Paul_Gowder

Karma: 159

Paul_Gowder 11 Oct 2008 21:25 UTC
2 points
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on: Shut up and do the impossible!
He put up a very good fight.

Paul_Gowder 4 Sep 2008 22:14 UTC
11 points
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on: The Truly Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma
Eliezer: the rationality of defection in these finitely repeated games has come under some fire, and there’s a HUGE literature on it. Reading some of the more prominent examples may help you sort out your position on it.

Start here:

Robert Aumann. 1995. “Backward Induction and Common Knowledge of Rationality.” Games and Economic Behavior 8:6-19.

Cristina Bicchieri. 1988. “Strategic Behavior and Counterfactuals.” Synthese 76:135-169.

Cristina Bicchieri. 1989. “Self-Refuting Theories of Strategic Interaction: A Paradox of Common Knowledge.” Erkenntnis 30:69-85.

Ken Binmore. 1987. “Modeling Rational Players I.” Economics and Philosophy 3:9-55.

Jon Elster. 1993. “Some unresolved problems in the theory of rational behaviour.” Acta Sociologica 36: 179-190.

Philip Reny. 1992. “Rationality in Extensive-Form Games.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 6:103-118.

Phillip Petit and Robert Sugden. 1989. “The Backward Induction Paradox.” The Journal of Philosophy 86:169-182.

Brian Skyrms. 1998. “Subjunctive Conditionals and Revealed Preference.” Philosophy of Science 65:545-574

Robert Stalnaker. 1999. “Knowledge, Belief and Counterfactual Reasoning in Games.” in Cristina Bicchieri, Richard Jeffrey, and Brian Skyrms, eds., The Logic of Strategy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Paul_Gowder 16 Jul 2008 19:53 UTC
0 points
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on: Whither Moral Progress?
Nick,

Fair enough, but consider the counterfactual case: suppose we believed that there were some fact about a person that would permit enslaving that person, but learned that the set of people to whom those facts applied was the null set. It seems like that would still represent moral progress in some sense.

Perhaps not the sort that Eliezer is talking about, though. But I’m not sure that the two can be cleanly separated. Consider slavery again, or the equality of humanity in general. Much of the moral movement there can be seen as changing interpretations of Christianity—that is, people thought the Bible justified slavery, then they stopped thinking that. Is that a purely moral change? Or is that a better interpretation of a body of religious thought?

Paul_Gowder 16 Jul 2008 18:59 UTC
0 points
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on: Whither Moral Progress?
Nick:

I don’t think discovering better instrumental values toward the same terminal values you always had counts as moral progress, at least if those terminal values are consciously, explicitly held.

Why on earth not? Aristotle thought some people were naturally suited for slavery. We now know that’s not true. Why isn’t that moral progress?

(Similarly, general improvements in reasoning, to the extent they allow us to reject bad moral arguments as well as more testable kinds of bad arguments, could count as moral progress.)

Paul_Gowder 16 Jul 2008 9:08 UTC
3 points
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on: Whither Moral Progress?
One possibility: we can see a connection between morality and certain empirical facts—for example, if we believe that more moral societies will be more stable, we might think that we can see moral progress in the form of changes that are brought about by previous morally related instability. That’s not very clear—but a much clearer and more sophisticated variant on that idea can perhaps be seen in an old paper by Joshua Cohen, “The Arc of the Moral Universe” (google scholar will get it, and definitely read it, because a) it’s brilliant, and b) I’m not representing it very well).

Or we might think that some of our morally relevant behaviors are consistently dependent on empirical facts, in which we might progress in finding out. For example, we might have always thought that beings who are as intelligent as we are and have as complex social and emotional lives as do we deserve to be treated as equals. Suppose we think the above at year 1 and year 500, but at year 500, we discover that some group of entities X (which could include fellow humans, as with the slaves, or other species) is as intelligent, etc., and act accordingly. Then it seems like we’ve made clearly directional moral progress—we’ve learned to more accurately make the empirical judgments about which our unchanged moral judgment depends.

