As far as I can tell, this post successfully communicates a cluster of claims relating to "Looking, insight meditation, and enlightenment". It's written in a quite readable style that uses a minimum of metaphorical language or Buddhist jargon. That being said, likely due to its focus as exposition and not persuasion, it contains and relies on several claims that are not supported in the text, such as:
I think that all of these are worth doubting without further evidence, and I think that some of them are in fact wrong.
If this post were coupled with others that substantiated the models that it explains, I think that that would be worthy of inclusion in a 'Best of LW 2018' collection. However, my tentative guess is that Buddhist psychology is not an important enough set of claims that a clear explanation of it deserves to be signal-boosted in such a collection. That being said, I could see myself being wrong about that.
Review by the author:
I continue to endorse the contents of this post.
I don't really think about the post that much, but the post expresses a worldview that shapes how I do my research - that agency is a mechanical fact about the workings of a system.
To me, the main contribution of the post is setting up a question: what's a good definition of optimisation that avoids the counterexamples of the post? Ideally, this definition would refer or correspond to the mechanistic properties of the system, so that people could somehow statically determine whether a given controller was an optimiser. To the best of my knowledge, no such definition has been developed. As such, I see the post as not having kicked off a fruitful public conversation, and its value if any lies in how it has changed the way other people think about optimisation.
I think it was important to have something like this post exist. However, I now think it's not fit for purpose. In this discussion thread, rohinmshah, abramdemski and I end up spilling a lot of ink about a disagreement that ended up being at least partially because we took 'realism about rationality' to mean different things. rohinmshah thought that irrealism would mean that the theory of rationality was about as real as the theory of liberalism, abramdemski thought that irrealism would mean that the theory of rationality would be about as real as the theory of population genetics, and I leaned towards rohinmshah's position but also thought that it referred to something more akin to a mood than a proposition. I think that a better post would distinguish these three types of 'realism' and their consequences. However, I'm glad that this post sparked enough conversation for the better post to become real.
Note: this is on balance a negative review of the post, at least least regarding the question of whether it should be included in a "Best of LessWrong 2018" compilation. I feel somewhat bad about writing it given that the author has already written a review that I regard as negative. That being said, I think that reviews of posts by people other than the author are important for readers looking to judge posts, since authors may well have distorted views of their own works.
This post gave a short name for a way of thinking that I naturally fall into, and implicitly pointing to the possibility of that way of thinking being mistaken. This makes a variety of discussions in the AI alignment space more tractable. I do wish that the post were more precise at characterising the position of 'realism about rationality' and its converse, or (even better) that it gave arguments for or against 'realism about rationality' (even a priors-based one as in this closely related Robin Hanson post), but pointing to a type of proposition and giving it a name seems very valuable.
This post formulated a concrete open problem about what are now called 'inner optimisers'. For me, it added 'surface area' to the concept of inner optimisers in a way that I think was healthy and important for their study. It also spurred research that resulted in this post giving a promising framework for a negative answer.
This is now a hypothesis I look out for and see many places, thanks in part to this post.
This is now a hypothesis I look out for and see many places, thanks in part to this post.
I think that strictly speaking this post (or at least the main thrust) is true, and proven in the first section. The title is arguably less true: I think of 'coherence arguments' as including things like 'it's not possible for you to agree to give me a limitless number of dollars in return for nothing', which does imply some degree of 'goal-direction'.
I think the post is important, because it constrains the types of valid arguments that can be given for 'freaking out about goal-directedness', for lack of a better term. In my mind, it provokes various follow-up questions:
Off the top of my head, I'm not familiar with compelling responses from the 'freak out about goal-directedness' camp on points 1 through 5, even though as a member of that camp I think that such responses exist. Responses from outside this camp include Rohin's post 'Will humans build goal-directed agents?'. Another response is Brangus' comment post, although I find its theory of goal-directedness uncompelling.
I think that it's notable that Brangus' post was released soon after this was announced as a contender for Best of LW 2018. I think that if this post were added to the Best of LW 2018 Collection, the 'freak out' camp might produce more of these responses and move the dialogue forward. As such, I think it should be added, both because of the clear argumentation and because of the response it is likely to provoke.