jacoblyles

Karma: 107

jacoblyles 15 Oct 2012 17:02 UTC
3 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
It’s true that lots of Utilitarianisms have corner cases where they support action that would normally considered awful. But most of them involve highly hypothetical scenarios that seldom happen, such as convicting an innocent man to please a mob.

The problem with LW/SIAI is that the moral monstrosities they support are much more actionable. Today, there are dozens of companies working on AI research. LW/SIAI believes that their work will be of infinite negative utility if they are successful before Eliezer invents FAI theory and he convinces them that he’s not a crackpot. The fate of not just human civilization, but all of galactic civilization is at stake.

So, if any of them looks likely to be successful, such as scheduling a press conference to announce a breakthrough, then it’s straightforward to see what SI/LW thinks you should do about that. Actually, given the utilities involved, a more proactive strategy may be justified, if you know what I mean.

I’m pretty sure this is going to evolve into an evil terrorist organization, and would have done so already if the population weren’t so nerdy and pacifistic to begin with.

And yes, there are the occasional bits of cautionary principles on LW. But they are contradicted and overwhelmed by “shut up and calculate”, which says trust your arithmetic utilitarian calculus and not your ugh fields.

jacoblyles 14 Oct 2012 20:07 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
Oh sure, there are plenty of other religions as dangerous as the SIAI. It’s just strange to see one growing here among highly intelligent people who spend a ton of time discussing the flaws in human reasoning that lead to exactly this kind of behavior.

However, there are ideologies that don’t contain shards of infinite utility, or that contain a precautionary principle that guards against shards of infinite utility that crop up. They’ll say things like “don’t trust your reasoning if it leads you to do awful things” (again, compare that to “shut up and calculate”). For example, political conservatism is based on a strong precautionary principle. It was developed in response to the horrors wrought by the French Revolution.

One of the big black marks on the SIAI/LW is the seldom discussed justification for murder and terrorism that is a straightforward result of extrapolating the locally accepted morality.

jacoblyles 14 Oct 2012 19:03 UTC
4 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough
Nevermind the fact that LW actually believes that uFAI has infinitely negative utility and that FAI has infinitely positive utility (see arguments for why SIAI is the optimal charity). That people conclude that acts that most people would consider immoral are justified by this reasoning, well I don’t know where they got that from. Certainly not these pages.

Ordinarily, I would count on people’s unwillingness to act on any belief they hold that is too far outside the social norm. But that kind of thinking is irrational, and irrational restraint has a bad rep here (“shut up and calculate!”)

LW scares me. It’s straightforward to take the reasoning of LW and conclude that terrorism and murder are justified.

jacoblyles 18 Aug 2012 19:56 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Shmi’s comment on: Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute
We should try to pick up “moreright.com″ from whoever owns it. It’s domain-parked at the moment.

jacoblyles 18 Aug 2012 5:32 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Muehlhauser-Wang Dialogue
The principles espoused by the majority on this site can be used to justify some very, very bad actions.

1) The probability of someone inventing AI is high

2) The probability of someone inventing unfriendly AI if they are not associated with SIAI is high

3) The utility of inventing unfriendly AI is negative MAXINT

4) “Shut up and calculate”—trust the math and not your gut if your utility calculations tell you to do something that feels awful.

It’s not hard to figure out that Less Wrong’s moral code supports some very, unsavory, actions.

jacoblyles 18 Aug 2012 1:00 UTC
9 points
in reply to: DaFranker’s comment on: Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
Fortunately, the United States has a strong evangelical Christian lobby that fights for and protects home schooling freedom.

jacoblyles 17 Aug 2012 18:42 UTC
3 points
in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?

