Richard_Hollerith

Karma: 102

Richard_Hollerith Jul 7, 2008, 6:20 PM
0 points
on: Is Morality Given?
It seems the ultimate confusion here is that we are talking about instrumental values . . . before agreeing on terminal values . . .
If we could agree on some well-defined goal, e.g. maximization of human happiness, we could much more easily theorize on whether a particular case of murder would benefit or harm that goal.

denis bider, I would not be surprised to learn that refraining from murder is a terminal value for Eliezer. Eliezer’s writings imply that he has hundreds of terminal values: he cannot even enumerate them all.

Defn. “Murder” is killing under particular circumstances, e.g., not by uniformed soldiers during a war, not in self-defense, not by accident.

Richard_Hollerith Jun 20, 2008, 8:41 AM
2 points
on: Possibility and Could-ness
Thesis: regarding some phenomenon as possible is nothing other than . . .

I consider that an accurate summary of Eliezer’s original post (OP) to which these are comments.

Will you please navigate to this page and start reading where it says,

Imagine that in an era before recorded history or formal mathematics, I am a shepherd and I have trouble tracking my sheep.

You need read only to where it says, “Markos Sophisticus Maximus”.

Those six paragraphs attempt to be a reductive exposition of the concept of whole number, a.k.a., non-negative integer. Please indicate whether you have the same objection to that exposition, namely, that the exposition treats of the number of pebbles in a bucket and therefore circularly depends on the concept of number (or whole number).

Richard_Hollerith Jun 20, 2008, 5:39 AM
0 points
on: Possibility and Could-ness
Joseph Knecht says to Eliezer,

you dedicated an entire follow-up post to chiding Brandon, in part for using realizable in his explanation . . . [and] you committed the same mistake in using reachable.

Congratulations to Joseph Knecht for finding a flaw in Eliezer’s exposition!

I would like his opinion about Eliezer’s explanation of how to fix the exposition. I do not see a flaw in the exposition if it is fixed as Eliezer explains. Does he?

Richard_Hollerith Jun 11, 2008, 8:50 PM
0 points
on: Living in Many Worlds
Is Death capitalized because it is being used in a technical sense?

Richard_Hollerith May 29, 2008, 5:02 PM
0 points
on: Timeless Beauty
The question that interests me, Michael, is whether a human being’s coming to believe that the future is already determined will make the human being less likely to write the blog post or to help build the spaceship that deflects the civilization-destroying asteroid.

Richard_Hollerith May 24, 2008, 6:25 PM
2 points
on: That Alien Message
Richard, if you’re seriously proposing that consciousness is a mistaken idea, but morality isn’t, I can only say that that has got to be one unique theory of morality.

Yes, Z.M.D., I am seriously proposing. And I know my theory of morality is not unique to me because a man caused thousands of people to declare for a theory of morality that makes no reference to consciousness (or subject experience for that matter) and although most of those thousands might have switched by now to some other moral theory and although most of the declarations might have been insincere in the first place, a significant fraction have not and were not if my correspondence with a couple of dozens of those thousands is any indication.

Maybe [Eliezer is] right, and superintelligence implies consciousness. I don’t see why it would, but maybe it does. How would we know? I worry about how productive discussions about AI can be, if most of the participants are relying so heavily upon their intuitions, as we don’t have any crushing experimental evidence.

It is not only that we don’t have any experimental evidence, crushing or otherwise, but also that I have never seen anything resembling an embryo of a definition of consciousness (or personhood unless personhood is defined “arbitrarily”, e.g., by equating it to being a human being) that would commit a user of the concept to any outcome in any experiment. I have never seen anything resembling an embryo of a definition even after reading Chalmers, Churchland, literally most of SL4 before 2004 (which goes on and on about consciousness) and almost everything Eliezer published (e.g., on SL4).

Richard_Hollerith May 23, 2008, 8:00 PM
5 points
on: That Alien Message
RI asks,

how moral or otherwise desirable would the story have been if half a billion years’ of sentient minds had been made to think, act and otherwise be in perfect accordance to what three days of awkward-tentacled, primitive rock fans would wish if they knew more, thought faster, were more the people they wished they were...

