As always, there’s the difference between “we’re all doomed to be biased, so I might as well carry on with whatever I was already doing” and “we’re all doomed to be somewhat biased, but less biased is better than more biased, so let’s try and mitigate them as we go”.
Someone really ought to name a website along those lines.
No its not. There is no objective sense in which human suffering and extinction is bad. It’s not even a matter of degree. Questions of morality are only meaningful from a subjective POV. That’s Hume’s Law in a nutshell. You can’t solve the alignment problem by believing that we should aim as close as possible to the objective truth that everything is just particles and forces and alignment doesn’t matter. It’s circular reasoning.
If you haven’t yet encountered the classic LW answer to “what is bias”, this sequence of posts is basically it—this post is a quick gesture in the right direction if you don’t want to read the others.
If you have read/osmosed the relevant posts, and you don’t think the LW account of bias is adequate for purposes like the one in my comment upthread, can you say more about why?
As always, there’s the difference between “we’re all doomed to be biased, so I might as well carry on with whatever I was already doing” and “we’re all doomed to be somewhat biased, but less biased is better than more biased, so let’s try and mitigate them as we go”.
Someone really ought to name a website along those lines.
No its not. There is no objective sense in which human suffering and extinction is bad. It’s not even a matter of degree. Questions of morality are only meaningful from a subjective POV. That’s Hume’s Law in a nutshell. You can’t solve the alignment problem by believing that we should aim as close as possible to the objective truth that everything is just particles and forces and alignment doesn’t matter. It’s circular reasoning.
Disambiguating:
If you haven’t yet encountered the classic LW answer to “what is bias”, this sequence of posts is basically it—this post is a quick gesture in the right direction if you don’t want to read the others.
If you have read/osmosed the relevant posts, and you don’t think the LW account of bias is adequate for purposes like the one in my comment upthread, can you say more about why?