Can somebody convince me that the problem this site is trying to solve is even soluble?
I don't understand how an aligned machine intelligence is definitionally possible without some sort of mathematization of ethics/decision theory, which I know has been worked on. But any such correct mathematization, that is to say one that doesn't assert a falsehood or anything else from which seemingly anything is derivable, should amount to solving ethics entirely. It's the ethical equivalent of..."the meteor is coming and it will eradicate us all unless we come up with a polynomial algorithm for 3SAT, despite the fact that we don't even know that P=NP nonconstructionally."
My admittedly meager mathematical and philosophical knowledge gives me the intuition that alignment is somehow by its nature unsolvable, or that an aligned AI is Solomonoff-like nonconstructable. Any conceivable solution would prove far, far too much. Clearly there must be an assumption that I'm making but you're not, since you're still working on it, but I don't know where it is.
Is it too pessimistic to point out that humans are constantly doing awful things to each other and their surroundings and have been for millennia? I mean, we torture and kill at least eleven moral patients per human per year. I don't understand how this solution doesn't immediately wipe out as much life as it can.