...And you just blew your cover. :)

Nobody of any importance reads Less Wrong :)

jacoblyles 17 Aug 2012 18:40 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: David_Gerard’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?
I’m pretty sure they are sourced from census data. I check the footnotes on websites like that.

jacoblyles 17 Aug 2012 0:14 UTC
28 points
on: Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?
Tagline: Coursera for high school

Mission: The economist Eric Hanushek has shown that if the USA could replace the worst 7% of K-12 teachers with merely average teachers, it would have the best education system in the world. What if we instead replaced the bottom 90% of teachers in every country with great instruction?

The Company: Online learning startups like Coursera and Udacity are in the process of showing how technology can scale great teaching to large numbers of university students (I’ve written about the mechanics of this elsewhere). Let’s bring a similar model to high school.

This Company starts in the United States and ties into existing home school regulations with a self-driven web learning program that requires minimum parental involvement and results in a high school degree. It cloaks itself as merely a tool to aid homeschool parents, similar to existing mail-order tutoring materials, hiding its radical mission to end high school as we know it.

The result is high-quality education for every student. In addition to the high quality, it gives the student schedule flexibility to pursue other interests outside of high school. Many exceptional young people I know dodge the traditional schools early in life. This product gives everyone that opportunity.

By lowering the cost of going home-school, this product will enlargen the home school market and threaten traditional educrats while producing more exceptional minds.

With direct access to millions of students, the website will be able to monetize through one-on-one tutoring markets, college prep services, and other means.

Course material can be bootstrapped by constructing a curriculum out of free videos provided through sources like the Khan Academy. The value-add of the Company will be to tailor the curriculum to the home-school requirements of the particular state of the student.

My background: I cofounded a company that’s had reasonable success. I’m not much of a Less Wrong fan—I find the community to be an intellectual monoculture, dogmatic, and full of blind spots to flaws in the philosophy it preaches. BUT this is an idea that needs to happen, as it will provide much value to the world. Contact me at firstname lastname gmail if you have lots of money or can hack. Or hell, steal the idea and do it yourself. Just make it happen.
What links here?
- DaFranker's comment on Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? by ShannonFriedman (21 Aug 2012 17:36 UTC; 3 points)

jacoblyles 15 Aug 2012 22:54 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: OphilaDros’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?
Out of wedlock birth rates have exploded with sexual freedom:

-http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/205/four-in-10-children-are-born-to-unwed-mothers

Marriage is way down:

-http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/105/the-annual-marriage-rate-has-declined-significantly-in-the-past-generation

jacoblyles 31 Jul 2012 18:47 UTC
0 points
on: Muehlhauser-Wang Dialogue
If an AGI research group were close to success but did not respect friendly AI principles, should the government shut them down?

jacoblyles 18 Jul 2012 23:47 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Unknown’s comment on: The Moral Void
I’m glad I found this comment. I suffer from an intense feeling of cognitive dissonance when I browse LW and read the posts which sound sensible (like this one) and contradictory posts like the dust specks. I hear “don’t use oversimplified morality!” and then I read a post about torturing people because summing utilons told you it was the correct answer. Mind=>blown.

jacoblyles 18 Jul 2012 23:43 UTC
−3 points
in reply to: dac69’s comment on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
Welcome!

The least attractive thing about the rationalist life-style is nihilism. It’s there, it’s real, and it’s hard to handle. Eliezer’s solution is to be happy and the nihilism will leave you alone. But if you have a hard life, you need a way to spontaneously generate joy. That’s why so many people turn to religion as a comfort when they are in bad situations.

The problem that I find is that all ways to spontaneously generate joy have some degree of mysticism. I’m looking into Tai Chi as a replacement for going to church. But that’s still eastern mumbo-jumbo as opposed to western mumbo-jumbo. Stoicism might be the most rational joy machine I can find.

Let me know if you ever un-convert.

jacoblyles 18 Jul 2012 23:29 UTC
4 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Reply to Holden on ‘Tool AI’
It’s interesting that we view those who do make the tough decisions as virtuous—i.e. the commander in a war movie (I’m thinking of Bill Adama). We recognize that it is a hard but valuable thing to do!

jacoblyles 18 Jul 2012 22:03 UTC
1 point
on: Welcome to Heaven
This reminds me of a thought I had recently—whether or not God exists, God is coming—as long as humans continue to make technological progress. Although we may regret it (for one, brief instant) when he gets here. Of course, our God will be bound by the laws of the universe, unlike the Theist God.

