I wonder if the distinction between 1) something implementing the same dynamic as a typical human but mistaken about what it says and 2) something implementing a completely different dynamic and not mistaken about anything, is the same as the distinction people normally make between 1) immoral and 2) amoral.

Steven: quite possibly related. I don't think they're exactly the same (the classic comic book/high fantasy "I'm evil and I know it" villain fits A2, but I'd describe him as amoral), but it's an interesting parallel.

Eliezer: I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that our main area of disagreement is our willingness to believe that someone who disagrees with us really "embodies a different optimization process." There are infinitely many self-consistent belief systems and infinitely many internally consistent optimization processe... (read more)

If a person's morality is not defined as what they believe about morals, I don't know how it can be considered to meaningfully entail any propositions at all. A General AI should be able to convince it just about anything, right?

Far more extreme, I would think, to say that zero out of 6.5 billion humans are stable psychopaths.

Heck, what about babies? What do they want, and would they be complicated enough to want anything different if they knew more and thought faster?

There are infinitely many self-consistent belief systems and infinitely many internally consistent optimization processes; while I believe mine to be the best I've found, I remain aware that if I held any of the others I would believe exactly the same thing.

You would not believe exactly the same thing. If you ... (read more)

I must be starting to get it. That unpacked in exactly the way I expected.

On the other hand, this:

If a person's morality is not defined as what they believe about morals, I don't know how it can be considered to meaningfully entail any propositions at all.

makes no sense to me at all.

I think my highest goal in life is to make myself happy. Because I'm not a sociopath making myself happy tends to involve having friends and making them happy. But the ultimate goal is me.

Sebastian Hagen:

My intuition is that a good deal of people would take the psychopath pill. At least if the social consequences were minimal, which is besides the point.

Frame it defensively rather than offensively and a whole heck of a lot of people would take that pill. Of course some of us would also take the pill that negates the effects of our friends taking the first pill, hehehe.

Weird, jsalvati is not my sock puppet, but the 11:16pm post above is mine.

Fixed. How very odd. (And for the record, jsalvati's IP is not HA's.)

"Perhaps Richard means that we could suppose that abortion is indeed prohibited by morality_Bob..."

That's right. (I didn't mean to suggest that there's never any disputing what someone's moral commitments are; just that this wasn't supposed to be in dispute in the particular case I was imagining.) I take it that Sally and Bob could disagree even so, and not merely be talking past each other, even if one or both of them was impervious to rational argument. It is at least a significant cost of your theory that it denies this datum. (It doesn't have... (read more)

Eliezer: for 'better' vs 'frooter,' of course you're right. I just would have phrased it differently; I've been known to claim that the word 'better' is completely meaningless unless you (are able to) follow it with "better at or for something." So of course, Jadagul_real would say that his worldview is better for fulfilling his values. And Jadagul_hypothetical would say that his worldview is better for achieving his values. And both would (potentially) be correct. (or potentially wrong. I never claimed to be infallible, either in reality o... (read more)

Re: "We have nothing to argue about, we are only different optimization processes." That seems to apply in the case when a man wants to rescue copies of his genes from eternal oblivion - by convincing his mate not to abort his prospective offspring. Of course, not many would actually say that under those circumstances.

Eliezer: "But this would be an extreme position to take with respect to your fellow humans, and I recommend against doing so. Even a psychopath would still be in a common moral reference frame with you, if, fully informed, they would decide to take a pill that would make them non-psychopaths. If you told me that my ability to care about other people was neurologically damaged, and you offered me a pill to fix it, I would take it."

How sure are you that most human moral disagreements are attributable to

• lack of veridical information, or
• lack of

Mike,

"I do not eat steak, because I am uncertain of what my own morality outputs with respect to steak-eating. It seems reasonable to me to imagine that cows are capable of experiencing pain, of fearing death. Of being, and ceasing to be. If you are like the majority of human beings, you do eat steak. The propositions I have suggested do not seem reasonable to you."

Accepting your propositions for the sake of argument, I still find that eating steak seems reasonable.