Eliezer answers,

A Friendly AI should not be a person. I would like to know at least enough about this “consciousness” business to ensure a Friendly AI doesn’t have (think it has) it. An even worse critical failure is if the AI’s models of people are people.

Suppose consciousness and personhood are mistaken concepts. Well, since personhood is an important concept in our legal systems, there is something in reality (namely, in the legal environment) that corresponds to the term “person”, but suppose there is not any “objective” way to determine whether an intelligent agent is a person where “objective” means without someone creating a legal definition or taking a vote or something like that. And suppose consciousness is a mistaken concept like phlogiston, the aether and the immortal soul are mistaken concepts. Then would not CEV be morally unjustifiable because there is no way to justify the enslavement—or “entrainment” if you want a less loaded term—of the FAI to the (extrapolated) desires of the humans?

Richard_Hollerith Jan 31, 2008, 7:36 PM
0 points
on: The “Intuitions” Behind “Utilitarianism”
I also see no explanation as to why knowledge of objective reality is of any value, even derivative; objective reality is there, and is what it is, regardless of whether it’s known or not.

You and I can influence the future course of objective reality, or at least that is what I want you to assume. Why should you assume it, you ask? For the same reason you should assume that reality has a compact algorithmic description (an assumption we might call Occam’s Razor): no one knows how to be rational without assuming it: in other words, it is an inductive bias necessary for effectiveness.

It is an open question which future courses are good and which are evil, but IMO neither the difficulty of the question nor the fact that no one so far has advanced a satisfactory answer for futures involving ultratechnologies and intelligence explosions—neither of those two facts—removes from you and I the obligation to search for an answer the best we can—or to contribute in some way to the search. This contribution can take many forms. For example, many contribute by holding down a job in which they make lunches for other people to eat or a job in which they care for other people’s elderly or disabled family members.

That last is the same as saying that you should seek power, but without saying what the power is for.

The power is for searching for a goal greater than ourselves and if the search succeeds, the power is for achieving the goal. The goal should follow from the fundamental principles of rationality and from correct knowledge of reality. I do not know what that goal is. I can only hope that someone will recognize the goal when they see it. I do not know what the goal is, but I can rule out paperclip maximization, and I am almost sure I can rule out saving each and every human life. That last goal is not IMO worthwhile enough for a power as large as the power that comes from an explosion of general intelligence. I believe that Eliezer should be free to apply his intelligence and his resources to a goal of his own choosing and that I have no valid moral claim on his resources, time or attention. My big worry is that even if my plans do not rely on his help or cooperation in any way, the intelligence explosion Eliezer plans to use to achieve his goal will prevent me from achieving my goal.

I like extended back-and-forth. Since extended back-and-forth is not common in blog comment sections, let me repeat my intention to continue to check back here. In fact, I will check back till further notice.

This comment section is now 74 hours old. Once a comment section has reached that age, I suggest that it is read mainly by people who have already read it and are checking back to look for replies to particular conversational threads.

I would ask the moderator to allow longer conversations and even longer individual comments once a comment section reaches a certain age.

Mitchell Porter, please consider the possibility that many if not most of the “preference-relevant human cognitive universals” you refer to are a hinderance rather than a help to agents who find themselves in an environment as different from the EEA as our environment is. It is my considered opinion that my main value to the universe derives from the ways my mind is different—differences which I believe I acquired by undergoing experiences that would have been extremely rare in the EEA. (Actually, they would have been depressingly common: what would have been extremely rare is for an individual to survive them.) So, it does not exactly ease my fear that the really powerful optimizing process will cancel my efforts to affect the far future for you to reply that CEV will factor out the “contigent idiosyncracies . . . of particular human beings”.

