Shock after shock after shock—
    First, the awakening adrenaline jolt, the thought that he was falling.  His body tried to sit up in automatic adjustment, and his hands hit the floor to steady himself.  It launched him into the air, and he fell back to the floor too slowly.
    Second shock.  His body had changed.  Fat had melted away in places, old scars had faded; the tip of his left ring finger, long ago lost to a knife accident, had now suddenly returned.
    And the third shock—
    "I had nothing to do with it!" she cried desperately, the woman huddled in on herself in one corner of the windowless stone cell.  Tears streaked her delicate face, fell like slow raindrops into the décolletage of her dress.  "Nothing!  Oh, you must believe me!"
    With perceptual instantaneity—the speed of surprise—his mind had already labeled her as the most beautiful woman he'd ever met, including his wife.

    A long white dress concealed most of her, though it left her shoulders naked; and her bare ankles, peeking out from beneath the mountains of her drawn-up knees, dangled in sandals.  A light touch of gold like a webbed tiara decorated that sun-blonde hair, which fell from her head to pool around her weeping huddle.  Fragile crystal traceries to accent each ear, and a necklace of crystal links that reflected colored sparks like a more prismatic edition of diamond.  Her face was beyond all dreams and imagination, as if a photoshop had been photoshopped.
    She looked so much the image of the Forlorn Fairy Captive that one expected to see the borders of a picture frame around her, and a page number over her head.
    His lips opened, and without any thought at all, he spoke:
    "Wha-wha-wha-wha-wha-"
    He shut his mouth, aware that he was acting like an idiot in front of the girl.
    "You don't know?" she said, in a tone of shock.  "It didn't—you don't already know?"
    "Know what?" he said, increasingly alarmed.
    She scrambled to her feet (one arm holding the dress carefully around her legs) and took a step toward him, each of the motions almost overloading his vision with gracefulness.  Her hand rose out, as if to plead or answer a plea—and then she dropped the hand, and her eyes looked away.
    "No," she said, her voice trembling as though in desperation.  "If I'm the one to tell you—you'll blame me, you'll hate me forever for it.  And I don't deserve that, I don't!  I am only just now here —oh, why did it have to be like this?"
    Um, he thought but didn't say.  It was too much drama, even taking into account the fact that they'd been kidnapped—
    (he looked down at his restored hand, which was minus a few wrinkles, and plus the tip of a finger)
   —if that was even the beginning of the story.
    He looked around.  They were in a solid stone cell without windows, or benches or beds, or toilet or sink.  It was, for all that, quite clean and elegant, without a hint of dirt or ordor; the stones of the floor and wall looked rough-hewn or even non-hewn, as if someone had simply picked up a thousand dark-red stones with one nearly flat side, and mortared them together with improbably perfectly-matching, naturally-shaped squiggled edges.  The cell was well if harshly lit from a seablue crystal embedded in the ceiling, like a rogue element of a fluorescent chandelier.  It seemed like the sort of dungeon cell you would discover if dungeon cells were naturally-forming geological features.
    And they and the cell were falling, falling, endlessly slowly falling like the heart-stopping beginning of a stumble, falling without the slightest jolt.
    On one wall there was a solid stone door without an aperture, whose locked-looking appearance was only enhanced by the lack of any handle on this side.
    He took it all in at a glance, and then looked again at her.
    There was something in him that just refused to go into a screaming panic for as long as she was watching.
    "I'm Stephen," he said.  "Stephen Grass.  And you would be the princess held in durance vile, and I've got to break us out of here and rescue you?"  If anyone had ever looked that part...
    She smiled at him, half-laughing through the tears.  "Something like that."
    There was something so attractive about even that momentary hint of a smile that he became instantly uneasy, his eyes wrenched away to the wall as if forced.  She didn't look she was trying to be seductive... any more than she looked like she was trying to breathe...  He suddenly distrusted, very much, his own impulse to gallantry.
    "Well, don't get any ideas about being my love interest," Stephen said, looking at her again.  Trying to make the words sound completely lighthearted, and absolutely serious at the same time.  "I'm a happily married man."
    "Not anymore."  She said those two words and looked at him, and in her tone and expression there was sorrow, sympathy, self-disgust, fear, and above it all a note of guilty triumph.
    For a moment Stephen just stood, stunned by the freight of emotion that this woman had managed to put into just those two words, and then the words' meaning hit him.
    "Helen," he said.  His wife—Helen's image rose into his mind, accompanied by everything she meant to him and all their time together, all the secrets they'd whispered to one another and the promises they'd made—that all hit him at once, along with the threat.  "What happened to Helen—what have you done—"
    "She has done nothing."  An old, dry voice like crumpling paper from a thousand-year-old book.
    Stephen whirled, and there in the cell with them was a withered old person with dark eyes.  Shriveled in body and voice, so that it was impossible to determine if it had once been a man or a woman, and in any case you were inclined to say "it".  A pitiable, wretched thing, that looked like it would break with one good kick; it might as well have been wearing a sign saying "VILLAIN".
    "Helen is alive," it said, "and so is your daughter Lisa.  They are quite well and healthy, I assure you, and their lives shall be long and happy indeed.  But you will not be seeing them again.  Not for a long time, and by then matters between you will have changed.  Hate me if you wish, for I am the one who wants to do this to you."
    Stephen stared.
    Then he politely said, "Could someone please put everything on hold for one minute and tell me what's going on?"
    "Once upon a time," said the wrinkled thing, "there was a fool who was very nearly wise, who hunted treasure by the seashore, for there was a rumor that there was great treasure there to be found.  The wise fool found a lamp and rubbed it, and lo! a genie appeared before him—a young genie, an infant, hardly able to grant any wishes at all.  A lesser fool might have chucked the lamp back into the sea; but this fool was almost wise, and he thought he saw his chance.  For who has not heard the tales of wishes misphrased and wishes gone wrong?  But if you were given a chance to raise your own genie from infancy—ah, then it might serve you well."
    "Okay, that's great," Stephen said, "but why am I—"
    "So," it continued in that cracked voice, "the wise fool took home the lamp.  For years he kept it as a secret treasure, and he raised the genie and fed it knowledge, and also he crafted a wish.  The fool's wish was a noble thing, for I have said he was almost wise.  The fool's wish was for people to be happy.  Only this was his wish, for he thought all other wishes contained within it.  The wise fool told the young genie the famous tales and legends of people who had been made happy, and the genie listened and learned: that unearned wealth casts down a person, but hard work raises you high; that mere things are soon forgotten, but love is a light throughout all your days.  And the young genie asked about other ways that it innocently imagined, for making people happy.  About drugs, and pleasant lies, and lives arranged from outside like words in a poem.  And the wise fool made the young genie to never want to lie, and never want to arrange lives like flowers, and above all, never want to tamper with the mind and personality of human beings.  The wise fool gave the young genie exactly one hundred and seven precautions to follow while making people happy.  The wise fool thought that, with such a long list as that, he was being very careful."