"Rather, it is essential to the concept of morality that it involves shared standards common to all fully reasonable agents."

Richard,

If you're going to define 'fully reasonable' to mean sharing your moral axioms, so that a superintelligent pencil maximizer with superhuman understanding of human ethics and philosophy is not a 'reasonable agent,' doesn't this just shift the problem a level? Your morality_objectivenorms is only common to all agents with full reasonableness_RichardChappell, and you don't seem to have any compelling reason for the latter (somewhat gerrymandered) account of reasonableness save that it's yours/your culture's/your species.'

Other moral issues where there are a gender differences include: "should prostitution be legalised" and "should there be tighter regulation of pornography".

Again, it seems that part of the effect is due to people's idea of what is right being influenced by their own personal role - i.e. the "different optimization processes" effect.

Gender is the most obvious source of such issues, but I'm sure you can find them in other areas of life. Race politics, for instance.

People in general do not want to be shot. The person doing the shooting, the lethal weapon being fired, the location in which the shooting occurs and the time of day are all pretty much irrelevant. You can ask people if they want to be shot and they'll say no, without even specifying those details. That seems a very different case from Bob, who is considering a moral proposition and outright rejecting it.

Given all of Bacon's idols of the Mind can you ever know definitely if there is an error in your own reasoning, let alone the other persons?

You cannot rely on your moral intuition, nor the cultural norms of your time, nor academic authority, nor your internal reasoning or ability to know the soundness of your argument.

Socialization, severe biases, faulty reasoning can all make you think you are ‘correct’, but can leave you with the incorrect impression of the ‘correctness’ of your thinking. & even if presented with all the correct or relevant information some people still make these errors, so if they can so could you.

Eliezer: "When a paperclip maximizer and a pencil maximizer do different things, they are not disagreeing about anything, they are just different optimization processes. You cannot detach should-ness from any specific criterion of should-ness and be left with a pure empty should-ness that the paperclip maximizer and pencil maximizer can be said to disagree about - unless you cover "disagreement" to include differences where two agents have nothing to say to each other.

But this would be an extreme position to take with respect to your fellow... (read more)

I should qualify this statement: "As such, we shouldn't expect much more moral agreement from humans than from rational (or approximately rational) AIs."

to instead read:

"As such, on ethical questions that had no precedent in our EEA, we shouldn't expect much more moral agreement from humans than from rational (or approximately rational) AIs, apart, of course, from the fact that most humans share a common set of cognitive biases"

one can see that this is true by looking at the vast disagreements between different moral philosophers consequentialists vs. deontological ethicists, or atheists vs. christians vs. muslims, or libertarians vs. liberals vs. communists.

You have been priming people to think in terms of functions. (Pure) Functions do not change. They map an input to an output, and can be substituted by a list, e.g. a function that tests for primality can can be performed by an (infinitely) long list.

You may want to describe impure functions for people without a functional programming background if you want to keep terminology like morality_john().

Virge's point seems particularly important, and hopefully Eliezer can address it.

I find Roko on-point. The psychological unity of humankind is important, but it can be over-stated. While human beings may occupy a very small area in the space of all possible minds, it is still an area and not a single point. When we shut up and multiply by sufficiently large numbers, very small differences in the starting point are very meaningful. If we are talking about a difference valued at 0.0000001% of a human life, and you extrapolate it over a billion lives, we are talking about life and death matters. Successful AI will affect more than a ... (read more)

Virge:

How sure are you that most human moral disagreements are attributable to - lack of veridical information, or - lack of ability/tools to work through that information, or - defects? You talk freely about psychopaths and non-psychopaths as though these were distinct categories of non-defective and defective humans. I know you know this is not so. The arguments about psychological unity of humankind only extend so far. e.g., would you be prepared to tell a homosexual that, if they were fully informed, they would decide to take a pill to change their or

I must be missing something -- why would you advocate something that you know you can't justify to anyone else?

