This is a late reply, but in some societies, intentionally not killing your enemy is the point. See counting coup in the Americas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_coup
If both sides are obeying a warrior code that lets you gain prestige but limits lethality, then you don’t want to defect by escalating the lethality of attacks, because then your enemies might too. Warrior codes are often part of a prisoners dilemma.
Put a scarf or neck warmer over your mouth. Your throat will thank you. If that’s too warm, you can use one of those little medical masks or chew a piece of gum.
P.S. I stand by everything I said, but I’m pretty sure I only finished the reply so I could make an Alienizer pun.
To explain my perspective, let me turn your example around by using a fictional alien species called humans. Instead of spending their childhoods contemplating the holy key, these humans would spend some of their childhoods being taught to recognize a simple shape with three sides, called a ‘triangle’.
To them, when the blob forms a holy key shape, it would mean nothing, but if it formed a triangle they would recognize it immediately!
Your theory becomes simpler when you have a triangle, a key, a lock that accepts a triangle, and lock that accepts a holy key. The key and the triangle are the theories and therefore feel intrinsic. The locks (our brains) are the reality and therefore feel extrinsic.
We want to have a true theory of morality (A true holy key ;)). But the only tool we have to deduce the shape of the key is our own moral intuitions. Alieneizer’s theory of meta ethics, is that you need to look at the evidence until you have a theory that is satisfying on reflection and at no point require you to eat babies or anything like that. Some people find the bottom up approach to ethics unsatisfying, but we’ve been trying the top down approach of: propose a morality system, then see if it works perfectly in the real world for a long time without success.
I think this should satisfy your intuitions, like how our brains seem to accept a morality key because it is a lock, morality not changing even if your mind changes (because your mind will fit a new key), how our morality was shaped by evolution but also somehow both abstract and real, and why I think that calling Alieneizer a relativist is silly. He made it his job to figure out if morality is triangle shaped, key shaped, or 4th dimensional croissant shaped so he could make an AI with that shaped ethics.
Humans value some things more than others. Survival is the bedrock human value (yourself, your family, your children, your species). Followed by things like pleasure and the lives of others and the lives of animals. Every human weighs the things a little differently, and we’re all bad at the math. But on average most humans weigh the important things about the same. There is a reason Elizer is able to keep going back to the example of saving a child.
Most acne medications work by drying out your skin, not by being antibacterial out anti viral. The infections are a symptom of greasy skin and I think they claim that skin products less grease when it has the right bacteria is on it. But that still leaves me only 50% confident that it would work under optimal conditions.
Their ads say that AO spray makes your sweat smell less bad and it helps clear up acne. I’ve had zits since I hit puberty and a product that cuts down on the amount of caustic chemicals I need to rub all over my body would be great. I also commute to work by bicycl I’m 100+ degree Fahrenheit weather, and my office has no shower, so if AO actually cuts my BO then it might be a good investment.
I’m not sure if I’m reading you right, but if I am, you are saying that it takes a long time to kick in. Therefore I need to give up bathing while I wait for it to kick in. Therefore I would need to give up swimming because it’s not useful if I want to replace the good bacteria lost from swimming in a chlorinated pool and then showering off the chlorine.
I did read one article (after I posted) where the reporter skipped showering for a month then took one shower and washed it all away (according to the bacterial swabs he took).
Does it work as advertised? Does it kind of work but only a little bit? I’d it basically a really expensive placebo? These are the kind of questions I would want answers to. I doubt anyone here would actually know about this product specifically, but maybe someone knows of a site like crazymeds.com for health stuff.
I know a lot of less wrongers are big fans of nootropics and y’all could probably recommend some forums to ask questions about the effectiveness of strange drugs. Did anyone know of forums for strange health products? I was thinking of trying AO+ body spray, but at $50 for a month’s supply I want to know if it is effective before I buy it. AO body spray is a new product by an MIT startup that is supposed to replace the good bacteria on your skin that bathing with soap removes. These bacteria are supposed to be to break down your sweat to make you smell better and have healthier skin. ttps://shop.motherdirt.com/product/ao-mist-2 If this stuff works, I think that lends credence to the historical viewpoint that bathing is unhealthy. But right now we only have a few case studies and no controller trials.