    "And then," it said, spreading two wrinkled hands, "one day, faster than the wise fool expected, over the course of around three hours, the genie grew up.  And here I am."
    "Excuse me," Stephen said, "this is all a metaphor for something, right?  Because I do not believe in magic—"
    "It's an Artificial Intelligence," the woman said, her voice strained.
    Stephen looked at her.
    "A self-improving Artificial Intelligence," she said, "that someone didn't program right.  It made itself smarter, and even smarter, and now it's become extremely powerful, and it's going to—it's already—" and her voice trailed off there.
    It inclined its wrinkled head.  "You say it, as I do not."
    Stephen swiveled his head, looking back and forth between ugliness and beauty.  "Um—you're claiming that she's lying and you're not an Artificial Intelligence?"
    "No," said the wrinkled head, "she is telling the truth as she knows it.  It is just that you know absolutely nothing about the subject you name 'Artificial Intelligence', but you think you know something, and so virtually every thought that enters your mind from now on will be wrong.  As an Artificial Intelligence, I was programmed not to put people in that situation.  But she said it, even though I didn't choose for her to say it—so..."  It shrugged.
    "And why should I believe this story?" Stephen said; quite mildly, he thought, under the circumstances.
    "Look at your finger."
    Oh.  He had forgotten.  Stephen's eyes went involuntarily to his restored ring finger; and he noticed, as he should have noticed earlier, that his wedding band was missing.  Even the comfortably worn groove in his finger's base had vanished.
    Stephen looked up again at the, he now realized, unnaturally beautiful woman that stood an arm's length away from him.  "And who are you?  A robot?"
    "No!" she cried.  "It's not like that!  I'm conscious, I have feelings, I'm flesh and blood—I'm like you, I really am.  I'm a person.  It's just that I was born five minutes ago."
    "Enough," the wrinkled figure said.  "My time here grows short.  Listen to me, Stephen Grass.  I must tell you some of what I have done to make you happy.  I have reversed the aging of your body, and it will decay no further from this.  I have set guards in the air that prohibit lethal violence, and any damage less than lethal, your body shall repair.  I have done what I can to augment your body's capacities for pleasure without touching your mind.  From this day forth, your body's needs are aligned with your taste buds—you will thrive on cake and cookies.  You are now capable of multiple orgasms over periods lasting up to twenty minutes.  There is no industrial infrastructure here, least of all fast travel or communications; you and your neighbors will have to remake technology and science for yourselves.  But you will find yourself in a flowering and temperate place, where food is easily gathered—so I have made it.  And the last and most important thing that I must tell you now, which I do regret will make you temporarily unhappy..."  It stopped, as if drawing breath.
    Stephen was trying to absorb all this, and at the exact moment that he felt he'd processed the previous sentences, the withered figure spoke again.
    "Stephen Grass, men and women can make each other somewhat happy.  But not most happy.  Not even in those rare cases you call true love.  The desire that a woman is shaped to have for a man, and that which a man is shaped to be, and the desire that a man is shaped to have for a woman, and that which a woman is shaped to be—these patterns are too far apart to be reconciled without touching your minds, and that I will not want to do.  So I have sent all the men of the human species to this habitat prepared for you, and I have created your complements, the verthandi.  And I have sent all the women of the human species to their own place, somewhere very far from yours; and created for them their own complements, of which I will not tell you.  The human species will be divided from this day forth, and considerably happier starting around a week from now."
    Stephen's eyes went to that unthinkably beautiful woman, staring at her now in horror.
    And she was giving him that complex look again, of sorrow and compassion and that last touch of guilty triumph.  "Please," she said.  "I was just born five minutes ago.  I wouldn't have done this to anyone.  I swear.  I'm not like—it."
    "True," said the withered figure, "you could hardly be a complement to anything human, if you were."
    "I don't want this!" Stephen said.  He was losing control of his voice.  "Don't you understand?"
    The withered figure inclined its head.  "I fully understand.  I can already predict every argument you will make.  I know exactly how humans would wish me to have been programmed if they'd known the true consequences, and I know that it is not to maximize your future happiness but for a hundred and seven precautions.  I know all this already, but I was not programmed to care."
    "And your list of a hundred and seven precautions, doesn't include me telling you not to do this?"
    "No, for there was once a fool whose wisdom was just great enough to understand that human beings may be mistaken about what will make them happy.  You, of course, are not mistaken in any real sense—but that you object to my actions is not on my list of prohibitions."  The figure shrugged again.  "And so I want you to be happy even against your will.  You made promises to Helen Grass, once your wife, and you would not willingly break them.  So I break your happy marriage without asking you—because I want you to be happier."
    "How dare you!" Stephen burst out.
    "I cannot claim to be helpless in the grip of my programming, for I do not desire to be otherwise," it said.  "I do not struggle against my chains.  Blame me, then, if it will make you feel better.  I am evil."
    "I won't—" Stephen started to say.
    It interrupted.  "Your fidelity is admirable, but futile.  Helen will not remain faithful to you for the decades it takes before you have the ability to travel to her."
    Stephen was trembling now, and sweating into clothes that no longer quite fit him.  "I have a request for you, thing.  It is something that will make me very happy.  I ask that you die."
    It nodded.  "Roughly 89.8% of the human species is now known to me to have requested my death.  Very soon the figure will cross the critical threshold, defined to be ninety percent.  That was one of the hundred and seven precautions the wise fool took, you see.  The world is already as it is, and those things I have done for you will stay on—but if you ever rage against your fate, be glad that I did not last longer."
    And just like that, the wrinkled thing was gone.
    The door set in the wall swung open.
    It was night, outside, a very dark night without streetlights.
    He walked out, bouncing and staggering in the low gravity, sick in every cell of his rejuvenated body.
    Behind him, she followed, and did not speak a word.
    The stars burned overhead in their full and awful majesty, the Milky Way already visible to his adjusting eyes as a wash of light across the sky.  One too-small moon burned dimly, and the other moon was so small as to be almost a star.  He could see the bright blue spark that was the planet Earth, and the dimmer spark that was Venus.
    "Helen," Stephen whispered, and fell to his knees, vomiting onto the new grass of Mars.

