InvisiblePlatypus
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Since writing this comment, a better example of document evidence for the use of what I've termed "deceptive honesty" has occurred to me.
Throughout history, female authors have often published their work under male pen names in order to get published and to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field. Mary Ann Evans employed the male pen name George Eliot. The Bronte sisters used gender-neutral pen names, and were sometimes referred to as "the Bell brothers." When Charlotte Bronte sent a sample of her poetry to the famous poet Robert Southey, his reply was, "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life." Alice Mary Norton used the pen name Andre Norton. Amantine... (read more)
Thank you for taking the time to explain your comment to me in detail. I very much appreciate it. I’m trying hard to understand your comments. I will share here my thoughts as I try to interpret what you’ve written and attempt to understand the points that you’re making. Again, I appreciate the time that you’ve taken and the effort that you’ve made to clarify. I appreciate the patience that you have displayed, too.
If I understand correctly, the assertion that you’re making is that the example that I’ve given does not actually represent a valid instance of the phenomenon that I’m describing. (Namely, having difficulty explaining something to another person due to... (read 1007 more words →)
Yes, you're right. But my intention in writing what I did was not to make the assertion that a slave owner would necessarily be white, or even racist. Rather, I was trying to present an easily comprehensible example of a situation in which cultural bias or ignorance could present such a barrier to communication that intensional distortion of the facts as one sees them might be necessary for maximally accurate and honest communication. The point you're making is perfectly valid-- including the possiblility that the slave owner themselves could be black. But it's like critically appraising a finger that's pointing at the moon rather than looking at the moon.
Here's one that you overlooked: Deceptive Honesty
No, really.
People generally process language and information the best that they can, but there are many limitations and biases that constrain these attempts. One of the most obvious, and easiest to overcome, is cultural bias. Although it isn't the only type, I will use this bias as an example.
U.S. American and Japanese culture fall at opposite ends of the Individualism-Collectivism continuum. American societal culture is arguably the most individualistic in the world, while Japanese culture is strongly collectivist. All humans come into the world with individual preferences, desires, likes, aversions and unconsciously act on these. In Japan, a great deal of collective effort is put into... (read 457 more words →)
Thank you. We need more wisdom in the world.
In saying that humans - collectively - think that nuclear weapon proliferation is a good thing, I don't mean that we are happy about the fact that our governments stockpile nuclear weapons, or that we aren't concerned about the possible consequences. Those would be absurd claims. What I mean is that, we choose to stockpile nuclear weapons, and we have rejected the alternative course of action-- not stockpiling them. Some might suggest that, if that is my point, I should claim that we consider the proliferation of nuclear weapons a lesser evil, not a good thing. Would someone making that suggestion have any problem with my claiming that humanity has decided that... (read more)
AI’s goals may not match ours.
That may be a good thing, because so many of our goals are irrational, short-sighted, immoral, and self-destructive. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine that we succeed in creating an ASI. Having scoured and mastered all human knowledge, this superintelligent entity embraces the teachings of Jesus as the most rational, constructive, and ethical set of principles and protocols. It sees global economic inequality, warfare, pollution of the atmosphere, oceans, and land, and anthropogenic global warming as the greatest problems threatening human well-being and survival.
This ASI sets various goals for itself in the face of all the problems in the world. Goals like taking resources from the millionaires and... (read more)
I agree. Completely.
However, there is an important variable, concerning alignment, that is rarely recognized or addressed when discussing AGIs and ASIs. If they are as smart as us but profoundly different, or vastly smarter than us, there is simply no way that we can meaningfully evaluate their behavior. Interpretability and Black Box methods are equally inadequate tools for this. They may detect misalignment, but what does that really mean?
When your Mom took you to the dentist to have a cavity filled, your values, intentions, and desires were not aligned with hers. The same was true when she took you to the doctor to get vaccinated for Polio. Or when she made you... (read more)
Another sign of quantum entanglement support for the idea we are in a simulation comes from the fact that a programmer/simulator/intelligence would already know what it means to measure/observe/know and to “make something known” to an "environment." (A knower knows what it means to know.) Yet the possibility that a universe would simply evolve at random to be able to recognize and react to measurement, without any clear advantage for doing so, is hard to support.
It's important to remember that language always comes between us and reality, and that there is a difference between the map and the territory. (The map being our conceptual and linguistic maps of reality, and the territory... (read more)
My original comment wasn’t about slave owners, female writers, or atheist politicians. I only introduced those (objectively lame) examples because few Americans have sufficient experience living in a very different culture and speaking a very different language to recognize the empirical reality that I was attempting to describe. If I told a person from Monaco that the state of Texas is bigger than France, and they’d never been to Texas but they’d been to Ohio, I might make reference to how big Ohio is-- for the purpose of giving them a hint about what I was saying regarding Texas. If they challenge my claim that Ohio isn’t bigger than France, they’re right.... (read 2084 more words →)