I said "damaged" not "missing". The notion is that I am my current self, but one day you inform me that, relative to other humans, my ability to care about others is damaged. Do I want a pill to fix the damage, even though it will change my values? Yes, because I value humanity and want to stay with humanity; I don't want to be off in some lonely unoccupied volume of mindspace. This is one of the arguments that moves me.

Does that work in the other direction? The notion is that you are your current self, but one day I inform you that, r... (read more)

Jadagul:

But my moral code does include such statements as "you have no fundamental obligation to help other people." I help people because I like to.

Roko:

In the modern world, people have to make moral choices using their general intelligence, because th

Quick correction: s/abstract rational reasoning/abstract moral reasoning/

Will Pearson: Why not just treat them as pure functions in the State monad?

Re: If there are distinct categories of human transpersonal values, I would expect them to look like "male and female babies", "male children", "male adults", "female children", "female adults", "neurological damage 1", "neurological damage 2", not "Muslims vs. Christians!"

That seems like the position you would get if you thought that cultural evolution could not affect people's values.

Carl - "If you're going to define 'fully reasonable' to mean sharing your moral axioms, so that a superintelligent pencil maximizer with superhuman understanding of human ethics and philosophy is not a 'reasonable agent,' doesn't this just shift the problem a level? Your morality_objectivenorms is only common to all agents with full reasonableness_RichardChappell, and you don't seem to have any compelling reason for the latter (somewhat gerrymandered) account of reasonableness save that it's yours/your culture's/your species.'"

I don't mean to def... (read more)

"If there are distinct categories of human transpersonal values, I would expect them to look like [...] 'male adults', [...] 'female adults', [...] not 'Muslims vs. Christians!'"

Really? In the ways that are truly important, don't you think you have more in common with Natasha Vita-More than Osama bin Laden?

ZM, he means after volition-extrapolating.

Steven, even so, I think the basic question stands. Why should cultural differences and within-sex individual differences wash out of the CEV?

Supposedly genetics allows for people of different ages or sexes to have different mental machinery, whereas individual genetic differences just represent low-complexity differences in tweaking. I'm not sure why that makes Eliezer's point though, if the aforementioned differences in tweaking mean different complex machinery gets activated. Cultural differences I'd expect to wash out just through people learning about different cultures that they could have grown up in.

Zubon: "if you do not think you should be a bit more sociopathic, what are the odds you have exactly the right amounts of empathy and altruism?"

• that was exactly what I was going to say ; - ) My personal "gut" feeling is that have exactly the right amount of empathy, no more, no less. Intellectually, I realize that this is means I have failed the reversal test, and that I am therefore probably suffering from status quo bias. (assuming, as I believe, that there is an objectively true ethics. If you're a moral relativist, you get a blank

Steven: "Cultural differences I'd expect to wash out just through people learning about different cultures that they could have grown up in."

I suspect a category error here hinging around personal identity. We say "if I had grown up in a different culture ..." when I think we mean "if the baby that grew into me had grown up in a different culture..." If the baby that grew into me had grown up in a radically different culture, I don't think ve'd be me in any meaningful sense, although of course there would be many similarities ... (read more)

Re: Roko's "more reasonable position":

Human psychological unity, to the extent that it exists, includes brain speed, brain degree-of-parallelism, brain storage capacity, brain reliability - and other limitations that have little to do with human goals.

If you had a chance to take a pill which would cause you to stop caring about your friends by permanently maxing out that part of your hapiness function regardless of whether you had any friends, would you take it?

I'm not sure this proves anything. I'll take Jadagul's description as my own. I'm maximizing my happiness, but my non-sociopath status means that I like having friends/loved ones, so maximizing my own happiness entails caring about them to some degree or another. Under my existing moral code I wouldn't take the pill, but that's because it will... (read more)

I, too, wonder if the "psychological unity of humankind" has been a bit overstated. All [insert brand and model here] computers have identical hardware, but you can install different software on them. We're running different

Consider the case of a "something maximizer". It's given an object, and then maximizes the number of copies of that object.

You give one something maximizer a paperclip, and it becomes a paperclip maximizer. You give another a pencil, and that one becomes a pencil maximizer.

