Software developer with an interest in rationality, consciousness, philosophy and spirituality.
Coding2077
Karma: 10
This was very satisfying for me to read!
Not only did I find this story a very convincing example for the point this articles is trying to make (“You don’t know how bad most things are nor precisely how they’re bad.” and, related “Reality has a surprising amount of detail.”).
But the writing was great as well! The fact that you were not a complete novice, but someone who tried to follow along with the piano tuner’s every step, and failed to predict every next little problem that the piano tuner identified made for a great reading experience for me. It evoked a sense of: “Oh, what’s the next detail going to be?” And I wanted to continue reading. :)
And, as a final sidenote: Not only do I enjoy thinking about this particular point in general (= how detailed reality is, and how difficult it is to assess the state of all the things in reality). But I also relate to this particular example about piano tuning and music, because I just started (= a year ago) learning about music, music theory, and I’m trying my hand at being creative with creating my own music. So when you mentioned the “attack of the note”: A year ago I wouldn’t have known what this meant. But now this consumes a lot of my mental resources (because I’m trying to wrap my head around _everything_ related to creating and being creative with music), and this whole topic was just satisfying to read. :)
I found your reply really interesting.
Because I find it so interesting and want to understand it: What does the “RLed” in “Unfortunately it seems to me that humans are RLed pretty hard by doing a lot of playing of these games” mean? That term is not familiar to me.
Thanks for the explanation. This makes a lot of sense to me now. I’m glad I asked!
While I agree that there is value in “don’t tie yourself up in knots overthinking”, my intuition tells me that there is a lot of value in just knowing about / considering that there is more information about a situation to be had, which might, in theory, influence my decision about that situation in important ways. It changes how I engange with all kinds of situations beforehand, and also after the fact. So considering the motivations and backstories of the people in the trolley-problem does have value, even if in that particular moment I do not have the time to gather more information and a decision needs to be made quickly.
I don’t think that this point needs to be made for people on this forum. It’s more aimed at people who are looking for rules / strategies / heuristics to robotically and mindlessly apply them to their lives (and enforce those rules for others).
This sounds intuitively interesting to me.
Can you maybe give an example or two (or one example and one counter example) to help illustrate how a moral principle displaying “robustness to auxiliary information” operates in practice, versus one that does not? Specifically, I’m interested in understanding how the variance in outcomes might manifest with the addition of new information.
I don’t have time to write a more in-depth comment, but I hope it’s still valuable to say that I found this article / story very inspiring. I wanted to read a few paragraphs while waiting for Claude Code to finish, but found myself reading this to the end immediately. This stimulated lots of thoughts, both about AI, but also about humans and societies and history… Thank you for writing this. :)