Yvain2

Karma: 524

Yvain2 19 Mar 2009 20:46 UTC
2 points
on: The Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy
One more thing: Eliezer, I’m surprised to be on the opposite side as you here, because it’s your writings that convinced me a catastrophic singularity, even one from the small subset of catastrophic singularities that keep people alive, is so much more likely than a good singularity. If you tell me I’m misinterpreting you, and you assign high probability to the singularity going well, I’ll update my opinion (also, would the high probability be solely due to the SIAI, or do you think there’s a decent chance of things going well even if your own project fails?)

Yvain2 19 Mar 2009 20:30 UTC
5 points
on: The Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy
“I’m curious to know how you know that in advance? Isn’t it like a kid making a binding decision on its future self? As Aubrey says, (I’m paraphrasing): “If I’m healthy today and enjoying my life, I’ll want to wake up tomorrow. And so on.” You live a very long time one day at a time.”

Good point. I usually trust myself to make predictions of this sort. For example, I predict that I would not want to eat pizza every day in a row for a year, even though I currently like pizza, and this sort of prediction has worked in the past. But I should probably think harder before I become certain that I can make this prediction with something more complicated like my life. I know that many of the very elderly people I know claim they’re tired of life and just want to die already, and I predict that I have no special immunity to this phenomenon that will let me hold out forever. But I don’t know how much of that is caused by literally being bored with what life has to offer already, and how much of it is caused by decrepitude and inability to do interesting things.

“Evil is far harder than good or mu, you have to get the future almost right for it to care about people at all, but somehow introduce a sustainable evil twist to it.”

In all of human society-space, not just the ones that have existed but every possible combination of social structures that could exist, I interpret only a vanishingly small number (the ones that contain large amounts of freedom, for example) as non-evil. Looking over all of human history, the number of societies I would have enjoyed living in are pretty minimal. I’m not just talking about Dante’s Hell here. Even modern day Burma/Saudi Arabia, or Orwell’s Oceania would be awful enough to make me regret not dying when I had the chance.

I don’t think it’s so hard to get a Singularity that leaves people alive but is still awful. If the problem is a programmer who tried to give it a sense of morality but ended up using a fake utility function or just plain screwing up, he might well end with a With Folded Hands scenario or Parfit’s Mere Addition Paradox (I remember Eliezer saying once—imagine if we get an AI that understands everything perfectly except freedom) . And that’s just the complicated failure—the simple one is that the government of Communist China develops the Singularity AI and programs it to do whatever they say.

“Also, steven points out for the benefit of altruists that if it’s not you who’s tortured in the future dystopia, the same resources will probably be used to create and torture someone else.”

I think that’s false. In most cases I imagine, torturing people is not the terminal value of the dystopia, just something they do to people who happen to be around. In a pre-singularity dystopia, it will be a means of control and they won’t have the resources to ‘create’ people anyway, (except the old-fashioned way). In a post-singularity dystopia, resources won’t much matter and the AI’s more likely to be stuck under injunctions to protect existing people than trying to create new ones (unless the problem is the Mere Addition Paradox). Though I admit it would be a very specific subset of rogue AIs that view frozen heads as “existing people”.

“Though I hesitate to point this out, the same logic against cryonic suspension also implies that egoists, but not altruists, should immediately commit suicide in case someone is finishing their AI project in a basement, right now. A good number of arguments against cryonics also imply suicide in the present.”

I’m glad you hesitated to point it out. Luckily, I’m not as rationalist as I like to pretend :) More seriously, I currently have a lot of things preventing me from suicide. I have a family, a debt to society to pay off, and the ability to funnel enough money to various good causes to shape the future myself instead of passively experience it. And less rationally but still powerfully, I have the self-preservation urge pretty strongly that would probably kick in if I tried anything. Someday when the Singularity seems very near, I really am going to have to think about this more closely. If I think a dictator’s about to succeed on an AI project, or if I’ve heard about the specifics of the a project’s code and the moral system seems likely to collapse, I do think I’d be sitting there with a gun to my head and my finger on the trigger.

Yvain2 18 Mar 2009 1:43 UTC
7 points
on: The Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy
“There are negative possibilities (woken up in dystopia and not allowed to die) but they are exotic, not having equal probability weight to counterbalance the positive possibilities.”

That doesn’t seem at all obvious to me. First, our current society doesn’t allow people to die, although today law enforcement is spotty enough that they can’t really prevent it. I assume far future societies will have excellent law enforcement, including mind reading and total surveillance (unless libertarians seriously get their act together in the next hundred years). I don’t see any reason why the taboo on suicide must disappear. And any society advanced enough to revive me has by definition conquered death, so I can’t just wait it out and die of old age. I place about 50% odds on not being able to die again after I get out.