Richard_Hollerith Jan 31, 2008, 8:18 AM
0 points
on: The “Intuitions” Behind “Utilitarianism”
Yes, mitchell porter, of course there is no method (so far) (that we know of) for moral perception or moral action that does not rely on the human mind. But that does not refute my point, which again is as follows: most of the readers of these words seem to believe that the maximization of happiness or pleasure and the minimization of pain is the ultimate good. Now when you combine that belief with egalitarianism, which can be described as the belief that you yourself have no special moral value relative to any other human, and neither do kings or movie stars or Harvard graduates, you get a value system that is often called utilitarianism. Utilitarianism and egalitarianism have become central features of our moral culture over the last 400 years, and have exerted many beneficial effects. To give one brief example, they have done much to eliminate the waste of human potential that came from having a small groupand their descendants own everything. But the scientific and technological environment we now find ourselves in has become challenging enough that if we continue to use utilitarianism and egalitarianism to guide us, we will go badly astray. (I have believed this since 1992 when I read a very good book on the subject.) I consider utilitarianism particularly inadequate in planning for futures in which humans will no longer be the only ethical intelligences. I refer to those futures in which humans will share the planet and the solar system with AGIs.

You mentioned CEV, which is a complex topic, but I will briefly summarize my two main objections. The author of CEV says that one of his intentions is for everyone’s opinion to have weight: he does not wish to disenfranchise anyone. Since most humans care mainly or only about happiness, I worry that that will lead to an intelligence explosion that is mostly or all about maximizing happiness and that that will interfere with my plans, which are to exert a beneficial effect on reality that persists indefinitely but has little to do in the long term with whether the humans were happy or sad. Second, there is much ambiguity in CEV that has to be resolved in the process of putting it into a computer program. In other words, everything that goes into a computer program has to be specified very precisely. The person who currently has the most influence on how the ambiguities will be resolved has a complex and not-easily summarized value system, but utilitarianism and “humanism”, which for the sake of this comment will be defined as the idea that humankind is the measure of all things, obviously figure very prominently.

I will keep checking this thread for replies to my comment.

Richard_Hollerith Jan 29, 2008, 9:46 PM
3 points
on: The “Intuitions” Behind “Utilitarianism”
Doug, I do not agree because my utility function depends on the identity of the people involved, not simply on N. Specifically, it might be possible for an agent to become confident that Bob is much more useful to whatever is the real meaning of life than Charlie is, in which case a harm to Bob has greater disutility in my system than a harm to Charlie. In other words, I do not consider egalitarianism to be a moral principle that applies to every situation without exception. So, for me U is not a function of (N,I,T)

Richard_Hollerith Jan 29, 2008, 5:58 PM
0 points
on: The “Intuitions” Behind “Utilitarianism”
Please let me interrupt this discussion on utilitarianism/humanism with an alternative perspective.

I do not claim to know what the meaning of life is, but I can rule certain answers out. For example, I am highly certain that it is not to maximize the number of paperclips in my vicinity.

I also believe it has nothing to do with how much pain or pleasure the humans experience—or in fact anything to do with the humans.

More broadly, I believe that although perhaps intelligent or ethical agents are somehow integral to the meaning of life, they are integral for what they do, not because the success or failure of the universe hinges somehow on what the sentients experience or whether their preferences or desires are realized.

Humans, or rather human civilization, which is an amalgam of humans, knowledge and machines, are of course the most potent means anyone knows about for executing plans and achieving goals. Hobble the humans and you probably hobble whatever it is that really is the meaning of life.

But I firmly reject humanity as repository of ultimate moral value.

I looks to me like Eliezer plans to put humanism at the center of the intelligence explosion. I think that is a bad idea. I am horrified. I am appalled.

Richard_Hollerith Oct 25, 2007, 9:00 PM
0 points
on: Congratulations to Paris Hilton
Do you consider the following a fair rephrasing of your last comment? A quantum measurement has probability p of going one way and p − 1 of going the other way where p depends on a choice made by the measurer. That is an odd property for the next bit in a message to have, and makes me suspicious of the whole idea.

If so, I agree. Another difficulty that must be overcome is, assuming one has obtained the first n bits of the message, to explain how one obtains the next bit.

