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[…] The notion of an argument that convinces any mind seems to involve a little blue woman who was never built into the system, who climbs out of literally nowhere, and strangles the little grey man, because that transistor has just got to output +3 volts:  It's such a compelling argument, you see.

But compulsion is not a property of arguments, it is a property of minds that process arguments.

[…]

And that is why (I went on to say) the result of trying to remove all assumptions from a mind, and unwind to the perfect absence of any prior, is not an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, but a rock.  What is left of a mind after you remove the source code?  Not the ghost who looks over the source code, but simply... no ghost.

So—and I shall take up this theme again later—wherever you are to locate your notions of validity or worth or rationality or justification or even objectivity, it cannot rely on an argument that is universally compelling to all physically possible minds.

Nor can you ground validity in a sequence of justifications that, beginning from nothing, persuades a perfect emptiness.

[…]

The first great failure of those who try to consider Friendly AI, is the One Great Moral Principle That Is All We Need To Program—aka the fake utility function—and of this I have already spoken.

But the even worse failure is the One Great Moral Principle We Don't Even Need To Program Because Any AI Must Inevitably Conclude It.  This notion exerts a terrifying unhealthy fascination on those who spontaneously reinvent it; they dream of commands that no sufficiently advanced mind can disobey.  The gods themselves will proclaim the rightness of their philosophy!  (E.g. John C. Wright, Marc Geddes.)

 

--No Universally Compelling Arguments

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Answer by cwilluJul 22, 202361

Not a complete answer, but something that helps me, that hasn't been mentioned often, is letting yourself do the task incompletely.

I don't have to fold all the laundry, I can just fold one or three things.  I don't have to wash all the dishes, I can just wash one more than I actually need to eat right now.  I don't have to pick up all the trash laying around, just gather a couple things into an empty bag of chips.

It doesn't mean anything, I'm not committing to anything, I'm just doing one meaningless thing.  And I find that helps.

Climbing the ladder of human meaning, ability and accomplishment for some, miniature american flags for others!

“Non-trivial” is a pretty soft word to include in this sort of prediction, in my opinion.

I think I'd disagree if you had said “purely AI-written paper resolves an open millennium prize problem”, but as written I'm saying to myself “hrm, I don't know how to engage with this in a way that will actually pin down the prediction”.

I think it's well enough established that long form internally coherent content is within the capabilities of a sufficiently large language model.  I think the bottleneck on it being scary (or rather, it being not long before The End) is the LLM being responsible for the inputs to the research.

Bing told a friend of mine that I could read their conversations with Bing because I provided them the link.

Is there any reason to think that this isn't a plausible hallucination?

Regarding musicians getting paid ridiculous amounts of money for playing gigs, I'm reminded of the “Making chalk mark on generator $1. Knowing where to make mark $9,999.” story.

The work happens off-stage, for years or decades, typically hours per day starting in childhood, all of which is uncompensated; and a significant level of practice must continue your entire life to maintain your ability to perform.

My understanding is that M&B is intended to be broader than that, as per:

“So it is, perhaps, noting the common deployment of such rhetorical trickeries that has led many people using the concept to speak of it in terms of a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Nevertheless, I think it is clearly worth distinguishing the Motte and Bailey Doctrine from a particular fallacious exploitation of it. For example, in some discussions using this concept for analysis a defence has been offered that since different people advance the Motte and the Bailey it is unfair to accuse them of a Motte and Bailey fallacy, or of Motte and Baileying. That would be true if the concept was a concept of a fallacy, because a single argument needs to be before us for such a criticism to be made. Different things said by different people are not fairly described as constituting a fallacy. However, when we get clear that we are speaking of a doctrine, different people who declare their adherence to that doctrine can be criticised in this way. Hence we need to distinguish the doctrine from fallacies exploiting it to expose the strategy of true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte.” [bold mine]

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/

I'm deeply suspicious of any use of the term “violence” in interpersonal contexts that do not involve actual risk-of-blood violence, having witnessed how the game of telephone interacts with such use, and having been close enough to be singed a couple times.

It's a motte and bailey: the people who use the word as part of a technical term clearly and explicitly disavow the implication, but other people clearly and explicitly call out the implication as if it were fact. Accusations of gaslighting sometimes follow.

It's as if “don't-kill-everyoneism” somehow got associated with the ethics-and-unemployment branch of alignment, but then people started making arguments that opposing, say, RLHF-imposed guardrails for proper attribution, implied that you were actively helping bring about the robot apocalypse, merely because the technical term happens to include “kill everyone”.

Downside of most any information being available to use from any context, I guess.

Meta, possibly a site bug:

The footnote links don't seem to be working for me, in either direction: footnote 1 links to #footnote-1, but there's no element with that id; likewise the backlink on the footnote links to #footnote-anchor-1, which also lacks a block with a matching id.

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