When we are speaking about what to do with the world, which is what formal preference (extrapolated volition) is ultimately about, this is different in character (domain of application) from any heuristics that a human person has for what he personally should be doing. Any human consequentialist is a hopeless dogmatic deontologist in comparison with their personal FAI. Even if we take both views as representations of the same formal object, syntactically they have little in common. We are not comparing what a human will do with what advice that human will give to himself if he knew more. Extrapolated volition is a very different kind of wish, a kind of wish that can’t be comprehended by a human, and so no heuristics already in mind will resemble heuristics about that wish.
But you seem to have the heuristic that the extrapolated volition of even the most evil human “won’t be that bad”. Where does that come from?
That’s not a heuristic in the sense I use the word in the comment above, it’s (rather weakly) descriptive of a goal and not rules for achieving it.
The main argument (and I changed my mind on this recently) is the same as for why another normal human’s preference isn’t that bad: sympathy. If human preference has a component of sympathy, of caring about other human-like persons’ preferences, then there is always a sizable slice of the control of the universe pie going to everyone’s preference, even if orders of magnitude smaller than for the preference in control. I don’t expect that even the most twisted human can have a whole aspect of preference completely absent, even if manifested to smaller degree than usual.
This apparently changes my position on the danger of value drift, and modifying minds of uploads in particular. Even though we will lose preference to the value drift, we won’t lose it completely, so long as people holding the original preference persist.
I don’t expect that even the most twisted human can have a whole aspect of preference completely absent, even if manifested to smaller degree than usual.
Humans also have other preferences that are in conflict with sympathy, for example the desire to see one’s enemies suffer. If sympathy is manifested to a sufficiently small degree, then it won’t be enough to override those other preferences.
When we are speaking about what to do with the world, which is what formal preference (extrapolated volition) is ultimately about, this is different in character (domain of application) from any heuristics that a human person has for what he personally should be doing. Any human consequentialist is a hopeless dogmatic deontologist in comparison with their personal FAI. Even if we take both views as representations of the same formal object, syntactically they have little in common. We are not comparing what a human will do with what advice that human will give to himself if he knew more. Extrapolated volition is a very different kind of wish, a kind of wish that can’t be comprehended by a human, and so no heuristics already in mind will resemble heuristics about that wish.
But you seem to have the heuristic that the extrapolated volition of even the most evil human “won’t be that bad”. Where does that come from?
That’s not a heuristic in the sense I use the word in the comment above, it’s (rather weakly) descriptive of a goal and not rules for achieving it.
The main argument (and I changed my mind on this recently) is the same as for why another normal human’s preference isn’t that bad: sympathy. If human preference has a component of sympathy, of caring about other human-like persons’ preferences, then there is always a sizable slice of the control of the universe pie going to everyone’s preference, even if orders of magnitude smaller than for the preference in control. I don’t expect that even the most twisted human can have a whole aspect of preference completely absent, even if manifested to smaller degree than usual.
This apparently changes my position on the danger of value drift, and modifying minds of uploads in particular. Even though we will lose preference to the value drift, we won’t lose it completely, so long as people holding the original preference persist.
Humans also have other preferences that are in conflict with sympathy, for example the desire to see one’s enemies suffer. If sympathy is manifested to a sufficiently small degree, then it won’t be enough to override those other preferences.
Are you aware of what has been happening in Congo, for example?