GloriaSidorum

The distinguishing feature of one's boss is that this person has certain kinds of (formally recognized) power over you within your organization's hierarchy

You're considering just the word "boss". Consider the phrase "real boss". Regardless of the meanings of the constituent words, the phrase itself can often be replaced with "the one with the real power", or "the one who actually makes the decisions." For example, "The king may have nominal power, but he's really only a figurehead, his vizier is the real boss... (read more)

If propositional calculus (simpler than it sounds is a good way of describing causality in the territory, I very much doubt there is a fourth option. If I'm doing logic right:

1.¬A is A's cause(1)∨A is A's cause (1)(By NOT-3)

2.A has a cause→ ¬A is A's cause(1)∨A is A's cause(1)(By THEN-1)

3.A has a cause→ ¬A is A's cause(1)∨A is A's cause(1)→A has a cause ∧¬A is A's cause(1)∨A is A's cause(1)(By AND-3)

4.A has a cause→A has a cause ∧¬A is A's cause(1)∨ A is A's cause(1)(Modus Ponens on 3)

1. ¬A has a cause∨A has a cause⊢A has a cause ∧ A is A's cause(1)∨¬A is

If I recall correctly, they actually do. It falls under their incest taboo. So "bad" in any culture could probably be defined by a list of generalised principals which don't necessarily share any characteristics other than being labelled as "bad".

That works a bit better, at least for the art example. A better example of where you'd best "define" a set by memorising all of it's members might be the morality of a particular culture. For instance, some African tribes consider it evil to marry someone whose sibling has the same first name as oneself. Not only is it hard to put into words, in English or Ju|'hoan, a definition of "bad" (or |kàù) which would encompass this, but one couldn't look at a bunch of other things that these tribes consider bad and infer that one shouldn't marry someone who has a sibling who share's one's first name. Better to just know that that's one of the things that is said to |kàù in that culture.

What about words that "can't be defined"? (e.g. "art")

If you can't think of any unifying features of a category, but you still want to use it, you could go about listing members: "Art" Includes (for all known English-speaking humans):

• Intentional paintings from before 1900 Statues Stained-glass windows &c. Includes for many: abstract art modern art cubism Photography &c. Includes for a few: Man-made objects not usually labelled as art &c. Includes for no known English-speaking human: Non man-made objects The Ho

It seems as though Pascal's mugging may be vulnerable to the same "professor god" problem as Pascal's wager. With probabilities that low, the difference between P(3^^^^3 people being tortured|you give the mugger $5) and P(3^^^^3 people being tortured| you spend $5 on a sandwich) may not even be calculable. It's also possible that the guy is trying to deprive the sandwich maker of the money he would otherwise spend on the Simulated People Protection Fund. If you're going to say that P(X is true|someone says X is true)>P(X is true|~someone say... (read more)

Many thanks!

Or one where the differences are small, or trivial. I don't think this is "miraculous" or "implausible". Before the invention of agriculture, about seven to twelve thousand years ago, I'm not sure what pressures there could have been on Europeans to develop higher intelligence than Africans, so in contrast to physical differences, many of which have well-established links to specific climates, intellectual genetic differences would probably be attributable to genetic drift and >~10,000 years of natural selection. To be clear, my position isn't that I have good evidence for this, merely that I don't know and I don't assign this scenario as low a prior probability as you seem to.

Really? I've seen twin studies that purport a genetic explanation for IQ differences between individuals, but never between racial groups. If you've saved a link to a study of the latter type, I'd be really interested to read it.

Not a priori, but there has been at least one study performed on black children adopted by white families, this one, which comes to the conclusion that environment plays a key role. In all honesty, I haven't even read the study, because I can't find the full text online, but if more studies like it are performed and come to similar conclusions, then that could be taken as evidence of a largely environmental explanation.

Could you define "better"? Remember, until clippy actually rewrites its utility function, it defines "better" as "producing more paperclips". And what goal could produce more paperclips than the goal of producing the most paperclips possible?

(davidpearce, I'm not ignoring your response, I'm just a bit of a slow reader, and so I haven't gotten around to reading the eighteen page paper you linked. If that's necessary context for my discussion with whowhowho as well, then I should wait to reply to any comments in this thread until I've read it, but for now I'm operating under the assumption that it is not)

I'm sorry for misinterpreting. What evidence is there ( from the clippy SIs perspective) that maximizing happiness would produce more paperclips?

Thanks! Eventually I'll figure out the formatting on this site.

That's a guess

As opposed to all of those empirically-testable statements about idealized superintelligences

Knowing why some entity avoids some thing has more predictive power.

In what way?

Would it then need to acquire the knowledge that post-utopians experience colonial alienation? That heaps of 91 pebbles are incorrect? I think not. At most it would need to understand that "When pebbles are sorted into heaps of 91, pebble-sorters scatter those heaps" or "When I say that colonial alienation is caused by being a post-utopian, my professor reacts as though I had made a true statement." or "When a human experiences certain phenomena, they try to avoid their continued experience". These statements have predictive p... (read more)

The two cases presented are not entirely comparable. If Jane's utility function is "Maximize Jane's pleasure" then she will choose to not drink in the first problem; the pleasure of non-hangover-having [FOR JANE] exceeding that of [JANE'S] intoxication. Whereas in the second problem Jane is choosing between the absence of a painful death [FOR A COW] and [JANE'S] delicious, juicy hamburger. Since she is not selecting for the strongest preference of every being in the Universe, but rather for herself, she will choose the burger. In terms of which... (read more)

Perhaps its paperclipping machine is slowed down by suffering. But it doesn't have to be reducing suffering, it could be sorting pebbles into correct heaps, or spreading Communism, or whatever. What I was trying to ask was, "In what way is the instrumental rationality of a being who empathizes with suffering better, or more maximal, than that of a being who does not?" The way I've seen it used, "instrumental rationality" refers to the ability to evaluate evidence to make predictions, and to choose optimal decisions, however they may b... (read more)

To have maximal instrumental rationality, an entity would have to understand everything... Why? In what situation is someone who empathetically understands, say, suffering better at minimizing it (or, indeed, maximizing paperclips) than an entity who can merely measure it and work out on a sheet of paper what would reduce the size of the measurements?

Fixed. Thanks.

Orthography is not intuitive. To test my native speaker instinct, I'll pick a case that is. Imagine a user whose name was "Praise_Him". To me, it would be more natural to say "Praise_Him's post" than "Praise_His post"; the former might give me a second's pause, but the latter would make me reread the sentence. Thus, at least the way I use the language, a proper name which incorporates a pronoun is possessivized as a whole, and cousin_it's is correct. But "Its" and "It's" are homophonous, so it wouldn't matter to me much.