In the original blog post, we think a lot about slack. It says that if you have slack, you can kind of go off the optimal solution and do whatever you want. But in practice, what we see is that slack, when it occurs, produces this kind of drift. It’s basically the universe fulfilling its naturally entropic nature, in that most ways to go away from the optimum are bad. If we randomly drift, we just basically tend to lose fitness and produce really strange things which are not even really what we value.
My response to this gets at what Joe Carlsmith calls Deep Atheism. I think there just is no natural force that systematically produces goodness. I agree with you that slack is not a force that systematically produces goodness. But also, I feel much more strongly than you that competition is also not a force that systematically produces goodness. No such force exists. Too bad.
So I agree with this paragraph literally, but disagree with its connotation that competition would be better than slack.
I mostly agree here and with the deep atheism take. Definitely I would not say that competition systematically or always produces goodness. Rather, it can produce goodness and empirically in the case of human evolution it has created things that we would call goodness. This obviously depends on the circumstances of the competition. I think it’s possible that cooperation in general is a fairly large attractor but this cooperation doesn’t have to involve humans nor does it have to correspond in the end to the kind of amortised values we think of as good.
>Rather, it can produce goodness and empirically in the case of human evolution it has created things that we would call goodness.
Hasn’t it produced cooperation and goodness amongst humans who’re of similar power? My intuition pump for AI risk is what humans have done to other beings sharing the planet and the story there is not encouraging.
My response to this gets at what Joe Carlsmith calls Deep Atheism. I think there just is no natural force that systematically produces goodness. I agree with you that slack is not a force that systematically produces goodness. But also, I feel much more strongly than you that competition is also not a force that systematically produces goodness. No such force exists. Too bad.
So I agree with this paragraph literally, but disagree with its connotation that competition would be better than slack.
I mostly agree here and with the deep atheism take. Definitely I would not say that competition systematically or always produces goodness. Rather, it can produce goodness and empirically in the case of human evolution it has created things that we would call goodness. This obviously depends on the circumstances of the competition. I think it’s possible that cooperation in general is a fairly large attractor but this cooperation doesn’t have to involve humans nor does it have to correspond in the end to the kind of amortised values we think of as good.
>Rather, it can produce goodness and empirically in the case of human evolution it has created things that we would call goodness.
Hasn’t it produced cooperation and goodness amongst humans who’re of similar power? My intuition pump for AI risk is what humans have done to other beings sharing the planet and the story there is not encouraging.