“Though, since you never designed your own leg muscles, you are racing using strength that isn’t yours. A race between robot cars is a purer contest of their designers.”
Eliezer: While people don’t design their muscles, they presently don’t design their brains either, so a robot car-designing contest seems like just as impure a contest. Even if people did repeatedly redesign their brains, wouldn’t this either result in convergence, in which case the contestants would be identical and the contest wouldn’t be interesting, or alternatively, the arbitrary initial advantages and disadvantages would just be passed on in modified and perhaps even amplified form and the contest stays as impure as ever. Even if you try to measure the amount of effort the contestants put in, that’s no good either because different people are born with unfairly different amounts of will-power.
This could function as an intuition pump for my own hypothesis that advanced self-modifying minds won’t compete at arbitrary preselected goals for fun. (At least not exclusively for fun; they might design themselves to enjoy competing to achieve goals in a pedagogical framework, but actually achieving the goal [or acquiring the skills/knowledge/etc. necessary to achieve the goal] will be the point.)
“Though, since you never designed your own leg muscles, you are racing using strength that isn’t yours. A race between robot cars is a purer contest of their designers.”
Eliezer: While people don’t design their muscles, they presently don’t design their brains either, so a robot car-designing contest seems like just as impure a contest. Even if people did repeatedly redesign their brains, wouldn’t this either result in convergence, in which case the contestants would be identical and the contest wouldn’t be interesting, or alternatively, the arbitrary initial advantages and disadvantages would just be passed on in modified and perhaps even amplified form and the contest stays as impure as ever. Even if you try to measure the amount of effort the contestants put in, that’s no good either because different people are born with unfairly different amounts of will-power.
So what on earth do you mean by “purer contest”?
This could function as an intuition pump for my own hypothesis that advanced self-modifying minds won’t compete at arbitrary preselected goals for fun. (At least not exclusively for fun; they might design themselves to enjoy competing to achieve goals in a pedagogical framework, but actually achieving the goal [or acquiring the skills/knowledge/etc. necessary to achieve the goal] will be the point.)