Well, not at all for the literal complexity of agents, because we don’t estimate the complexity of our peers. Aristotle thought the heart was the seat of intelligence, Shannon thought AGI could be built in a year, everyone and their mother anthropomorphizes inanimate objects like smoke alarms and printers.
I suspect perceived character traits that engender distrust, the Dark Triad traits, make the trait-possessor seem complex not because their brain must be described in more bits absolutely, but conditionally given the brain of the character judge. That is, we require a larger encoding diff to predict the behavior of people who display unfamiliar desires and intents, or to predict them with comparable accuracy as one does for one’s warm, honest, emotionally stable peer group. For example, someone who appears paranoid is displaying extreme caution in situations the character judge finds forthright and nonthreatening, an extra piece of situational context to the other person’s decision making.
This is a poor explanation overall because we’re much less likely to distrust atypically nice humane people than Machiavellian, sub-psychopath people, even if they’re both less conditionally compressible. It takes a lot of niceness (Stepford Wives) before the uncanny-differential-encoding-valley reaction trips.
Edit: This might have been uncharitable. People who are more prone to lying may be more absolutely complex, because lying skillfully requires keeping track of ones lies and building further lies to support them, while honest beliefs can simply be verified against reality. People who decide by a few fixed, stable criteria (e.g. always voting for the nominated candidate of their political party) might be called trustworthy in the sense of being reliable (if not reliably pro-social). Fulfilling promises and following contracts also make one more trustworthy, in both the weak sense of predictability and the stronger sense of moral behavior. Yudkowsky makes the argument that moral progress tends to produce simplified values.
An interesting question is to what extent a similar phenomenon is present in human relationships.
Well, not at all for the literal complexity of agents, because we don’t estimate the complexity of our peers. Aristotle thought the heart was the seat of intelligence, Shannon thought AGI could be built in a year, everyone and their mother anthropomorphizes inanimate objects like smoke alarms and printers.
I suspect perceived character traits that engender distrust, the Dark Triad traits, make the trait-possessor seem complex not because their brain must be described in more bits absolutely, but conditionally given the brain of the character judge. That is, we require a larger encoding diff to predict the behavior of people who display unfamiliar desires and intents, or to predict them with comparable accuracy as one does for one’s warm, honest, emotionally stable peer group. For example, someone who appears paranoid is displaying extreme caution in situations the character judge finds forthright and nonthreatening, an extra piece of situational context to the other person’s decision making.
This is a poor explanation overall because we’re much less likely to distrust atypically nice humane people than Machiavellian, sub-psychopath people, even if they’re both less conditionally compressible. It takes a lot of niceness (Stepford Wives) before the uncanny-differential-encoding-valley reaction trips.
Edit: This might have been uncharitable. People who are more prone to lying may be more absolutely complex, because lying skillfully requires keeping track of ones lies and building further lies to support them, while honest beliefs can simply be verified against reality. People who decide by a few fixed, stable criteria (e.g. always voting for the nominated candidate of their political party) might be called trustworthy in the sense of being reliable (if not reliably pro-social). Fulfilling promises and following contracts also make one more trustworthy, in both the weak sense of predictability and the stronger sense of moral behavior. Yudkowsky makes the argument that moral progress tends to produce simplified values.