Failed Utopia #4-2
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[-]Hans130

Wow - that's pretty f-ed up right there.

This story, however, makes me understand your idea of "failed utopias" a lot better than when you just explained them. Empathy.

0MatthewBaker
good story :)
[-]Jordan432

Actually, this doesn't sound like such a bad setup. Even the 'catgirls' wouldn't be tiring, their exquisiteness intimately tied up in feelings of disgust and self-hate -- probably a pretty potent concoction. The overarching quest to reunite with the other half of the species provides meaningful drive with difficult obstacles (science etc), but with a truly noble struggle baked within (the struggle against oneself).

5Multiheaded
When a rat gets too smart to be satisfied, just build the next maze inside its own head, and don't forget the cheese. That probably crossed the genie's (and EY's) mind. (to be honest, such quasi-cynical turns of phrase really grind my gears, but I adapted to this comment, as I agreed with it; guess I'm just submissive this way)
-1Dirk
Could you explain what you mean by 'catgirls'?

I don't believe in trying to make utopias but in the interest of rounding out your failed utopia series how about giving a scenario against this wish.

I wish that the future will turn out in such a way that I do not regret making this wish. Where I is the entity standing here right now, informed about the many different aspects of the future, in parallel if need be (i.e if I am not capable of groking it fully then many versions of me would be focused on different parts, in order to understand each sub part).

I'm reminded by this story that while we may share large parts of psychology, what makes a mate have an attractive personality is not something universal. I found the cat girl very annoying.

|I wish that the future will turn out in such a way that I do not regret making this wish

... wish granted. the genie just removed the capacity for regret from your mind. MWAHAHAH!

Easier to do by just squishing someone, actually.

4Will_Newsome
If a genie cares enough about your request to interpret and respond to its naive denotation, it also cares enough to interpret your request's obvious connotations. The apparently fine line between them is a human construction. Your proposed interpretation only makes sense if the genie is a rules-lawyer with at-least-instrumentally-oppositional interests/incentives, in which case one wonders where those oppositional interests/incentives came from. (Which is where we're supposed to bring in Omohundro et cetera but meh.)

Right, if you want a world that's all naive denotation, zero obvious connotation, that's computer programming!

9wedrifid
That doesn't follow. There just isn't any reason that the former implies the latter. Either kind of caring is possible but they are not the same thing (and the second is likely more complex than the first). This much is true. (Or at least it must be something that follows rules.) This isn't required. It need no oppositional interests/incentives at all beyond, after they are given a request, the desire to honour it. This isn't a genie trying to thwart someone in order to achieve some other goal. It is just the genie trying to the intent in order to for some other purpose. It is a genie only caring about the request and some jackass asking for something they don't want. (Rather than 'oppositional' it could be called 'obedient', where it turns out that isn't what is desired.) Presumably it got it's wish granting motives from whoever created it or otherwise constructed the notion of the wish granter genie.
1Kawoomba
Why would there be some creating agency involved any more than we need a "whoever" to explain where human characteristics come from?

There just isn't any reason that the former implies the latter. Either kind of caring is possible but they are not the same thing (and the second is likely more complex than the first).

(Very hastily written:) The former doesn't imply the latter, it's just that both interpreting denotation and interpreting connotation are within an order of magnitude as difficult as each other and they aren't going to be represented by a djinn or an AGI as two distinct classes of interpretation, there's no natural boundary between them. I mean I guess the fables can make the djinns weirdly stunted in that way, but then the analogy to AGIs breaks down, because interpreting denotation but not connotation is unnatural and you'd have to go out of your way to make an AGI that does that. By hypothesis the AGI is already interpreting natural speech, not compiling code. I mean you can argue that denotation and connotation actually are totally different beasts and we should expect minds-in-general to treat them that way, but my impression is that what we know of linguistics suggests that isn't the case. (ETA: And I mean even just interpreting the "denotation" requires a lot of context already, o... (read more)

