. I want your measured opinions. Don’t let’s be pedantic.
Unfortunately, I cannot read minds.
But you can read, right? Because I wrote “I’d like to ask for suggestions on proxies for evaluating [...]”. I didn’t say “I want suggestions on how to go about deciding the suitability of a metric”.
And I am not saying that I agree with that majority view. All I am saying is that since you know that, to sort of pretend that it’s not the case is a bit strange.
You in particular did provide metrics, so I am not complaining! Although, to be perfectly honest, I do think your delivery is sort of passive aggressive or disingenuous… you know that nearly everyone, when discussing gender inequality, use the term to mean that women are disadvantaged. You provide metrics to evaluate improvement in areas where men are disadvantaged—i.e. your underlying assumption/hypothesis is the opposite of everyone else, but you don’t acknowledge it.
Regardless of what I do, I expect the program to provide a response at the end. Like I said in response to another comment—if you want to “debug” my thinking process, absolutely fair enough; but provide the result. What you are doing, to carry on your analogy, is to say “hmm there may be a bug there. But I won’t tell you what the program will give as an output even if you fix it”.
Even worse, imagine your compsci professor asks you to write code to simulate objects falling from a skyscraper. What you are doing then here is telling me “aaah, but you are trying to simulate this using gravity! That is, of course, not a universal solution, so you should try relativity instead”.
To be fair, I’m not saying it’s obviously wrong; I’m saying it’s not obviously true, which is what many people seem to believe!