There's no particular reason to expect the p... (read more)

Eliezer: "The basic ev-bio necessity behind the psychological unity of human brains is not widely understood."

I agree. And I think you've over-emphasized the unity and ignored evidence of diversity, explaining it away as defects.

Eliezer: "And even more importantly, the portion of our values that we regard as transpersonal, the portion we would intervene to enforce against others, is not all of our values; it's not going to include a taste for pepperoni pizza, or in my case, it's not going to include a notion of heterosexuality or homosexuali... (read more)

virge makes a very good point here. The human mind is probably rather flexible in terms of it's ethical views; I suspect that Eli is overplaying our psychological unity.

I think that views are being attributed to me that I do not possess - perhaps on the Gricean notion that if someone attacks me for holding these views, I ought to hold them; but on a blog like this one, that leaves you prey to everyone else's misunderstanding.

I do not assert that all humans end up in the same moral frame of reference (with regard to any particular extrapolation method). I do think that psychological unity is typically underestimated, and I have a hard time taking modern culture at face value (we're the ancient Greeks, guys, not a finished... (read more)

"Being a jerk" here means "being a jerk according to other people's notion of morality, but not according to my own notion of morality", right?

I sort of take offense to "we're the ancient Greeks"; I make sure to disagree with Western morality whenever it's wrong, and I have no reason to believe the resulting distribution of errors is biased toward agreement with Western morality. If you meant to say "most of them are the ancient Greeks", then sure.

On second thought I suppose it could mean "being a jerk according to 'ethics'", where "ethics" is conceived not as something intrinsically moral but as a practical way for agents with different moralities to coordinate on a mutually acceptable solution.

The notion is that I am my current self, but one day you inform me that, relative to other humans, my ability to care about others is damaged. Do I want a pill to fix the damage, even though it will change my values? Yes, because I value humanity and want to stay with humanity; I don't want to be off in some lonely unoccupied volume of mindspace. This is one of the arguments that moves me.

Eliezer, relative to other humans, your ability to believe in a personal creative deity is damaged.

Do you want a pill to help you be religious?

Virge: The argument for psychological unity is that, as a sexually reproducing species, it is almost impossible for one gene to rise in relative frequency if the genes it depends on are not already nearly universal. So the all the diversity within any species at any given time consists of only one-step changes; no complex adaptations. The one exception of course is that males can have complex adaptations that females lack, and vice versa.

So, with respect to your specific examples:

Homosexuals: sexual preference certainly is a complex adaptation, but obvio... (read more)

Eli: "I do not assert that all humans end up in the same moral frame of reference (with regard to any particular extrapolation method). I do think that psychological unity is typically underestimated,"

- right, thanks for the clarification.

"But if you read "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" you'll see that it's specifically designed to handle, among other problems, the problem of, "What if we don't all want the same thing?" What then can an AI programmer do that does not constitute being a jerk? That was my attempt to answ... (read more)

Roko: I think Eliezer has explicitly stated that he is a realist.

Larry D'Anna: "And it doesn't do any good to say that they aren't defective. They aren't defective from a human, moral point of view, but that's not the point. From evolutions view, there's hardly anything more defective, except perhaps a fox that voluntarily restrains it's own breeding."

Why is it "not the point"? In this discussion we are talking about differences in moral computation as implemented within individual humans. That the blind idiot's global optimization strategy defines homosexuality as a defect is of no relevance.

Larr... (read more)

Just to check, surely you're not saying an extrapolated version of Archimedes and a thousand people who agreed with him wouldn't have turned out OK?

It seems to me that we have some quite strong evidence against rotten bastards theory in that intelligent and well-informed people IRL seem to converge away from bastardly beliefs. Still, rotten bastards theory seems worth thinking about for negative-utilitarian reasons.

The basic ev-bio necessity behind the psychological unity of human brains is not widely understood.

"Necessity" may be over-stating it. Humans are not very diverse, due to recent genetic bottlenecks. We do have enormous psychological differences between us - due to neotony-induced developmental plasticity - and because there are many ways to break a human. We haven't yet lived in the human hive long enough for the developmental plasticity to result in clearly-discrete queen/worker/warrior castes, with associated mental adaptations, though.