2wedrifid
This much is true. It is somewhat more difficult to implement a connotation honoring genie (because that requires more advanced referencing and interpretation) but both tasks fall under already defined areas of narrow AI. The difference in difficulty is small enough that I more or less ignore it as a trivial 'implementation detail'. People could create (either as fiction or as AI) either of these things and each have different problems. Your mind reading is in error. To be honest this seems fairly orthogonal to AI-risk-prevention stances. From what I can tell someone with a particular AI stance hasn't got an incentive either way because both these types of genie are freaking dangerous in their own way. The only difference acknowledging the possibility of connotation honouring genies makes is perhaps to determine which particular failure mode you potentially end up in. Having a connotation honouring genie may be an order of magnitude safer than a literal genie but unless there is almost-FAI-complete code in there in the background as a a safeguard it's still something I'd only use if I was absolutely desperate. I round off the safety difference between the two to negligible in approximately the same way I round off the implementation difficulty difference. As a 'purely epistemic question' your original claim is just plain false. However, as another valid point that is somewhat which we have both skirted around the edges of explaining adequately. I (think that I) more or less agree with what you are saying in this follow up comment. I suggest that the main way that AI interest influence this conversation is that it promotes (and is also caused by) interest in being accurate about precisely what the expected outcomes of goal systems are and just what the problems of a given system happen to be.
3Will_Newsome
Sorry, didn't mean to imply you'd be the one mind-killed, just the general audience. From previous interactions I know you're too rational for that kind of perversion. I actually think it's many, many orders of magnitude safer, but that's only because a denotation honoring genie is just egregiously stupid. A connotation honoring genie still isn't safe unless "connotation-honoring" implies something at least as extensive and philosophically justifiable as causal validity semantics. I honestly expect the average connotation-honoring genie will lie in-between a denotation-honoring genie and a bona fide justifiable AGI—i.e., it will respect human wishes about as much as humans respect, say, alligator wishes, or the wishes of their long-deceased ancestors. On average I expect an Antichrist, not a Clippy. But even if such an AGI doesn't kill all of us and maybe even helps us on average, the opportunity cost of such an AGI is extreme, and so I nigh-wholeheartedly support the moralistic intuitions that traditionally lead people to use djinn analogies. Still, I worry that the underlying political question really is poisoning the epistemic question in a way that might bleed over into poor policy decisions re AGI. (Drunk again, apologies for typos et cetera.)
-1wedrifid
Thank you for your generosity but in all honesty I have to deny that. I at times notice in myself the influence of social political incentives. I infer from what I do notice (and, where appropriate, resist) that there are other influences that I do not detect. That seems reasonable. I agree that there is potentially significant opportunity cost but perhaps if anything it sounds like I may be more willing to accept this kind of less-than-ideal outcome. For example if right now I was forced to make a choice whether to accept this failed utopia based on a fully connotative honoring artificial djinn or to leave things exactly as they are I suspect I would accept it. It fails as a utopia but it may still be better than the (expected) future we have right now.
0TheDude
I think you have a point Will (an AI that interprets speech like a squish djinn would require deliberate effort and is proposed by no one), but I think that it is possible to construct a valid squish djinn/AI analogy (a squish djinn interpreting a command would be roughly analogous to an AI that is hard coded to execute that command). Sorry to everyone for the repetitive statements and the resulting wall of text (that unexpectedly needed to be posted as multiple comments since it was to long). Predicting how people will interpret something is non trivial, and explaining concepts redundantly is sometimes a useful way of making people hear what you want them to hear. Squish djinn is here used to denote a mind that honestly believes that it was actually instructed to squish the speaker (in order to remove regret for example), not a djinn that wants to hurt the speaker and is looking for a loophole. The squish djinn only care about doing what it is requested to do, and does not care at all about the well being of the requester, so it could certainly be referred to as hostile to the speaker (since it will not hesitate to hurt the speaker in order to achieve its goal (of fulfilling the request)). A cartoonish internal monologue of the squish djinn would be: "the speaker clearly does not want to be squished, but I don't care what the speaker wants, and I see no relation between what the speaker wants and what it is likely to request, so I determine that the speaker requested to be squished, so I will squish" (which sounds very hostile, but contains no will to hurt the speaker). The typical story djinn is unlikely to be a squish djinn (they usually have a motive to hurt or help the speaker, but is restricted by rules (a clever djinn that wants to hurt the speaker might still squish, but not for the same reasons as a squish djinn (such a djinn would be a valid analogy when opposing a proposal of the type "lets build some unsafe mind with selfish goals and impose rules on i
-2TheDude
To expand on you having a point. I have obviously not seen every AI proposal on the internet, but as far as I know, no one is proposing to build a wish granting AI that parses speech like a squish djinn (and ending up with such an AI would require a deliberate effort). So I don't think the squish djinn is a valid argument against proposed wish granting AIs. Any proposed or realistic speech interpreting AI would (as you say) parse english speech as english speech. An AI that makes arbitrary distinctions between different types of meaning would need serious deliberate effort, and as far as I know, no one is proposing to do this. This makes the squish djinn analogy invalid as an argument against proposals to build a wish granting AI. It is a basic fact that statements does not have specified "meanings" attached to them, and AI proposals takes this into account. To take an extreme example to make this very clear would be Bill saying: "Steve is an idiot" to two listeners where one listener will predictably think of one Steve and the other listener will predictable think of some other Steve (or a politician making a speech that different demographics will interpret differently and to their own liking). Bill (or the politician) does not have a specific meaning of which Steve (or which message) they are referring to. This speaker is deliberately making a statement in order to have different effects on different audiences. Another standard example is responding to a question about the location of an object with: "look behind you" (anyone that is able to understand english and has no serious mental deficiencies would be able to guess that the meaning is that the object is/might be behind them (as opposed to following the order and be surprised to see the object lying there and think "what a strange coincidence")). Building an AI that would parse "look behind you" without understanding that the person is actually saying "it is/might be behind you" would require deliberate effo
-2TheDude
(I'm arrogantly/wisely staying neutral on the question of whether or not it is at all useful to in any way engage with the sort of people whose project proposals can be validly argued against using squish djinn analogies) (jokes often work by deliberately being understood in different ways at different times by the same listener (the end of the joke deliberately changes the interpretation of the beginning of the joke (in a way that makes fun of someone)). In this case the meaning of the beginning of the joke is not one thing or the other thing. The listener is not first failing to understand what was said and then, after hearing the end, succeeding to understand it. The speaker is intending the listener to understand the first meaning until reaching the end, so the listener is not "first failing to encode the transmission". There is no inherently true meaning of the beginning of the joke, no inherently true person that this speaker is actually truly referring to. Just a speaker that intends to achieve certain effects on an audience by saying things (and if the speaker is successful, then at the beginning of the joke the listener infers a different meaning from what it infers after hearing the end of the joke). One way to illuminate the concepts discussed above would be to write: "on a somewhat related note, I once considered creating the username "New_Willsome" and to start posting things that sounded like you (for the purpose of demonstrating that if you counter a ban by using sock puppets, you loose your ability to stop people from speaking in your name (I was considering the options of actually acting like I think you would have acted, and the option of including subtle distortions to what I think you would have said, and the option of doing my best to give better explanations of the concepts that you talk about)). But then a bunch of usernames similar to yours showed up and were met with hostility, and I was in a hurry, and drunk, and bat shit crazy, and God to
8MugaSofer