Nevertheless, I believe my primary point remains: since our model of physics does not predict the evolution of reality exactly, the discovery of a previously overlooked means of receiving data need not violate our model of physics. The discovery that if you do X, you can read out the Old Testament in UTF-8, would constitute the addition of a new conjunct to our current model of physics, but not a falsification of the model. That last sentence is phrased in the language of traditional rationality, but my obligation in this argument is only to establish that looking for a new physical principle for receiving data is not a complete waste of resources, and I think the sentence achieves that much.

Also, I wish to return to a broader view to avoid the possibility of our getting lost in a detail. My purpose is to define a system of valuing things suitable for use as the goal system of a seed AI. This scenario in which physicists find themselves in communication with an ontologically privileged observer is merely one contingency that the AI should handle correctly (and a lot more fruitful to think about than simulation scenarios IMHO). It is also useful to consider special cases like this one to keep the conversation about the system of value from becoming too abstract.

Richard_Hollerith Oct 25, 2007, 2:31 PM
0 points
on: Congratulations to Paris Hilton
No blog yet, but I now have a wiki anyone can edit. Click on “Richard Hollerith” to go there.

Richard_Hollerith Oct 25, 2007, 2:18 PM
0 points
on: Congratulations to Paris Hilton
In cryptography, you try to hide the message from listeners (except your friends). In anticryptography, you try to write a message that a diligent and motivated listener can decode despite his having none of your biological, pyschological and social reference points.

I certainly don’t know how you are going to do it at the blackboard. Anything you write on the blackboard comes from you, not something outside space-time.
I meant that most of the difficulty of the project is in understanding our laws of physics well enough to invent a possible novel method for sending and receiving messages.

I don’t see how you can have this other observer and at the same time have the scientist with control over the lab.
It is possible for the fundamental laws of physics as we know them to continue to apply without exception and for physicists to discover a novel method of sending or receiving messages because the fundamental laws are not completely deterministic. Specifically, when a measurement is performed on a quantum system, the result of the measurement is “random”. If as E.T.Jaynes taught saying that something is random is a statement about our ignorance rather than a statement about reality then it is not a violation of the fundamental laws to discover that the data we used to consider random in actuality has a signal or a message in it.

Richard_Hollerith Oct 24, 2007, 10:47 PM
0 points
on: Congratulations to Paris Hilton
Physicists have been proceeding like physicists for some time now and none of them has done anything like receiving the Old Testament from outside of our space-time.
As far as I know, none of them are looking for a message from beyond the space-time continuum. Maybe I will try to interest them in making the effort. My main interest however is a moral system that does not break down when thinking about seed AI and the singularity. Note that the search for a message from outside space-time takes place mainly at the blackboard and only at the very end moves to the laboratory for the actual construction of the experimental apparatus. Moreover, it is irrational to expect the message to arrive in any human tongue or in a human-originated encoding like Ascii or UTF8. How absurd! The rational approach is an embryonic department of mathematics called anticryptography. Also, the SETI project probably knows an algorithm to detect a signal created by an intelligent agent about which we know nothing specific trying to communicate with another intelligent agent about which it knows nothing specific.

It also seems you are postulating an extra-agent (the Mugger), which limits the amount of control experimenters have and in turn makes the experiment unrepeatable.
I see your point. To explain the concept of the ontologically privileged observer, I borrowed Pascal’s Mugger because my audience is already familiar with that scenario. I have another scenario in which a physicist finds himself in a dialog or monologue with an ontologically privileged observer in which physicists retain their accustomed level of control over their laboratories.

Richard_Hollerith Oct 24, 2007, 9:53 PM
0 points
on: Congratulations to Paris Hilton
This was Eliezer’s point: how could you ever recognize which ones are good and which ones are evil? How could you even recognize a process for recognizing objective good and evil?

I have only one suggestion so far, which is that if you find yourself in a situation which satisfies all five of the conditions I just listed, obeying the Mugger initiates an indefinitely-long causal chain that is good rather than evil. I consider, “You might as well assume it is good,” to be equivalent to, “It is good.” Now that I have an example I can try to generalize it, which is best done after the scenario has been expressed mathematically. That is my plan of research. So for example I am going to characterize mathematically the notion of a possible world in which an agent can become confident of a “negative fact” about its environment. An example of a negative fact is, I will probably not be able to refine further my model of the Mugger using any evidence except what the Mugger tells me. Then I will try to determine whether our reality is an example of a possible world that allows agents to become confident of negative facts. I will try to devise a way to compute an answer to the question of how to trade off the two goals of obeying the Mugger and refining my model of reality.