Paul_Gowder 6 Jul 2008 17:02 UTC
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on: Is Morality Given?
So here’s a question Eliezer: is Subhan’s argument for moral skepticism just a concealed argument for universal skepticism? After all, there are possible minds that do math differently, that do logic differently, that evaluate evidence differently, that observe sense-data differently...

Either Subhan can distinguish his argument from an argument for universal skepticism, or I say that it’s refuted by reductio, since universal skepticism fails to the complete impossibility of asserting it consistently + things like moorean facts.

Paul_Gowder 3 Jul 2008 22:47 UTC
2 points
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on: The Bedrock of Fairness
Suppose that 98% of humans, under 98% of the extrapolated spread, would both choose a certain ordering of arguments, and also claim that this is the uniquely correct ordering. Is this sufficient to just go ahead and label that ordering the rational one? If you refuse to answer that question yourself, what is the procedure that answers it?

Again, this is why it’s irreducibly social. If there isn’t a procedure that yields a justified determinate answer to the rationality of that order, then the best we can do is take what is socially accepted at the time and in the society in which such a superintelligence is created. There’s nowhere else to look.

Paul_Gowder 3 Jul 2008 20:19 UTC
1 point
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on: The Bedrock of Fairness
Eleizer,

Things like the ordering of arguments are just additional questions about the rationality criteria, and my point above applies to them just as well—either there’s a justifiable answer (“this is how arguments are to be ordered,”) or it’s going to be fundamentally socially determined and there’s nothing to be done about it. The political is really deeply prior to the workings of a superintelligence in such cases: if there’s no determinate correct answer to these process questions, then humans will have to collectively muddle through to get something to feed the superintelligence. (Aristotle was right when he said politics was the ruling science...)

On the humans for humans point, I’ll appeal back to the notion of modeling minds. If we take P to be a reason, then all we have to be able to tell the superintelligence is “simulate us and consider what we take to be reasons,” and, after simulating us, the superintelligence ought to know what those things are, what we mean when we say “take to be reasons,” etc. Philosophy written by humans for humans ought to be sufficient once we specify the process by which reasons that matter to humans are to be taken into account.

Paul_Gowder 3 Jul 2008 19:34 UTC
3 points
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on: The Bedrock of Fairness
Right, but those questions are responsive to reasons too. Here’s where I embrace the recursion. Either we believe that ultimately the reasons stop—that is, that after a sufficiently ideal process, all of the minds in the relevant mind design space agree on the values, or we don’t. If we do, then the superintelligence should replicate that process. If we don’t, then what basis do we have for asking a superintelligence to answer the question? We might as well flip a coin.

Of course, the content of the ideal process is tricky. I’m hiding the really hard questions in there, like what counts as rationality, what kinds of minds are in the relevant mind design space, etc. Those questions are extra-hard because we can’t appeal to an ideal process to answer them on pain of circularity. (Again, political philosophy has been struggling with a version of this question for a very long time. And I do mean struggling—it’s one of the hardest questions there is.) And the best answer I can give is that there is no completely justifiable stopping point: at some point, we’re going to have to declare “these are our axioms, and we’re going with them,” even though those axioms are not going to be justifiable within the system.

What this all comes down to is that it’s all necessarily dependent on social context. The axioms of rationality and the decisions about what constitute relevant mind-space for any such superintelligence would be determined by the brute facts of what kind of reasoning is socially acceptable in the society that creates such a superintelligence. And that’s the best we can do.

Paul_Gowder 3 Jul 2008 18:40 UTC
0 points
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on: The Bedrock of Fairness
Eliezer,

The resemblance between my second suggestion and your thing didn’t go unnoticed—I had in fact read your coherent extrapolated volition thing before (there’s probably an old e-mail from me to you about it, in fact). I think it’s basically correct. But the method of justification is importantly different, because the idea is that we’re trying to approximate something with epistemic content—we’re not just trying to do what you might call a Xannon thing—we’re not just trying to model what humans would do. Rather, we’re trying to model and improve a specific feature of humanity that we see as morally relevant—responsiveness to reasons.

That’s really, really important.