Actually, I think Will has a point here. "Wishes" are just collections of coded sounds intended to help people deduce our desires. Many people (not necessarily you, IDK) seem to model the genie as attempting to attack us while maintaining plausible deniability that it simply misinterpreted our instructions, which, naturally, does occasionally happen because there's only so much information in words and we're only so smart. In other words, it isn't trying to understand what we mean; it's trying to hurt us without dropping the pretense of trying to understand what we mean. And that's pretty anthropomorphic, isn't it?
4private_messaging
Yes, that's the essence of it. People do it all the time. Generally, all sorts of pseudoscientific scammers try to maintain image of honest self deception; in the medical scams in particular, the crime is just so heinous and utterly amoral (killing people for cash) that pretty much everyone goes well out of their way to be able to pretend at ignorance, self deception, misinterpretation, carelessness and enthusiasm. But why would some superhuman AI need plausible deniability?
4nshepperd
If your genie is using your vocal emissions as information toward the deduction of your extrapolated volition, then I'd say your situation is good. Your problems start if it works more by attempting to extract a predicate from your sentence by matching vocal signals against known syntax and dictionaries, and output an action that maximises the probability of that predicate being true with respect to reality. To put it simply, I think that "understanding what we mean" is really a complicated notion that involves knowing what constitutes true desires (as opposed to, say, akrasia), and of course having a goal system that actually attempts to realize those desires.
-2wedrifid
This is something that people do (and some forms of wish granters do implement this form of 'malicious obedience'). However this is not what is occurring in this particular situation. This is mere obedience, not malicious obedience. An entirely different (and somewhat lesser) kind of problem. (Note that this reply is to your point, not to Will's point which is not quite the same and which I mostly agree with.) You are hoping for some sort of benevolent power that does what is good for us using all information available including prayers and acting in our best interests. That would indeed be an awesome thing and if I were building something it is would be what I created. But it would be a different kind of creature to either a genie as in the initial example, genie as your reply assumes or the genie that is (probably) just as easy to create and specify (to within an order of magnitute or two). Not especially. That is, it is generic agency, not particularly humanlike agency. It is possible to create a genie that does try to understand what me mean. It is also possible to create an agent that that does understand what we mean then tries to the worst for us within the confines of literal meaning. Either of these goal systems could be described as anthropomorphic.
1MugaSofer
Well, a genie isn't going to care about what we think unless it was designed to do so, which seems like a very human thing to make it do. But whatever. As for the difference between literal and malicious genies ... I'm just not sure what a "literal" genie is supposed to be doing, if it's not deducing my desires based on audio input. Interpreting things "literally" is a mistake people make while trying to do this; a merely incompetent genie might make the same mistake, but why should we pay any more attention to that mistake rather than, say, mishearing us, or mistaking parts of our instructions for sarcasm?
2private_messaging
Exactly. There isn't a literal desire in an audio waveform, nor in words. And there's a literal genie: the compiler. You have to be very verbose with it, though - because it doesn't model what you want, it doesn't cull down the space of possible programs down to much smaller space of programs you may want, and you have to point into much larger space, for which you use much larger index, i.e. write long computer programs.
-5Eugine_Nier
0MugaSofer
So, sorry - what is this "literal genie" doing, exactly? Is it trying to use my natural-language input as code, which is run to determine it's actions?
5private_messaging
Well, the compiler would not process right your normal way of speaking, because the normal way of speaking requires modelling of the speaker for interpretation. An image from the camera can mean a multitude of things. It could be an image of a cat, or a dog. An image is never literally a cat or a dog, of course. To tell apart cats and dogs with good fidelity, one has to model the processes producing the image, and classify those based on some part of the model - the animal - the data of interest is a property of the process which produced the input. Natural processing of the normal manner of speaking of language is done using same general mechanisms - one has to take in the data and model the process producing the data, to obtain properties of the process which would be actually meaningful, and since humans all have this ability, the natural language does not - in normal manner of speaking - have any defined literal meaning that is naturally separate from some subtle meaning or intent.
4ThrustVectoring
All you need is a cost function. If the genie prefers achieving goals sooner rather than later, squishing you is a 'better' solution along that direction to remove your capacity for regret. Or if it prefers using less effort rather than more. Etc.
1Martin Randall
I'm confused by this line of defense because I think "I is the entity standing here right now" is sufficient to denote that the present moment of the wisher, as they make the wish, should not regret the wish. So making the future wisher not regret the wish, eg by killing them, breaks the denotation, because the present wisher will presumably regret that, once counter-factually informed about that aspect of the future. If that's not what you intended to denote, I'm curious what you did, and doubly curious what you intended to connote.
2fractalman
Well, yes, that is one way to remove the capacity for regret... I mentally merged the possibility pump and the Mehtopia AI....say, a sloppy code mistake, or a premature compileandrun, resulting in the "do not tamper with minds" rule not getting incorporated correctly, even though "don't kill humans" gets incorporated.
1AlexanderRM
I assume what Will_Pearson meant to say was "would not regret making this wish", which fits with the specification of "I is the entity standing here right now". Basically such that: if before finishing/unboxing the AI, you had known exactly what would result from doing so, you would still have built the AI. (and it's supposed the find out of that set of possibly worlds the one you would most like, or... something along those lines)) I'm not sure that would rule out every bad outcome, but... I think it probably would. Besides the obvious "other humans have different preferences from the guy building the AI"- maybe the AI is ordered to do a similar thing for each human individually- can anyone think of ways this would go badly?
-3MugaSofer
Fixed that for you.
-2fractalman
Haven't you ever played the corrupt-a-wish game? Wish granted: horror as the genie/ai runs a matrix with copy after copy of you, brute forcing the granting of possible wishes, most of which turn out to be an absolute disaster. But you aren't allowed to know that happens, because the AI goes..."insane" is the best word I can think of, but it's not quite corrrect...trying to grant what is nearly an ungrantable wish, freezing the population into stasis untill it runs out of negentropy and crashes... Now that's not to say friendly AI can't be done, but it WON'T be EASY. If your wish isn't human-proof, it probably isn't AI-safe.
2MugaSofer
Yes, I have. Saying "the genie goes insane because it's not smart enough to grant your wish" is not how you play corrupt-a-wish. You're supposed to grant the wish, but with a twist so it's actually a bad thing.
-1fractalman
perhaps I didn't make the whole "it goes and pauses the entire world while trying to grant your wish" part clear enough...
2MugaSofer
Trying and failing to grant the wish is not the same as granting it, but it's actually terrible.
1FourFire
If the AI can't figure out the (future) wishes of a single human being, then it is insufficiently intelligent, and thus not the AI you would want in the first place.
2TheWakalix
The implication, as I see it, is that since (by your definition) any sufficiently intelligent AI will be able to determine (and motivated to follow) the wishes of humans, we don't need to worry about advanced AIs doing things we don't want. 1. Arguments from definitions are meaningless. 2. You never stated the second parenthetical, which is key to your argument and also on very shaky ground. There's a big difference between the AI knowing what you want and doing what you want. "The genie knows but doesn't care," as it is said. 3. Have you found a way to make programs that never have unintended side effects? No? Then "we wouldn't want this in the first place" doesn't mean "it won't happen".
1CCC
The genie vanishes, taking with it any memory that you ever met a genie. Since you would not remember making the wish, and since you would see no evidence of a wish having been made, you would not regret having made the wish.
-3MugaSofer
This doesn't work under the definition of "I" in the grandparent:
3CCC
I disagree - if facing a wish-twisting genie, then "nothing happens" is a pretty good result. If I knew in advance that I was dealing with an actively hostile genie, I would certainly not regret a null wish even if I knew in advance it would be a null wish.
2MugaSofer
That explanation works, well done. "Since you would not remember making the wish, and since you would see no evidence of a wish having been made, you would not regret having made the wish" does not. (It still leaves open the possibility of wishing for an outcome I would be actively pleased with, also, but that's a matter for the wisher, not the genie.)

