Philosopher working in Melbourne, Australia. My book Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity is forthcoming in June 2022 with Routledge.
tristanhaze
Stimulating as always! I have a criticism to make of the use made of the term ‘rigid designation’.
Multiple philosophers have suggested that this stance seems similar to “rigid designation”, i.e., when I say ‘fair’ it intrinsically, rigidly refers to something-to-do-with-equal-division. I confess I don’t see it that way myself [...]
What philosophers of language ordinarily mean by calling a term a rigid designator is not that, considered purely syntactically, it intrinsically refers to anything. The property of being a rigid designator is something which can be possessed by an expression in use in a particular language-system. The distinction is between expressions-in-use whose reference we let vary across counterfactual scenarios (or ‘possible worlds’), e.g. ‘The first person to climb Everest’, and those whose reference remains stable, e.g. ‘George Washington’, ‘The sum of two and two’.
There is some controversy over how to apply the rigid/non-rigid distinction to general terms like ‘fair’ (or predicates like ‘is fair’) - cf. Scott Soames’ book Beyond Rigidity—but I think the natural thing to say is that ‘is fair’ is rigid, since it is used to attribute the same property across counterfactual scenarios, in contrast with a predicate like ‘possesses my favourite property’.
- 31 Oct 2013 1:13 UTC; 5 points) 's comment on Why didn’t people (apparently?) understand the metaethics sequence? by (
If only lukeprog had thought to tell Alice that at the time!
‘Continue’, you mean :-)
Why is it OK to use deduction theorem, though? In standard modal logics like K and S5 the deduction theorem doesn’t hold (otherwise you could assume P, use necessitation to get []P, and then use deduction theorem to get P → []P as a theorem).
This is an instance of arc that clever people have been going through for ages, so I’d like to see more teasing apart of the broader phenomenon from the particular historical episode of the Sequences etc.
A lot of the mixed feelings and lack of identification as rationalists on the part of lots of people who found the Sequences interesting reading is to be explained in terms of their perceiving the vibe you describe and being aware of its pitfalls.
The beginning of this comment, up to the comma, sounds so very like the beginning of one of those Chuck Norris format jokes. I was honestly surprised when it turned out not to be.
An extended answer to your question is given in the original post—the post is all about answering that question, and it seems very clearly written to me. So I think you’re being silly.
Filled in. This is a good idea. I would be interested in getting some feedback on the feedback, or seeing a writeup of some of the lessons or issues that come out of this.
I wonder if this principle works in the case of a murder which rapidly changes the murderer. (Later that day, they may bear no responsibility.)
I don’t think this is rude at all. One of the things I like about Less Wrong, and which seems characteristic of it, is that the writing in posts—style and form as well as more basic stuff—is often constructively discussed with a view to improving the author’s writing.
I’d be interested to hear how this compares with Wolfgang Schwarz’s ideas in ‘Imaginary Foundations’ and ‘From Sensor Variables to Phenomenal Facts’. Sounds like there’s some overlap, and Schwarz has a kind of explanation for why the hard problem might arise that you might be able to draw on.
Link to the second of the papers mentioned: https://www.umsu.de/papers/sensorfacts.pdf
Ramsey could be on the list too but I guess his tragically short life makes it hard to do some of the cells.
Maybe a bit off-colour to call the fact that three of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide ‘delicious’...
I think there’s a potentially confusing fact which you’re neglecting in this post, namely the reality of literature as territory not map. If you’re interested in literature, then when you read it you get lots of knowledge of what e.g. certain books contain, what certain authors wrote, and that can be very instructive not just within literature. I’d like to see you and others with this kind of viewpoint wrestle more with this kind of consideration.
I really liked the introduction—really well done. (shminux seems to agree!)
Some constructuve criticisms:
‘There are playing fields where you should cooperate with DefectBot, even though that looks completely insane from a naïve viewpoint. Optimality is a feature of the playing field, not a feature of the strategy.’ - I like your main point made with TrollBot, but this last sentence doesn’t seem like a good way of summing up the lesson. What the lesson seems to be in my eyes is: strategies’ being optimal or not is playing-field relative. So you could say that optimality is a relation holding between strategies and playing fields.
Later on you say ‘It helps to remember that “optimality” is as much a feature of the playing field as of the strategy.’ - but, my criticism above aside, this seems inconsistent with the last sentence of the previous quote (here you say optimality is equally a feature of two things, whereas before you said it was not a feature of the strategy)! Here you seem to be leaning more toward my proposed relational gloss.