A moral system must contain some postulates. I have retracted my claim that one can derive ought from is and apologize for advancing it. Above I give a list four postulates I consider unobjectionable—the list whose last item is Occam’s razor. I do not claim that you and I will come to agree on the fundamental moral postulates if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together. I do not claim that we have or can discover a procedure that allows two rational humans always to cooperate. I do not claim that this is the summer of love. I reserve the right to continue to advocate for my fundamental moral postulates even if it causes conflict.

Richard_Hollerith Oct 24, 2007, 7:00 PM
0 points
on: Congratulations to Paris Hilton
TGGP pointed out a mistake, which I acknowledged and tried to recover from by saying that what you learn about reality can create a behavioral obligation. g pointed out that you don’t need to consider exotic things like godlike beings to discover that. If you’re driving along a road, then whether you have an obligation to brake sharply depends on physical facts such as whether there’s a person trying to cross the road immediately in front of you. So now I have to retreat again.

There are unstated premises that go into the braking-sharply conclusion. What is noteworthy about my argument is that none of its premises has any psychological or social content, yet the conclusion (obey the Mugger) seems to. The premises of my argument are the 4 normative postulates I just listed plus the conditions on when you should obey the Mugger. It is time to recap those conditions:
- You find yourself in communication with an ontologically privileged observer.
- After extensive investigation you have discovered no other way to cause effects that go on indefinitely.
- You have no concrete hope of ever discovering a way.
- Once the observer has demonstrated that he exists outside your spacetime, the only information you can obtain about him is what he tells you.
- You have no concrete hope of ever discovering anything about the observer besides what he tells you.
Notice that there are no psychological or social concepts in those two lists! No mention for example of qualia or subjective mental experience. No appeal to the intrinsic moral value of every sentient observer, which creates the obligation to define sentience, which is distinct from and I claim fuzzier than the concept which I have been calling intelligence. Every concept in every premise comes from physics, cosmology, basic probability theory, information technology and well-understood parts of cognitive science and AI. The lack of pyschosocial concepts in the premises make my argument different from every moral argument I know about that contains what at first glance seems to be a psychological or social conclusion.

I think it’s no more obvious that increasing the intelligence of whatever part of reality is under your control is good than that (say) preventing suffering is good
When applied to ordinary situations (situations that do not involve e.g. ultratechnology or the fate of the universe) those two imperative lead to largely the same decisions because if you have only a little time to do an investigation, asking a person, Are you suffering? is the best way to determine if there is any preventable or reversible circumstance in his life impairing his intelligence, which I remind I am defining as the ability to acheive goals. Suffering though is a psychological concept and I recommend for ultratechnologists and others concerned with the ultimate fate of the universe to keep their fundamental moral premises free from psychological or social concepts.

All even-remotely-credible claims to have encountered godlike beings with moral advice to offer have been (1) from people who weren’t proceeding at all like physicists and (2) very unimpressive evidentially.
Their claims have been very unimpressive because they weren’t proceeding like physicists. Impressive evidence would be an experiment repeatable by anyone with a physics lab that receives the Old Testament in Hebrew (encoded as UTF8) from a compartment of reality beyond our spacetime. For the evidence to have moral authority, there would have to be a very strong reason to believe that the message was not sent from a transmitter in our spacetime. (The special theory of relativity seems to be able to provide the strong reason.)

since we don’t even know whether there are any effects that go on for ever it seems rather premature to declare that only such effects matter.
An understandable reaction. You might never discover a way to cause an effect that goes on forever even if you live a billion years and devote most of your resources to the search. I sympathize!