The Christian God is an interesting God. He’s something of a utilitarian. He values joy and created humans in a joyful state. But he values freedom over joy. He wanted humans to be like himself, living in joy but having free will. Joy is beautiful to him, but it is meaningless if his creations don’t have the ability to choose not-joy. When his creations did choose not-joy, he was sad but he knew it was a possibility. So he gave them help to make it easier to get back to joy.

I know that LW is sensitive to extended religious reference. Please forgive me for skipping the step of translating interesting moral insights from theology into non-religious speak.

I do hope that the beings we make which are orders of magnitude more powerful than us have some sort of complex value system, and not anything as simple as naive algebraic utilitarianism. If they value freedom first, then joy, then they will not enslave us to the joy machines—unless we choose it.

(Side note: this post is tagged with “shut-up-and-multiply”. That phrase trips the warning signs for me of a fake utility function, as it always seems to be followed by some naive algebraic utilitarian assertion that makes ethics sound like a solved problem).

edit: Whoa, my expression of my emotional distaste for “shut up and multiply” seems to be attracting down-votes. I’ll take it out.

jacoblyles 18 Jul 2012 21:44 UTC
6 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Reply to Holden on ‘Tool AI’
A common problem that faces humans is that they often have to choose between two different things that they value (such as freedom vs. equality), without an obvious way to make a numerical comparison between the two. How many freeons equal one egaliton? It’s certainly inconvenient, but the complexity of value is a fundamentally human feature.

It seems to me that it will be very hard to come up with utility functions for fAI that capture all the things that humans find valuable in life. The topology of the systems don’t match up.

Is this a design failure? I’m not so sure. I’m not sold on the desirability of having an easily computable value function.

jacoblyles 18 Jul 2012 21:21 UTC
2 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately
This is a great framework—very clear! Thanks!

jacoblyles 18 Jul 2012 21:18 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: Reply to Holden on ‘Tool AI’
Sorry, “meaning of life” is sloppy phrasing. “What is the meaning of life?” is popular shorthand for “what is worth doing? what is worth pursuing?”. It is asking about what is ultimately valuable, and how it relates to how I choose to live.

It’s interesting that we are imagining AIs to be immune from this. It is a common human obsession (though maybe only among unhappy humans?). An AI isn’t distracted by contradictory values like a human is then, it never has to make hard choices? No choices at all really, just the output of the argmax expected utility function?

jacoblyles 18 Jul 2012 20:59 UTC
3 points
on: Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately
I follow the virtue-ethics approach, I do actions that make me like the person that I want to be. The acquisition of any virtue requires practice, and holding open the door for old ladies is practice for being altruistic. If I weren’t altruistic, then I wouldn’t be making myself into the person I want to be.

It’s a very different framework from util maximization, but I find it’s much more satisfying and useful.

jacoblyles 18 Jul 2012 20:37 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Reply to Holden on ‘Tool AI’
Let me see if I understand what you’re saying.

For humans, the value of some outcome is a point in multidimensional value space, whose axes include things like pleasure, love, freedom, anti-suffering, and etc. There is no easy way to compare points at different coordinates. Human values are complex.

For a being with a utility function, it has a way to take any outcome and put a scalar value on it, such that different outcomes can be compared.

We don’t have anything like that. We can adjust how much we value any one dimension in value space, even discover new dimensions! But we aren’t utility maximizers.

Which raises the question—if we want to create AI that respect human values, then why would we make utility maximizer AI in the first place?

I’m still not sold on the idea that an intelligent being would slavishly follow its utility function. For AI, there are no questions about the meaning of life then? Just keep on U maximizing?