Another suggestion. The Omega argument comes right after you say you’re going to show that we occupy a strange playing field right now. This tends to make the reader prepare to object ‘But that’s not very realistic!’. Maybe you like that sort of tension and release thing, but my vote would be to first make it clear what you’re doing there—i.e., not right away arguing about the real world, but taking a certain step toward that.
One final suggestion. You write ‘Knowing this, I have a compartment in which my willpower doesn’t deplete’, and something relevantly similar just earlier. Now this is obviously not literally what you mean—rather, it’s something like, you have a compartment housing the belief that your willpower doesn’t deplete. Obviously, you get a certain literary effect by putting it the way you do. Now, I realize reasonable people may think I’m just being overly pedantic here, but I suspect that’s wrong, and that in this sort of discussion, we should habitually help ourselves to such easily-had extra precision. Since things get confusing so quickly in this area, and we’re liable to slip up all over the place, apparently minor infelicities could make a real difference by sapping resources which are about to be taxed to the full.
Would be good to see some more references and discussion of illusionism as a view in its own right. For my money the recent work of Wolfgang Schwarz on imaginary foundations and sensor variables gives a powerful explanation of why we might have this illusion.
Very interesting. I’m stuck on the argument about truthfulness being hard because the concept of truth is somehow fraught or too complicated. I’m envisaging an objection based on the T-schema (‘<p> is true iff p’).
Nate writes:
Now, in real life, building a truthful AGI is much harder than building a diamond optimizer, because ‘truth’ is a concept that’s much more fraught than ‘diamond’. (To see this, observe that the definition of “truth” routes through tricky concepts like “ways the AI communicated with the operators” and “the mental state of the operators”, and involves grappling with tricky questions like “what ways of translating the AI’s foreign concepts into human concepts count as manipulative?” and “what can be honestly elided?”, and so on, whereas diamond is just carbon atoms bound covalently in tetrahedral lattices.)
(end of quote)
But this reference to “the definition of ‘truth’” seems to presuppose some kind of view, where I’m not sure what that view is, but know it’s definitely going to be philosophically controversial.
Some think that ‘true’ can be defined by taking all the instances of the T-schema, or a (perhaps restricted) universal generalisation of it.
And this seems not totally crazy or irrelevant from an AI design perspective, at least at first blush. I feel I can sort of imagine an AI obeying a rule which says to assert <p> only if p.
Trying to envisage problems and responses, I hit the idea that the AI would have degrees of belief or credences, and not simply a list of things it thinks are true simpliciter. But perhaps it can have both. And perhaps obeying the T-schema based truthfulness rule would just lead it to confine most of its statements to statements about its own credences or something like that.
I think I see a separate problem about ensuring the AI does not (modify itself in order to) violate the T-schema based truthfulness rule. But that seems different at least from the supposed problem in the OP about the definition of ‘true’ being fraught or complicated or something.
If it wasn’t already clear I’m a philosophy person, not an alignment expert, but I follow alignment with some interest.
Interesting to read, here are a couple of comments on parts of what you say:
>the claim that all possibilities exist (ie. that counterfactuals are ontologically real)
‘counterfactuals are ontologically real’ seems like a bad way of re-expressing ‘all possibilities exist’. Counterfactuals themselves are sentences or propositions, and even people who think there’s e.g. no fact of the matter with many counterfactuals should agree that they themselves are real.
Secondly, most philosophers who would be comfortable with talking seriously about possibilities or possible worlds as real things would not go along with Lewis in holding them to be concrete. The view that possibilities really truly exist is quite mainstream and doesn’t commit you to modal realism.
>what worlds should we conceive of as being possible? Again, we can make this concrete by asking what would >happen if we were to choose a crazy set of possible worlds—say a world just like this one and then a world with >unicorns and fountains of gold—and no other worlds
I think it’s crucial to note that it’s not the presence of the unicorns world that makes trouble here, it’s the absence of all the other ones here. So what you’re gesturing at here is I think the need for a kind of plenitude in the possibilities one believes in.
Wittgenstein had so many ideas and is such a difficult thinker that I think one ought to read him before secondary sources. Also he’s a wonderful writer.
I just want to say that the title of this post is fantastic, and in a deep sort of mathy way, beautiful. It’s probably usually not possible, but I love it when an appropriate title—especially a nice not-too-long one—manages to contain, by itself, so much intellectual interest. Even just seeing that title listed somewhere could plant an important seed in someone’s mind.
For my part, I’ve found the economic notions of opportunity cost and marginal utility to be like this.