In the context of your dialogue above, it’s what reconciles Xannon and Yancy: even if Yancy can’t convince Xannon that there’s some kind of non-subjective moral truth, he ought to be able to convince Xannon that moral beliefs should be responsive to reasons—and likewise, even if Xannon can’t convince Yancy that what really matters, morally, is what people can agree on, he should be able to convince Yancy that the best way to get at it in the real world is by a collective process of reasoning.

So you see that this method of justification does provide a way to answers to questions like “friendliness to whom.” I know what I’m doing, Eliezer. :-)

Paul_Gowder 3 Jul 2008 9:13 UTC
2 points
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on: The Bedrock of Fairness
That’s a really fascinating question. I don’t know that there’d be a “standard” answer to this—were the questions taken up, they’d be subject to hot debate.

Are we specifying that this ultrapowerful superintelligence has mind-reading power, or the closest non-magical equivalent in the form of access to every mental state that an arbitrary individual human has, even stuff that now gets lumped under the label “qualia”/ability to perfectly simulate the neurobiology of such an individual?

If so, then two approaches seem defensible to me. First: let’s assume there is an answer out there to moral questions, in a form that is accessible to a superintelligence, and let’s just assume the hard problem away, viz., that the questioners know how to tell the superintelligence where to look (or the superintelligence can figure it out itself).

We might not be able to produce a well-formed specification of what is to be computed when we’re talking about moral questions (it’s easy to think that any attempt to do so would rig the answer in advance—for example, if you ask it for universal principles, you’re going to get something different from what you’d get if you left the universality variable free...). But if the superintelligence could simulate our mental processes such that it could tell what it is that we want (for some appropriate values of we, like the person asking or the whole of humanity if there was any consensus—which I doubt), then in principle it could simply answer that by declaring what the truth of the matter is with respect to that which it has determined that we desire.

That assumes the superintelligence has access to moral truth, but once we do that, I think the standard arguments against “guardianship” (e.g. the first few chapters of Robert Dahl, Democracy and its Critics) fail, in that if they’re true—if people are really better off deciding for themselves (the standard argument), and making people better off is what is morally correct, then we can expect the superintelligence to return “you figure it out.” And then the answer to “friendly to who” or “so you get to decide what’s friendly” is simply to point to the fact that the superintelligence has access to moral truth.

The more interesting question perhaps is what should happen if the superintelligence doesn’t have access to moral truth (either because there is no such thing in the ordinary sense, or because it exists but is unobservable). I assume here that being responsive to reasons is an appropriate way to address moral questions (if not, all bets are off). Then the superintelligence loses one major advantage over ordinary human reasoning (access to the truth on the question), but not the other (while humans are responsive to reasons in a limited and inconsistent sense, the supercomputer is ideally responsive to reasons). For this situation, I think the second defensible outcome would be that the superintelligence should simulate ideal democracy. That is, it should simulate all the minds in the world, and put them into an unlimited discussion with one another, as if they were bayesians with infinite time. The answers it would come up with would be the equivalent to the most legitimate conceivable human decisional process, but better...

I’m pretty sure this is a situation that hasn’t come under sustained discussion in the literature as such (in superintelligence terms—though it has come up in discussions of benevolent dictators and the value of democracy), so I’m talking out my ass a little here, but drawing on familiar themes. Still, the argument defending these two notions—especially the second—isn’t a blog comment, it’s a series of long articles or more.

Paul_Gowder 3 Jul 2008 8:25 UTC
2 points
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on: The Bedrock of Fairness
Eliezer, to the extent I understand what you’re referencing with those terms, the political philosophy does indeed go there (albeit in very different vocabulary). Certainly, the question about the extent to which ideas of fairness are accessible at what I guess you’d call the object level are constantly treated. Really, it’s one of the most major issues out there—the extent to which reasonable disagreement on object-level issues (disagreement that we think we’re obligated to respect) can be resolved on the meta-level (see Waldron, Democracy and Disagreement, and, for an argument that this leads into just the infinite recursion you suggest, at least in the case of democratic procedures, see the review of the same by Christiano, which google scholar will turn up easy).