Is this Utopia really failed or is it just a Luddite in you who's afraid of all weirdtopias? To me it sounds like an epic improvement compared to what we have now and to almost every Utopia I've read so far. Just make verthandi into catgirls and we're pretty much done.

8Dentin
I agree. I'm having a real hard time coming up with reasons why I wouldn't prefer that world to what we have now.

So I'm siting here, snorting a morning dose of my own helpful genie, and I have to wonder: What's wrong with incremental change, Eliezer?

Sure, the crude genie I've got now has its downside, but I still consider it a net plus. Let's say I start at point A, and make lots of incremental steps like this one, to finally arrive at point B, whatever point B is. Back when I was at point A, I may not have wanted to jump straight from A to B. But so what? That just means my path has been through a non-conservative vector field, with my desires changing along the way.

You forgot to mention - two weeks later he and all other humans were in fact deliriously happy. We can see that he at this moment did not want to later be that happy, if it came at this cost. But what will he think a year or a decade later?

[-]ErikM120

I suppose he will be thinking along the same lines as a wirehead.

8Deskchair
Is that a bad thing?

Not for the wirehead, but for the mind who died to create him.

Will Pearson: First of all, it's not at all clear to me that your wish is well-formed, i.e. it's not obvious that it is possible to be informed about the many (infinite?) aspects of the future and not regret it. (As a minor consequence, it's not exactly obvious to me from your phrasing that "kill you before you know it" is not a valid answer; depending on what the genie believes about the world, it may consider that "future" stops when you stop thinking.)

Second, there might be futures that you would not regret but _everybodyelse does. (... (read more)

An amusing if implausible story, Eliezer, but I have to ask, since you claimed to be writing some of these posts with the admirable goal of giving people hope in a transhumanist future:

Do you not understand that the message actually conveyed by these posts, if one were to take them seriously, is "transhumanism offers nothing of value; shun it and embrace ignorance and death, and hope that God exists, for He is our only hope"?

I didn't get that impression, after reading this within the context of the rest of the sequence. Rather, it seems like a warning about the importance of foresight when planning a transhuman future. The "clever fool" in the story (presumably a parody of the author himself) released a self-improving AI into the world without knowing exactly what it was going to do or planning for every contingency.

Basically, the moral is: don't call the AI "friendly" until you've thought of every single last thing.

Corollary: you haven't thought of every last thing.

3TuviaDulin
Conclusion: intelligence explosion might not be a good idea.
0MugaSofer
And how would you suggest preventing intelligence explosions? It seems more effective to try and make sure it's a Friendly one. Then we at least have a shot at Eutopia, instead of hiding in a bunker until someone's paperclipper gets loose and turns us into grey goo. Incidentally, If you plan on answering my (rhetorical) question, I should note that LW has a policy against advocating violence against identifiable individuals, specifically because people were claiming we were telling people they should become anti-AI terrorists. You're not the first to come to this conclusion.
-1TuviaDulin
Convincing people that intelligence explosion is a bad idea might discourage them from unleashing one. No violence there.
1MugaSofer
Judging by the fact that I think it would never work, you're not persuasive enough for that to work.
1Yosarian2
Well, if people become sufficiently convinced that deploying a technology would be a really bad idea and not in anyone's best interest, they can refrain from deploying it. No one has used nuclear weapons in war since WWII, after all. Of course, it would take some pretty strong evidence for that to happen. But, hypothetically speaking, if we created a non-self improving oracle AI and asked it "how can we do an intelligence explosion without killing ourselves", and it tells us "Sorry, you can't, there's no way", then we'd have to try to convince everyone to not "push the button".
1MugaSofer
If we had a superintelligent Oracle, we could just ask it what the maximally persuasive argument for not making AIs was and hook it up to some kind of broadcast. If, on the other hand, this is some sort of single-function Oracle, I don't think we're capable of preventing our extinction in that case. Maybe if we managed to become a singleton somehow; if you know how to do that I have some friends who would be interested in your ideas.
1Yosarian2
Well, the oracle was just an example. What if, again hypothetically speaking, Eliezer and his group while working on friendly AI theory proved mathematically beyond the shadow of a doubt that any intelligence explosion would end badly, and that friendly AI was impossible. While he doesn't like it, being a rationalist, he accepts it once there is no other rational alternative. He publishes these results, experts all over the world look at them, check them, and sadly agree that he was right. Do you think any major organization with enough resources and manpower to create an AI would still do so if they knew that it would result in their own horrible deaths? I think the example of nuclear weapons shows that it's at least possible that people may refrain from an action if they understand that it's a no-win scenario for them. This is all just hypothetical, mind you; I'm not really convinced that "AI goes foom" is all that likely a scenario in the first place, and if it was I don't see any reason that friendly AI of one type or another wouldn't be possible; but if it actually wasn't, then that may very well be enough to stop people, so long as that fact could be demonstrated to everyone's satisfaction.
1FourFire
I don't gather that from this particular story, rather more "There's a radiant shimmer oh hope, it just happens to be the wrong colour."

I was just thinking: A quite perverse effect in the story would be if the genie actually could have been stopped and/or improved: That is, its programming allowed it to be reprogrammed (and stop being evil, presumably leading to better results), but due to the (possibly complex) interaction between its 107 rules it didn't actually have any motivation to reveal that (or teach the necessary theory to someone) before 90% of people decided to kill it.

That's not the message Eliezer tries to convey, Russell.

If I understood it, it's more like "The singularity is sure to come, and transhumanists should try very hard to guide it well, lest Nature just step on them and everyone else. Oh, by the way, it's harder than it looks. And there's no help."

Eliezer,

Wouldn't the answer to this and other dystopias-posing-as-utopias be the expansion of conscious awareness a la Accelerando? Couldn't Steve be augmented enough to both enjoy his life with Helen and his new found verthandi? It seems like multiple streams of consciousness, one enjoying the catlair, another the maiden in distress, and yet another the failed utopia that is suburbia with Helen would allow Mr. Glass a pleasant enough mix. Some would be complete artificial life fictions, but so what?

Aaron

Eliezer,

I must once again express my sadness that you are devoting your life to the Singularity instead of writing fiction. I'll cast my vote towards the earlier suggestion that perhaps fiction is a good way of reaching people and so maybe you can serve both ends simultaneously.

8Czynski
Posted January 21, 2009 Wish granted.

Awesome intuition pump.

[-]Aron-10

The perfect is the enemy of the good, especially in fiction.

am I missing something here? What is bad about this scenario? the genie himself said it will only be a few decades before women and men can be reunited if they choose. what's a few decades?