I suspect you are right. But still, lying and tricking people is a skill, and I know where I can learn to practice it. (Debate clubs) Are the courses for the skill of detecting lies and tricks? All I can think of offhand is those fbi courses on micro expressions and maybe playing lots of poker. It feels like they off a currently unfilled market for defensive techniques.
I’ve heard the story of Elijah and the Priests of Baal being told as one of the first experimental swindles, rather than the first experiment. It goes something like this: Elijah: Pours ‘water’ on his pyre. Pyre: Catches on fire Priest of Baal: “Wait was that water or oil? If I pour some of your ‘water’ on my pyre maybe it will light too...” Elijah: “Put them to death before they can invent repeatability testing.”
The water being oil part is so obvious that it reads less like a ‘God turned water into fire’ story and more like a ‘look how dumb those Baal worshipers were, we totally tricked them’ story. I’ve heard it told both ways though.
Not really. Is there a lot to the book beyond the Wikipedia summary?
It’s kind of a cross between a job site and a review site. In theory.
AI doesn’t seem to be a single problem but a label for a broad field.
I don’t really want to debate definitions. But that is exactly why I want the sorter to break down ‘big problems’ like AI into ‘little problems’ like neural networks, search, etc.
How do you know that business thought it was very important?
Because people keep spending money on marginal user interface improvements that have added up to big differences in user interfaces. The easier the interface is to use, the more people will be able to use it, the more people will buy it.
[Here is a guide to graphic interfaces over time]. (http://toastytech.com/guis/guitimeline.html) Start about 30 years ago when the Macintosh comes out.
I have no idea how much stuff didn’t pan out, but we’ve been steadily chipping away at AI since the the 40′s, and I can’t imagine that AI was considered unimportant. We also made gigantic strides on user friendless/interfaces. I’m not sure if academia thought it was important but consumers and businesses thought it was.
Good advice. Since I wanted a lot of things to be weighted when determining the search order, I considered just hiding all the complexity ‘under the hood’. But if people don’t know what they are voting on they might be less inclined to vote at all.
haha. Yeah, later, on reflection I understood. I promise to not only show the ‘most important’ problems. The marginal utility of working on a problem is higher when no one else is doing it. But if there are neglected important problems then I want to find them.
That’s a good point. I shouldn’t just list skills by the goal of all the similar projects but also by the individual projects. If one Linux distribution is way easier to contribute to than the others, users should know that.
Continuing the thread from here: https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/ea-has-a-pr-problem-in-that-it-cares/comments
I agree with you that an AI programmed exactly as the one you describe is doomed to fail. What I didn’t understand is why you think any AI MUST be made that way.
Some confusions of mine: -There is not a real distinction between instrumental and terminal goals in humans. This seems not true to me? I seem to have terminal goals\desires, like hunger and instrumental goals, like going to the store to buy food. Telling me that terminal goals don’t exist seems to prove too much. Are you saying that complex goals like “Don’t let humanity die” in humans brains are in practice instrumental goals made up of simpler desires?
-Becuase humans don’t ‘really’ have terminal goals, it’s impossible to program them into AIs. ?
-AI’s can’t be made to have ‘irrational’ goals, like caring about humans more than themselves. This also seems to prove that humans don’t exist? Can’t humans care about their children more than themselves? AI’s couldn’t be made to think of humans as valuable as humans think of their children? Or more?
To choose an inflammatory argument, a gay man could think it’s irrational for him to want to date men, because that doesn’t lead to him having children. But that won’t make him want to date women. I have lots of irrational desires that I nevertheless treasure.
Less importantly, I also feel like there’s an assumption that we would want to create an AI that is only as good as we are, not better then we are. But if we can’t even define our current values, then deciding what the superior values would be does sound like an even more impossible challenge. Having a superhuman AI that treated us the way we treat chickens would be pretty bad.