Richard_Hollerith Oct 24, 2007, 9:02 AM
0 points
on: Congratulations to Paris Hilton
The blog “item” to which this is a comment started 5 days ago. I am curious whether any besides TGGP and I are still reading. One thing newsgroups and mailing lists do better than blogs is to enable conversational threads to persist for more than a few days. Dear reader, just this once, as a favor to me, please comment here (if only with a blank comment) to signal your presence. If no one signals, I’m not continuing.

Why is a “civilization” the unit of analysis rather than a single agent?
Since you put the word in quotes, I take it you hold something akin to the views of Margaret Thatcher who famously said that there is no society, just individuals and families. You should have been exposed to the mainstream view often enough to notice that my statement can be translated to an equivalent statement expressed in terms of individuals. If we introduce too many deviations from consensus reality at once, we are going to lose our entire audience. Please continue as if I had not used the word and had said instead that if there exists individuals who have a successful answer to the tricky question then they are not promoting the answer to the singularitarian community broadly understood or I would have become aware of them already.

Yes, I take as postulates
- the desirabitity of increasing the intelligence of whatever part of reality is under your control,
- the desirability of continuously refining your model of reality,
- that the only important effects are those that go on forever,
- for that matter, that the probability of a model of reality is proportional to 2^K where K is the complexity of the model in bits (Occam’s razor).
What I meant by deriving ought from is is that what you learn about reality can create a behavioral obligation e.g. in certain specific circumstances it creates an obligation to obey an ontologically priviledged observer. This is not usually acknowledged in expositions about morality and the intrinsic good—at least not to the extent I acknowledge it here. But yeah, you have a point that without the three oughts I listed above, I could not derive the ought of obeying the Mugger, so instead of my saying that you can derive ought from is, I should in the future say that it is not commonly understood by moral philosophers how much the moral obligations on an agent depend on the physical structure of the reality in which the agents finds himself. Note that he cannot do anything about that physical structure and consequently about the existence of the moral obligation (assuming the postulates above).

Richard_Hollerith Oct 24, 2007, 8:44 AM
3 points
on: Expecting Short Inferential Distances
When I write for a very bright “puzzle-solving-type” audience, I do the mental equivalent of deleting every fourth sentence or at least the tail part of every fourth sentence to prevent the reader from getting bored. I believe that practice helps my writings to compete with the writings around it for the critical resource of attention. There are of course many ways of competing for attention, and this is one of the least prejudicial to rational thought. I recommend this practice only in forums in which the reader can easily ask followup questions. Nothing about this practice is incompatible with the practices Eliezer is advocating. This week I am experimenting with adding three dots to the end of a sentence to signal to the reader the need mentally to complete the sentence.

So, what sentence did I delete from the above? A sentence to the effect that I only do this for writing that resembles mathematical proof fairly closely: “Suppose A. Because B, C. Therefore D, from which follows E, which is a contradiction, so our original assumption A must be false.”

After writing a first draft, I go back and add a lot more words than I had saved with the “do not bore the reader” practice. E.g. I add sentences explicitly to contradict interpretations that would lead to my being dismissed as hopelessly socially inept, eccentric or evil. Of course because I advocate outlandish positions here, I still get dismissed a lot.

Richard_Hollerith Oct 23, 2007, 6:55 AM
0 points
on: Congratulations to Paris Hilton
I suppose to a Pete Singer utilitarian it might be correct that we assign equal weight of importance to everyone in and beyond our [spacetime].

In the scenario with all the properties I list above, I assign most of the intrinsic good to obeying the Mugger. Some intrinsic good is assigned to continuing to refine our civilization’s model of reality, but the more investment in that project fails to yield the ability to cause effects that persist indefinitely without the Mugger’s help, the more intrinsic good gets heaped on obeying the Mugger. Nothing else gets any intrinsic good, including every human and in fact every intelligent agent in our spacetime. Agents in our spacetime must make do with whatever instrumental good derives from the two intrinsic goods. So for example if Robin is expected to be thrice as useful to those two goods as Eliezer is, then he gets thrice as much instrumental good. Not exactly Pete Singer! No one can accuse me of remaining vague on my goals to avoid offending people! I might revise this paragraph after learning more decision theory, Solomonoff induction, etc.