But are they relevant to ethics or alignment? a lot of tuem are aesthetic preferences that can be satisfied without public policy.
Alignment is about getting our AIs do do what we want, and not other things. Them understanding and attempting to fit within human aesthetic and ergonomic preferences is part of that. Not a particularly ethically complicated part, but still, the reason for flowers in urban landscapes is that humans like flowers. Full stop (apart from the biological background on why that evolved, presumably because flowers correlate with good places to gather food). That’s a sufficient reason, and an AI urban planner needs to know and respect that.
I learnt physics without ever learning Bayes. Science=Bayes is the extraordinary claim that needs justification.
I think I’m going to leave that to other people on Less Wrong — they’re the ones who convinced me of this, and I also don’t see it as core to my argument.
Nevertheless, they are correct: there is now a mathematical foundation underpinning the Scientific Method, it’s not just an arbitrary set of mundanely-useful epistemological rules that were discovered by people like Roger Bacon and Karl Popper — we (later) figured out mathematically WHY that set of rules works so well: because they’re a computable approximation to Solomonoff Induction
Again, I would suggest using the word engineering, if engineering is what you mean.
There is a difference between “I personally suggest we just use engineering” and “Evolutionary theory makes a clear set of predictions of why it’s a very bad idea to do anything other than just use engineering”. You seem to agree with my advice, yet not want people to hear the part about why they should follow it and what will happen if they don’t. Glad to hear you agree with me, but some people need a little more persuading — and I’d rather they didn’t kill us all.
If morals are not truth-apt, and free will is the control required for moral responsibility, then...
Alignment has many meanings. Minimally, it is about the AI not killing us.
AI s don’t have to share our aesthetic preferences to understand them. It would be a nuisance if they did—they might start demanding pot plants in their data centres -- so it is useful to distinguish aesthetic and moral values. So that’s one of the problems with the unproven but widely believed claim that all values are moral values.
Nevertheless, they are correct: there is now a mathematical foundation underpinning the Scientific Method
Bayes doesn’t encapsulate the whole scientific method, because it doesn’t tell you how to formulate hypotheses, or conduct experiments.
Bayes doesn’t give you a mathematical foundation of a useful kind, that is an objective kind. Two Bayesian scientists can quantify their subjective credences, quantify them differently, and have no way of reconciling their differences.
Alignment is about getting our AIs do do what we want, and not other things. Them understanding and attempting to fit within human aesthetic and ergonomic preferences is part of that. Not a particularly ethically complicated part, but still, the reason for flowers in urban landscapes is that humans like flowers. Full stop (apart from the biological background on why that evolved, presumably because flowers correlate with good places to gather food). That’s a sufficient reason, and an AI urban planner needs to know and respect that.
I think I’m going to leave that to other people on Less Wrong — they’re the ones who convinced me of this, and I also don’t see it as core to my argument.
Nevertheless, they are correct: there is now a mathematical foundation underpinning the Scientific Method, it’s not just an arbitrary set of mundanely-useful epistemological rules that were discovered by people like Roger Bacon and Karl Popper — we (later) figured out mathematically WHY that set of rules works so well: because they’re a computable approximation to Solomonoff Induction
There is a difference between “I personally suggest we just use engineering” and “Evolutionary theory makes a clear set of predictions of why it’s a very bad idea to do anything other than just use engineering”. You seem to agree with my advice, yet not want people to hear the part about why they should follow it and what will happen if they don’t. Glad to hear you agree with me, but some people need a little more persuading — and I’d rather they didn’t kill us all.
Alignment has many meanings. Minimally, it is about the AI not killing us.
AI s don’t have to share our aesthetic preferences to understand them. It would be a nuisance if they did—they might start demanding pot plants in their data centres -- so it is useful to distinguish aesthetic and moral values. So that’s one of the problems with the unproven but widely believed claim that all values are moral values.
Bayes doesn’t encapsulate the whole scientific method, because it doesn’t tell you how to formulate hypotheses, or conduct experiments.
Bayes doesn’t give you a mathematical foundation of a useful kind, that is an objective kind. Two Bayesian scientists can quantify their subjective credences, quantify them differently, and have no way of reconciling their differences.