I think the important thing is to separate two questions: 1. what is the true object-level statement, and 2. to what extent do we have epistemic access to the answer to 1? There may be an objectively correct answer to 1, but we might not be able to get sufficient grip on it to legitimately coerce others to go along—at which point Xannon starts to seem exactly right.

Oh, hell, go read Ch. 5. of Hobbes, Leviathan. And both of Rawls’s major books.

I mean, Xannon has been around for hundreds of years. Here’s Hobbes, from previous cite.

But no one mans Reason, nor the Reason of any one number of men, makes the certaintie; no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it. And therfore, as when there is a controversy in account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence they will both stand, or their controversie must either come to blowes, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature…

Paul_Gowder 3 Jul 2008 6:33 UTC
1 point
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on: The Bedrock of Fairness
What’s the point?

You realize, incidentally, that there’s a huge literature in political philosophy about what procedural fairness means. Right? Right?

Paul_Gowder 17 Apr 2008 22:18 UTC
4 points
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on: Where Philosophy Meets Science
gaaahhh. I stop reading for a few days, and on return, find this...

Eliezer, what do these distinctions even mean? I know philosophers who do scary bayesian things, whose work looks a lot—a lot—like math. I know scientists who make vague verbal arguments. I know scientists who work on the “theory” side whose work is barely informed by experiments at all, I know philosophers who are trying to do experiments. It seems like your real distinction is between a priori and a posteriori, and you’ve just flung “philosophy” into the former and “science” into the latter, basically at random.

(I defy you to find an experimental test for Bayes Rule, incidentally—or to utter some non-question-begging statistical principle by which the results could be evaluated.)

Paul_Gowder 5 Apr 2008 15:39 UTC
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on: Zombie Responses
I think part of the problem is that your premise 3 is question-begging: it assumes away epiphenomenalism on the spot. An epiphenomenalist has to bite the bullet that our feeling that we consciously cause things is false. (Also, what could it mean to have an empirical probability over a logical truth?)

Paul_Gowder 31 Mar 2008 7:18 UTC
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on: Hand vs. Fingers
Unknown: that’s not an ontological claim (at least for the dangerous metaethical commitments I mentioned in the caveat above).

Paul_Gowder 31 Mar 2008 5:48 UTC
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on: Hand vs. Fingers
Richard: the claim I’m trying out depends on us not being able to learn that information, for if we could learn it, the claim would have some observable content, and thereby have scientific implications.

Paul_Gowder 30 Mar 2008 21:53 UTC
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on: Hand vs. Fingers
Richard: I’m making a slightly stronger claim, which is that ontological claims with no scientific implications aren’t even relevant for philosophical issues of practical reason, so, for example, the question of god’s existence has no relevance for ethics (contra, e.g., Kant’s second critique). (Of course, to make this fly at all, I’m going to have to say that metaethical positions aren’t ontological claims, so I’m probably getting all kinds of commitments I don’t want here, and I’ll probably have to recant this position upon anything but the slightest scrutiny, but it seems like it’s worth considering.)

Paul_Gowder 30 Mar 2008 19:41 UTC
1 point
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on: Hand vs. Fingers
Although I prefer an even weaker kind of scientism: scientism″: an ontological claim is boring if it has no scientific implications. By boring, I mean, tells us nothing relevant to practical reason. Which is why I’m happy to take Richard’s property dualism: I accept scientism″, ergo, it doesn’t matter.

Paul_Gowder 30 Mar 2008 18:59 UTC
−5 points
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on: Hand vs. Fingers
Richard:

How about scientism’: an ontological claim is coherent only if it has scientific implications?

Eliezer:

I doubt you can conceive a non-prime number as prime. I think that the best way to think of “can conceive” here would be “can fully contemplate, without anything blowing up.” So I can conceive of a zombie world, but I can’t conceive of a world where, say, P is both true and not true, because I’d not know how to evaluate anything there. Likewise, I can’t conceive of, say, 4, as a prime number, because I can’t understand 4 except as it implies 2x2. That might strengthen your perceived connection between conceivability and logical possibility...