Go ba... (read more)

Had it fallen to Archimedes to build an AI, he might well have been tempted to believe that the whole fate of humanity would depend on whether the extrapolated volition of Syracuse or of Rome came to rule the world

I doubt there would have been much controversy. The fate of humanity is bound to be obliteration by far more advanced technology. The idea that our crappy evolved slug bodies, with their sluggish meat brains might go the distance would have seemed pretty ridiculous, even back then.

@Eliezer: "I'm sure that Archimedes of Syracuse thought that Syracuse had lots of incredibly important philosophical and cultural differences with the Romans who were attacking his city. Had it fallen to Archimedes to build an AI, he might well have been tempted to believe that the whole fate of humanity would depend on whether the extrapolated volition of Syracuse or of Rome came to rule the world - due to all those incredibly important philosophical differences."

- I don't see how adding the romans to the CEV algorithm would have made much of a... (read more)

Virge: Why is it "not the point"? In this discussion we are talking about differences in moral computation as implemented within individual humans. That the blind idiot's global optimization strategy defines homosexuality as a defect is of no relevance.

well because we're trying to characterize the sort of psychological diversity that can exist within our species. And this psychological unity argument is saying "we're all the same, except for a mix of one-step changes". This means that any complex adaptation in any human is in almost a... (read more)

Many people seem to have set their priors to 1 on several facts. I suspect even MiniLuv would have a hard time getting these guys to believe that Christianity is false.

In other words:

Bob: "Abortion is wrong."

Sally: "Do you think that this is something of which most humans ought to be persuadable?"

Bob: "Yes, I do. Do you think abortion is right?"

Sally: "Yes, I do. And I don't think that's because I'm a psychopath by common human standards. I think most humans would come to agree with me, if they knew the facts I

Doug raises another good point. Related to what I said earlier, I think people really do functionally have prior probability=1 on some propositions. Or act as if they do. If "The Bible is the inerrant word of God" is a core part of your worldview, it is literally impossible for me to convince you this is false, because you use this belief to interpret any facts I present to you. Eliezer has commented before that you can rationalize just about anything; if "God exists" or "The Flying Spaghetti Monster exists" or "reincarnation exists" is part of the machinery you use to interpret your experience, in a deep enough way, your experiences can't disprove it.

If you had the Pope in a holodeck that you completely controlled, do you think you could convince him that Jesus was never resurrected?

Oh hell yeah. Then again, I'd also go for it if you offered me 24 hours. Then again, the Pope almost certainly already believes that Jesus was never resurrected "except in our hearts" or some such, which makes the job much harder.

If the Pope knows that he's in a holodeck, and that you are controlling it, would that change your answer?

The argument for psychological unity is that, as a sexually reproducing species, it is almost impossible for one gene to rise in relative frequency if the genes it depends on are not already nearly universal. So the all the diversity within any species at any given time consists of only one-step changes; no complex adaptations. The one exception of course is that males can have complex adaptations that females lack, and vice versa.

That argument is not right - as fig wasps demonstrate. Organisms can exhibit developmental plasticity, and show different t... (read more)

Doug S: "A human's beliefs depend on the order in which he hears arguments."

- indeed. Anyone who has spent any time arguing with Christians should know this. And the effect is auto-catalytic - our beliefs about both facts and values tend to self-reinforce; c.f. "affective death spirals".

As I have claimed earlier in the comments, many issues in the modern world are not issues that our in-built evolutionary urges or "yuck factors" can advise us on directly. So human beliefs on issues such as which politics is best, whether to ... (read more)

Eliezer: The overall FAI strategy has to be one that would have turned out okay if Archimedes of Syracuse had been able to build an FAI.

I'd feel a lot safer if you'd extend this back at least to the infanticidal hunter-gatherers, and preferably to apes fighting around the 2001 monolith.

