semianonymous

• semianonymousApr 21, 2012, 4:57 AM

  −2 points

  in reply to: lavalamp’s comment on: A ques­tion about Eliezer

  I did understand his point. The issue is that the psychological traits are defined as what is behind the correlation, what ever this may be—brain lesion A, or brain lesion B, or weird childhood, or the like. They are very broad and are defined to include the ‘other features’

  It is probably better to drop the word ‘sociopath’ and just say—selfish—but then it is not immediately apparent why e.g. arrogance not backed by achievements is predictive of selfishness, even though it very much is, as it is a case of false signal of capability.

• semianonymousApr 21, 2012, 4:41 AM

  −2 points

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: A ques­tion about Eliezer

  The cat is defined outside being a combination of traits of owner; that is the difference between the cat and IQ or any other psychological measure. If we were to say ‘pet’, the formula would have worked, even better if we had a purely black box qualifier into people who have bunch of traits vs people who don’t have bunch of traits, regardless of what is the cause (a pet, a cat, a weird fetish for pet related stuff).

  It is however the case that narcissism does match sociopathy, to the point that difference between the two is not very well defined. Anyhow we can restate the problem and consider it a guess at the properties of the utility function, adding extra verbiage.

  The analogy on the math problems is good but what we are compensating for is miscommunication, status gaming, and such, by normal people.

  I would suggest, actually, not the Bayesian approach, but statistical prediction rule or trained neural network.

• semianonymousApr 20, 2012, 9:07 PM

  0 points

  in reply to: Jesper_Ostman’s comment on: A ques­tion about Eliezer

  He is a high IQ individual, though. That is rare on its own. There are smart people who pretty much maximize their personal utility only.

• semianonymousApr 20, 2012, 2:45 PM

  8 points

  in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: A ques­tion about Eliezer

  People don’t gain ability to program out of empty air… everyone able to program has long list of various working projects that they trained on. In any case, programming is real work, it is annoying, it takes training, it takes education, it slaps your ego on the nose just about every time you hit compile after writing any interesting code. And the newbies are grossly mistaken about their abilities. You can’t trust anyone to measure their skills accurately, let alone report them.

• semianonymousApr 20, 2012, 1:34 PM

  4 points

  in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: A ques­tion about Eliezer

  She did expensive altruistic stuff that was more expensive than expected self interested payoff, though; the actions that are more expensive to fake than the win from faking are a very strong predictor for non-psychopathy; the distinction between psychopath that is genuinely altruistic, and non-psychopath, is that of philosophical zombie vs human.

• semianonymousApr 20, 2012, 1:17 PM

  −3 points

  in reply to: lavalamp’s comment on: A ques­tion about Eliezer

  People do it selectively, though. When someone does IQ test and gets high score, you assume that person has high IQ, for instance, and don’t postulate existence of ‘low IQ people whom solved first two problems on the test’, whom would then be more likely to solve other, different problems, while having ‘low IQ’, and ultimately score high while having ‘low IQ’.

• semianonymousApr 20, 2012, 9:27 AM

  −3 points

  in reply to: DanielVarga’s comment on: A ques­tion about Eliezer

  The ‘sociopath’ label is not a well identified brain lesion; it is a predictor for behaviours; the label is used for the purpose of decreasing the computational overhead by quantizing the quality (and to reduce communication overhead). One could in principle go without this label and directly predict the likehood of unethical self serving act based on the prior observed behaviour, and that is ideally better but more computationally expensive and may result in much higher failure rate.

  This exchange is, by the way, why I do not think much of ‘rationality’ as presented here. It is incredibly important to be able to identify sociopaths; if your decision theory does not permit you to identify sociopaths as you strive for rigour that you can’t reach, then you will be taken advantage of.

• semianonymousApr 20, 2012, 8:28 AM

  0 points

  in reply to: DanielVarga’s comment on: A ques­tion about Eliezer

  They are not independent—the sociopathy (or lesser degree, narcissism) is a common cause.

• semianonymousApr 20, 2012, 4:58 AM

  1 point

  on: A ques­tion about Eliezer

  Threads like that make me want to apply Bayes theorem to something.

  You start with probability 0.03 that Eliezer is sociopath—the baseline. Then you do Bayesian updates on answers to questions like: Does he imagine grandiose importance to him or is he generally modest/​in line with actual accomplishments? Does he have grand plans out of the line with his qualifications and prior accomplishments, or are the plans grandiose? Is he talking people into giving him money as source of income? Is he known to do very expensive altruistic stuff that is larger than self interested payoff or not? Did he claim to be an ideally moral being? And so on. You do updates based on the likehood of such for sociopaths and normal people. Now, I’m not saying he is something, all I am saying is that I can’t help it but do such updates—first via fast pattern matching by the neural network, then if I find the issue significant enough, explicitly with a calculator if i want to doublecheck.

  edit: I think it will be better to change the wording here as different people understand that word differently. Let’s say we are evaluating whenever the utility function includes other people to any significant extent, in presence of communication noise and misunderstandings. Considering that some people are prone to being pascal wagered and so the utility function that doesn’t include other people leads to attempts to pascal-wager others, i.e. grandiose plans. On the AI work being charitable, I don’t believe it, to be honest. One has to study and get into Google (or the like) if one wants the best shot at influencing morality of future AI. I think that’s the direction into which everyone genuinely interested in saving the mankind and genuinely worried about the AI has gravitated. If one wants to make impact by talking—one needs to first gain some status among the cool guys, and that means making some really impressive working accomplishments.