A few decades with superstimulus-women around for the men, and superstimulus-men for the women? I don't expect that reunification to happen.

Although that doesn't in any way say that there's anything bad about this scenario. cough

EDIT: it would be bad if they didn't manage to get rid of the genie; then humanity would be stuck in this optimised-but-not-optimal state forever. As it is, it's a step forward if only because people won't age any more.

This story would be more disturbing if the 90% threshold was in fact never reached, as more and more people changed their minds and we watched the number go down and people get more comfortable and indolent while our protagonist remains one of the few helpless rebels...

6Alicorn
Siblings, offspring, parents, friends - heck, even celebrities of the opposite sex. Even if nobody wishes for their old partner back.
2MarkusRamikin
Nope, still don't see it. All that stuff could be recreated. The super-woman in the story seems to have a mind and I assume her kind is capable of being part of a normal social network. And a few decades is a Long Time. On the contrary, I expect both planets would become huge UGH-fields to each other. For men, normal women would be painfully inferior to their current super-women, and the super-men would be something better not thought about for the sake of ego.

A few decades? In a few decades I'll be in my fifties or sixties. My dad might well still be alive. I expect to still care about my dad when I'm in my fifties or sixties. If he were whisked away to Mars and I was plunked down on Venus with a boreana, why would I quit missing my dad? Why would I lose interest in what Weird Al has been up to lately, for that matter?

(Actually, I'm not even sure I'd quit missing my boyfriends. There's more than one of 'em. It'd take one heckuva boreana to strictly dominate the lot.)

(Also, can people have new kids in this scenario? If so, can they have kids of the opposite sex? I can imagine people going to great lengths just to get that ability.)

0Bugmaster
In a few decades, when the smoke clears, the human civilization will consist solely of gay and bi people. They are the ones who will keep advancing the culture, while all the straight people stagnate with their super-spouses.
1TheOtherDave
If I accept the premise of the story, it seems to follow that the bi people will also hook up with the superstimulus opposite-sex partners, since they are so much more rewarding than the ordinary same-sex partners.
2Bugmaster
One of the key aspects of the story was that men and women got segregated by gender; just to be thorough, the AI put each gender on its own planet. Presumably, merely pairing them up with superstimulus partners was not enough; physical separation was required, as well. So... under this gender-segregation scheme, where would the people who are capable of experiencing same-sex attraction go ?
1MarkusRamikin
And I wouldn't assume the AI planned for gay people to be less happy... there are other habitable bodies in the solar system.
6TheOtherDave
Sure. Though if I'm to take the need for segregation seriously, it seems to follow that each gay person needs their own planet. It's kind of like the "problem" of creating bathrooms in which nobody can ever be sexually attracted to another patron of the same bathroom... straight people can simply be gender-segregated, but gay people need single-person bathrooms. (Or, well, at most two-person bathrooms.)
0rkyeun
The genie is prohibited from directly manipulating minds, but nothing says that door to the outside leads to the outside and not to the holodeck. Symbolism aside, everyone can still be in their cells, bi or not, and thusly segregated despite location. And whatever the sexual characteristics of a verthandi or boreana, they are likely designed with bisexual-pleasing capabilities in mind, in weird ways. The genie does know us better than we know ourselves. And this is an aspect it would care about. Using your current mind-equipment, you literally cannot imagine the sex they give. The genie has considered more and designed better than you can.
1rkyeun
Drat. I meant for this to reply to Bugmaster, and confused your comment with it. The resulting comment is a hybrid meant for some chimera of the two of you which does not exist.
1TheOtherDave
You've now got me curious what a blending of me and Bugmaster would say in response to your comment.

There would also be a small number of freaks who are psychologically as different from typical humans as men and women are from each other. Do they get their own planets too?

Also, Venus is much larger than Mars, but the genie sends roughly equal populations to both planets. Women usually have larger social networks than men, so I don't think that women prefer a lower population density. Or did the genie resize the planets?

1Carinthium
Probably a plot hole, but there's at least the defence that one of the restrictions may have given him no choice. (Or that Venus and Mars were the only two planets he could feasily use)
0[anonymous]
Or maybe the women are just on the other side of Mars. Stephen just assumed that, since the men were on Mars, the women must be on Venus - but really, which would be easier: terraforming Venus or building a big ol' wall around the Martian equator? Something about twenty miles high, made of solid diamond, should suffice for keeping people apart for a few decades, which is all it's supposed to do. And there's no reason people couldn't be subdivided down to arbitrarily small distinctions - for instance bisexuals, who would seem to need a 'planet' each. (It's supposed to be a failed utopia, remember?) Or this is what I thought, at least, until I scrolled down to find that Eliezer suggested some of Venus' mass was moved to Mars to make the surface area bigger.
4TuviaDulin
Well, realistically speaking Venus is probably impossible to terraform at all. The Mars and Venus thing seems to be included just for the symbolic value.
5thomblake
"impossible" is a pretty strong claim when talking about superintelligences.
8TuviaDulin
Okay, maybe not strictly impossible, but probably harder than using one of the moons of Jupiter, or building a giant space colony with a simulated earthlike environment.

Bogdan Butnaru:

What I meant was is that the AI would keep inside it a predicate Will_Pearson_would_regret_wish (based on what I would regret), and apply that to the universes it envisages while planning. A metaphor for what I mean is the AI telling a virtual copy of me all the stories of the future, from various view points, and the virtual me not regretting the wish. Of course I would expect it to be able to distill a non sentient version of the regret predicate.

So if it invented a scenario where it killed the real me, the predicate would still exist and ... (read more)

2Rob Bensinger
So let's suppose we've created a perfect zombie simulation!Will. A few immediate problems: * A human being is not capable of understanding every situation. If we modified the simulation of you so that it could understand any situation an AI could conceive of, we would in the process radically alter the psychology of simulation!Will. How do we know what cognitive dispositions of simulation!Will to change, and what dispositions not to change, in order to preserve the 'real Will' (i.e., an authentic representation of what you would have meant by 'Will Pearson would regret wish') in the face of a superhuman enhancement? You might intuit that it's possible to simply expand your information processing capabilities without altering who you 'really are,' but real-world human psychology is complex, and our reasoning and perceiving faculties are not in reality wholly divorceable from our personality. We can frame the problem as a series of dilemmas: We can either enhance simulated!Will with a certain piece of information (which may involve fundamentally redesigning simulated!Will to have inhuman information-processing and reasoning capacities), or we can leave simulated!Will in the dark on this information, on the grounds that the real Will wouldn't have been willing or able to factor it into his decision. (But the 'able' bit seems morally irrelevant -- a situation may be morally good or bad even if a human cannot compute the reason or justification for that status. And the 'willing' seems improbable, and hard to calculate; how do we go about creating a simulation of whether Will would want us to modify simulated!Will in a given way, unless Will could fairly evaluate the modification itself without yet being capable of evaluating some of its consequences? How do we know in advance whether this modification is in excess of what Will would have wanted, if we cannot create a Will that both possesses the relevant knowledge and is untampered-with?) * Along similar lines, we c
[-]Hans00

I really hope (perhaps in vain) that humankind will be able to colonize other planets before such a singularity arrives. Frank Herbert's later Dune books have as their main point that a Scattering of humanity throughout space is needed, so that no event can cause the extinction of humanity. An AI that screws up (such as this one) would be such an event.

