I think it’s more something like “moral realism” than like word games. It’s (I think) isomorphic to the hypothesis that all superintelligences converge on the ‘same decision algorithm’: and of course at that point in the discussion a bunch of words have to get tabooed and we have to get technical and quantitative (e.g. talking about Goedel machines and such, not about arbitrary paperclip maximizers which may or may not be possible).
And I dunno about Divine Simplicity. I really do prefer to talk in terms of decision theory.
You (lately) misuse “isomorphic”, which is a word reserved for very strong relationship. “Analogy” or even “similarity” or “metaphor” would describe these relations better.
Sorry. In my defense I felt a sharp pain each time I did it, but figured that ‘analogous’ wasn’t quite right (wasn’t quite strong enough, because Thomas Aquinas and I are actually talking about the same decision policy, maybe). Maybe if I knew category theory I could make such comparisons precise.
With Leibniz it’s a lot clearer that his God was a programmer trying to make most efficient use of His resources to do the optimal thing, and he had intuitions but of course not any explicit language to talk about what that algorithm would look like. That’s roughly the extent to which I think I’m thinking of the same decision algorithm as Aquinas, the convergent objective decision theory. The specifics of that decision theory, nobody knows. The point is that none of the best thinkers were thinking about a big male human in the sky, and were instead thinking about Platonic algorithms, ever since early Christianity was influenced by neoplatonism. Leibniz made it computationalesque but only recently with decision theory is theology become truly mathematical.
Maybe. In this case, most would agree that at this level of vagueness saying that two thinkers are contemplating exactly the same idea is incorrect and misleading terminology, and your comment suggests that you don’t actually mean that.
Okay. It’s like a hypothesis about future revelations, where both Aquinas and I are being shown a series of different agents and we’d agree more than my prediction of LW priors would suggest as to which of those agents were more or less Godlike. It’s like we have different labels for what is ultimately the same thing but we don’t even know what that thing is yet; but the fact that they’re different labels is misleading as to the extent to which we’re talking or not talking about what is ultimately the same thing. Still, point taken.
/shrugs I’d be very surprised, but I know nothing about modern theology. I’ve been reading philosophy by working my way forward through time. If there were/are any competent computer scientist/theologians after Leibniz then I do not yet know about them.
(ETA: I suppose I could become one if I put my mind to it but unfortunately I have this whole “figuring out how moral justification works so that everything I love about the world doesn’t perish” thing to deal with.)
That’s fair. My probability for that is probably pretty close to my probability for a strong version of the simulation hypothesis+moral realism. Though it seems to me that a lot of people here think moral realism is much more likely than I do- which makes me confused about why I seem to take your ideas more seriously than others here. You seem to express unjustified certainty on the matter, but that may just be a quirk of your personality/social role here.
You seem to express unjustified certainty on the matter, but that may just be a quirk of your personality/social role here.
I consistently talk about things I have 1-20% confidence in in a way that makes me sound like I have 80-95% confidence in them. This is largely because there’s no way to non-misleadingly talk about things with 1-20% logical probability (1-20% decision theoretic importance whatever-that-means). It’s really a problem with norms of communication and English language, one of the few things where it’s not my fault that I can’t communicate easily. Most of the time I just suck at communicating.
Unfortunately, good rationalists should spend a lot of time hovering around things with 50% probability of being true, and anything moderately on the lower side of that ends up sounding completely ridiculous and anything moderately on the higher side of that ends up sounding completely reasonable.
Then just write “around 1-20%”. It will make your comments more clunky, but it’s not like they can get much worse anyway, and it’s better than the alternative.
I think it’s more something like “moral realism” than like word games. It’s (I think) isomorphic to the hypothesis that all superintelligences converge on the ‘same decision algorithm’: and of course at that point in the discussion a bunch of words have to get tabooed and we have to get technical and quantitative (e.g. talking about Goedel machines and such, not about arbitrary paperclip maximizers which may or may not be possible).
And I dunno about Divine Simplicity. I really do prefer to talk in terms of decision theory.
You (lately) misuse “isomorphic”, which is a word reserved for very strong relationship. “Analogy” or even “similarity” or “metaphor” would describe these relations better.
Sorry. In my defense I felt a sharp pain each time I did it, but figured that ‘analogous’ wasn’t quite right (wasn’t quite strong enough, because Thomas Aquinas and I are actually talking about the same decision policy, maybe). Maybe if I knew category theory I could make such comparisons precise.
Thanks for calling me out on a bad habit.
This seems very unlikely (1) to be true and (2) to become known, if true.
With Leibniz it’s a lot clearer that his God was a programmer trying to make most efficient use of His resources to do the optimal thing, and he had intuitions but of course not any explicit language to talk about what that algorithm would look like. That’s roughly the extent to which I think I’m thinking of the same decision algorithm as Aquinas, the convergent objective decision theory. The specifics of that decision theory, nobody knows. The point is that none of the best thinkers were thinking about a big male human in the sky, and were instead thinking about Platonic algorithms, ever since early Christianity was influenced by neoplatonism. Leibniz made it computationalesque but only recently with decision theory is theology become truly mathematical.
Maybe. In this case, most would agree that at this level of vagueness saying that two thinkers are contemplating exactly the same idea is incorrect and misleading terminology, and your comment suggests that you don’t actually mean that.
Okay. It’s like a hypothesis about future revelations, where both Aquinas and I are being shown a series of different agents and we’d agree more than my prediction of LW priors would suggest as to which of those agents were more or less Godlike. It’s like we have different labels for what is ultimately the same thing but we don’t even know what that thing is yet; but the fact that they’re different labels is misleading as to the extent to which we’re talking or not talking about what is ultimately the same thing. Still, point taken.
Do the theologians know about this?
/shrugs I’d be very surprised, but I know nothing about modern theology. I’ve been reading philosophy by working my way forward through time. If there were/are any competent computer scientist/theologians after Leibniz then I do not yet know about them.
(ETA: I suppose I could become one if I put my mind to it but unfortunately I have this whole “figuring out how moral justification works so that everything I love about the world doesn’t perish” thing to deal with.)
That’s fair. My probability for that is probably pretty close to my probability for a strong version of the simulation hypothesis+moral realism. Though it seems to me that a lot of people here think moral realism is much more likely than I do- which makes me confused about why I seem to take your ideas more seriously than others here. You seem to express unjustified certainty on the matter, but that may just be a quirk of your personality/social role here.
I consistently talk about things I have 1-20% confidence in in a way that makes me sound like I have 80-95% confidence in them. This is largely because there’s no way to non-misleadingly talk about things with 1-20% logical probability (1-20% decision theoretic importance whatever-that-means). It’s really a problem with norms of communication and English language, one of the few things where it’s not my fault that I can’t communicate easily. Most of the time I just suck at communicating.
Unfortunately, good rationalists should spend a lot of time hovering around things with 50% probability of being true, and anything moderately on the lower side of that ends up sounding completely ridiculous and anything moderately on the higher side of that ends up sounding completely reasonable.
Then just write “around 1-20%”. It will make your comments more clunky, but it’s not like they can get much worse anyway, and it’s better than the alternative.
(If only there were a language that had short concepts for things like “frequency=3%, utility=+10^15,-10^6 relative to counterfactual surgery world”.)