Recovering, if I write CEV then it ought to work on hunter-gatherers, but the hunter-gatherers could not plausible have understood the concepts involved in CEV (whereas I might be willing to try to explain it to Archimedes, if not any other Syracusans). So "think of a strategy such that it would work for hunter-gatherers" fails here; I can't visualize that counterfactual unless the hunter-gatherers have the concept of math.

The apes fighting around the monolith are outside my moral reference frame and a CEV focused on them would produce different results.

Roko, it doesn't just edit incorrect factual beliefs, there's also the "what if we thought faster, were smarter, were more like the people we wished we were", etc.

Steven: "what if we thought faster, were smarter, were more like the people we wished we were"

- yes, I'm aware of this, but the first two act in essentially the same way - they cause simulees to more quickly come to factually correct beliefs, and the last is just a "consistent under reflection" condition.

These conditions make little difference to my concern: the algorithm will end up mixing my values (which I like) with values I hate (religious dogma, sharia law, Christian fundamentalism, the naturalistic fallacy/bioluddism ... ), where my beliefs recieve a very small weighting, and those that I dislike receive a very large weighting.

If you think an IQ-200 extreme-polymath pope who pondered all current and future arguments for atheism would still remain a Christian, then maybe.

Steven: If you think an IQ-200 extreme-polymath pope who pondered all current and future arguments for atheism would still remain a Christian, then maybe.

Unfortunately, I know from personal experience that there are people who are more intelligent than I am who have been "hooked" by religious memes. I know of several Cambridge mathematicians who are currently at PhD level, one of them in mathematical logic, who are members of this evangelical Christian organization. One in particular is extremely bright: triple first, British mathematics Olympiad... (read more)

Time - Philip Johnson is not just a Christian but a creationist. Do you mean, "if there are smart creationists out there..."? I don't really pay much attention to the religious beliefs of the smartest mathematicians and scientists and I'm not especially keen on looking into it now, but I would be surprised if all top scientists without exception were atheists. This page seems to suggest that many of the best scientists are something other than atheist, many of those Christian.

PhD in mathematical logic != extreme polymath. I guess Dyson and Tipler come closest to refuting my position, but I wouldn't expect their beliefs to remain constant under a few thousand years of pondering the overcoming bias archives, say.

You can bring a brain to data, but you can't make it think.

Things like an IQ of 200 indicate that a person has certain cognitive strengths. They DO NOT indicate that those strengths will be utilized. Someone who is not concerned about being dishonest with themselves can self-convince of whatever they please.

At this point, there are no rational grounds for a person to accept the truth claims of, say, the various Christian doctrinal groups. A person who accepts them regardless has already decided to suspend rationality - unless a desire for honesty greate... (read more)

What I mean is, if there are smart Christians out there, why can't they put together a coherent argument favouring Christianity?

I mean, is this really the best they can do?

@Tim Tyler

"a coherent argument favouring Christianity"

Catholic people believe that they have such a thing, resting on strong philosophical definitions of ontology and truth. Traditionally I think that if one was truly interested in hearing a coherent argument for Christian belief, the Jesuit order specialized in teaching and expounding the philosophy. Short a long session with a Jesuit, you might consult the Catholic Encyclopedia for Christian arguments.

While perhaps you will ultimately agree that their system is coherent, that is, "marked ... (read more)

Caledonian and Tim Tyler: there are lots of coherent defenses of Christianity. It's just that many of them rest on statements like, "if Occam's Razor comes into conflict with Revealed Truth, we must privilege the latter over the former." This isn't incoherent; it's just wrong. At least from our perspective. Which is the point I've been trying to make. They'd say the same thing about us.

Roko: I sent you an email.

Well, it is not logically necessary that we have a genuine disagreement. We might be mistaken in believing ourselves to mean the same thing by the words right and wrong, since neither of us can introspectively report our own moral reference frames or unfold them fully."

I think the idea of associating the meaning of a word with a detailed theory of fine-grained set of criteria, allowing you to apply the term in all cases, has disadvantages.

Newtonian theory has a different set of fine grained criteria about gravity than relativistic theory. If we ta... (read more)