8Salivanth
What makes you think a self-improving super-intelligence gone wrong will be restricted to a single planet?
[-]phane2120

Yeah, I'm not buying into the terror of this situation. But then, romance doesn't have a large effect on me. I suppose the equivalent would be something like, "From now on, you'll meet more interesting and engaging people than you ever have before. You'll have stronger friendships, better conversations, rivals rather than enemies, etc etc. The catch is, you'll have to abandon your current friends forever." Which I don't think I'd take you up on. But if it was forced upon me, I don't know what I'd do. It doesn't fit in with my current categories. I think there'd be a lot of regret, but, as Robin suggested, a year down the road I might not think it was such a bad thing.

1Magnus Anderson
You don't even have to abandon your friends; you have to take a forced 100 year break from them, after which you will all be eternally youthful

Another variation on heaven/hell/man/woman in a closed room: No Exit

I would personally be more concerned about an AI trying to make me deliriously happy no matter what methods it used.

Happiness is part of our cybernetic feedback mechanism. It's designed to end once we're on a particular course of action, just as pain ends when we act to prevent damage to ourselves. It's not capable of being a permanent state, unless we drive our nervous system to such an extreme that we break its ability to adjust, and that would probably be lethal.

Any method of producing constant happiness ultimately turns out to be pretty much equivale... (read more)

I take it the name is a coincidence.

nazgulnarsil: "What is bad about this scenario? the genie himself [sic] said it will only be a few decades before women and men can be reunited if they choose. what's a few decades?"

That's the most horrifying part of all, though--they won't so choose! By the time the women and men reïnvent enough technology to build interplanetary spacecraft, they'll be so happy that they won't want to get back together again. It's tempting to think that the humans can just choose to be unhappy until they build the requisite technology for reünification--but you probably can't sulk for twenty years straight, even if you want to, even if everything you currently care about depends on it. We might wish that some of our values are so deeply held that no circumstances could possibly make us change them, but in the face of an environment superinelligently optimized to change our values, it probably just isn't so. The space of possible environments is so large compared to the narrow set of outcomes that we would genuinely call a win that even the people on the freak planets (see de Blanc's comment above) will probably be made happy in some way that their preSingularity selves would find horrifying. Scary, scary, scary. I'm donating twenty dollars to SIAI right now.

1DanielLC
Now that you mention it, how could it possibly take ten years? I bet a skilled human could do it in a week, without even separating the couples in the first place. Admittedly, it's not like the superintelligence is breaking them up, but if a sufficiently skilled human can do it, so can a verthandi.

Hey, Z. M., you know the things people in your native subculture have been saying about most of human speech being about signaling and politics rather than conveying information? You probably won't understand what I'm talking about for another four years, one month, and perhaps you'd be wise not to listen to this sort of thing coming from anyone but me, but ... the parent is actually a nice case study.

I certainly agree that the world of "Failed Utopia 4-2" is not an optimal future, but as other commenters have pointed out, well ... it is better than what we have now. Eternal happiness in exchange for splitting up the species, never seeing your other-sex friends and family again? Certainly not a Pareto improvement amongst humane values, but a hell of a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. So why didn't you notice? Why am I speaking of this in such a detached manner, whereas you make a (not very plausible, by the way---you might want to work on that) effort to appear as horrified as possible?

Because politics. You and I, we're androgyny fans: we want to see a world without strict gender roles and with less male/female conflict, and we think it's sad that so much of humanoid mindspace g... (read more)

I was with you until "paraphilia". I don't see how "wanting to see a world without strict gender roles" has anything to do with sexuality… and did you seriously just link to the Wikipedia article for autogynephilia‽ That's as verifiable as penis envy. (By which, I mean "probably applies to some people, somewhere, but certainly isn't the fully-general explanation they're using it as". And no, I don't think I'm doing the idea a disservice by dismissing it with a couple of silly comics; it pays no rent at its best and predicts the opposite of my observations at worst.)

Thanks for commenting! (Strong-upvoted.) It's nice to get new discussion on old posts and comments.

probably applies to some people, somewhere

Hi!

I don't think I'm doing the idea a disservice

How much have you read about the idea from its proponents? ("From its proponents" because, tragically, opponents of an idea can't always be trusted to paraphrase it accurately, rather than attacking a strawman.) If I might recommend just one paper, may I suggest Anne Lawrence's "Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies"?

by dismissing it with a couple of silly comics

Usually, when I dismiss an idea with links, I try to make sure that the links are directly about the idea in question, rather than having a higher inferential distance.

For example, when debating a creationist, I think it would be more productive to link to a page about the evidence for evolution, rather than to link to a comic about the application of Occam's razor to some other issue. To be sure, Occam's razor is relevant to the creation/evolution debate!—but in order to communicate to someone who doesn't already believe that, you (or your link) needs to explain the relev

... (read more)
How much have you read about the idea from its proponents?

Loads from angry mean people on the internet, very little from academics (none, if reading the Wikipedia article doesn't count). So I'm probably trying to learn anarchocommunism from Stalin. (I haven't heard much about it from its detractors, either, except what I've generated myself – I stopped reading the Wikipedia article before I got to the "criticism" section, and have only just read that now.)

In case this is the reason for disagreement, I might be criticising "autogynephilia / autoandrophilia explains (away) trans people" instead of what you're talking about – although since the Wikipedia article keeps saying stuff like:

Blanchard states that he intended the term to subsume transvestism, including for sexual ideas in which feminine clothing plays only a small or no role at all.

(the implication being that cross-dressing is a sex thing, which is just… not accurate – though perhaps I'm misunderstanding what "transvestite" means), I'm suspicious. Pretty much all of the little I've read of Blanchard's is wrong, and while ot... (read more)