I’m also less confident the future wouldn’t be a dystopia. Even in the best case scenario the future’s going to be scary through sheer cultural drift (see: legalized rape in Three Worlds Collide). I don’t have to tell you that it’s easier to get a Singularity that goes horribly wrong than one that goes just right, and even if we restrict the possibilities to those where I get revived instead of turned into paperclips, they could still be pretty grim (what about some well-intentioned person hard-coding in “Promote and protect human life” to an otherwise poorly designed AI, and ending up with something that resurrects the cryopreserved...and then locks them in little boxes for all eternity so they don’t consume unnecessary resources.) And then there’s just the standard fears of some dictator or fundamentalist theocracy, only this time armed with mind control and total surveillance so there’s no chance of overthrowing them.

The deal-breaker is that I really, really don’t want to live forever. I might enjoy living a thousand years, but not forever. You could change my mind if you had a utopian post-singularity society that completely mastered Fun Theory. But when I compare the horrible possibility of being forced to live forever either in a dystopia or in a world no better or worse than our own, to the good possibility of getting to live between thousand years and forever in a Fun Theory utopia that can keep me occupied...well, the former seems both more probable and more extreme.

Yvain2 22 Feb 2009 23:24 UTC
6 points
on: Pretending to be Wise
facepalm And I even read the Sundering series before I wrote that :(

Coming up with narratives that turn the Bad Guys into Good Guys could make good practice for rationalists, along the lines of Nick Bostrom’s Apostasy post. Obviously I’m not very good at it.

GeorgeNYC, very good points.

Yvain2 22 Feb 2009 22:50 UTC
6 points
on: Fairness vs. Goodness
Wealth redistribution in this game wouldn’t have to be communist. Depending on how you set up the analogy, it could also be capitalist.

Call JW the capitalist and AA the worker. JW is the one producing wealth, but he needs AA’s help to do it. Call the under-the-table wealth redistribution deals AA’s “salary”.

The worker can always cooperate, in which case he makes some money but the capitalist makes more.

Or he can threaten to defect unless the capitalist raises his salary—he’s quitting his job or going on strike for higher pay.

(To perfect the analogy with capitalism, make two changes. First, the capitalist makes zero without the worker’s cooperation. Second, the worker makes zero in all categories, and can only make money by entering into deals with the capitalist. But now it’s not a Prisoner’s Dilemma at all—it’s the Ultimatum Game.)

IANAGT, but I bet the general rule for this class of game is that the worker’s salary should depend a little on how much the capitalist can make without workers, how much the worker can make without capitalists, and what the marginal utility structure looks like—but mostly on their respective stubbornness and how much extra payoff having the worker’s cooperation gives the capitalist.

In the posted example, AA’s “labor” brings JW from a total of 50 to a total of 100. Perhaps if we ignore marginal utilities and they’re both equally stubborn, and they both know they’re both equally stubborn and so on, JW will be best off paying AA 25 for his cooperation, leading to the equal 75 − 75 distribution of wealth?

[nazgul, a warning. I think I might disagree with you about some politics. Political discussions in blogs are themselves prisoner’s dilemmas. When we all cooperate and don’t post about politics, we are all happy. When one person defects and talks about politics, he becomes happier because his views get aired, but those of us who disagree with him get angry. The next time you post a political comment, I may have to defect as well and start arguing with you, and then we’re going to get stuck in the (D,D) doldrums.]

Yvain2 21 Feb 2009 2:28 UTC
9 points
on: Pretending to be Wise
Darnit TGGP, you’re right. Right. From now on I use Lord of the Rings for all “sometimes things really are black and white” examples. Unless anyone has some clever reason why elves are worse than Sauron.

Yvain2 20 Feb 2009 0:32 UTC
27 points
on: Pretending to be Wise
[sorry if this is a repost; my original attempt to post this was blocked as comment spam because it had too many links to other OB posts]

I’ve always hated that Dante quote. The hottest place in Hell is reserved for brutal dictators, mass murderers, torturers, and people who use flamethrowers on puppies—not for the Swiss.

I came to the exact opposite conclusion when pondering the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Most of the essays I’ve seen in newspapers and on bulletin boards are impassioned pleas to designate one side or the other as Evildoers and the other as the Brave Heroic Resistance by citing who stole whose land first, whose atrocities were slightly less provoked, which violations of which cease-fire were dastardly betrayals and which were necessary pre-emptive actions, et cetera.

Not only is this issue so open to bias that we have little hope of getting to the truth, but I doubt there’s much truth to be attained at all. Since “policy debates should not appear one-sided” and “our enemies are not innately evil”, it seems pretty likely that they’re two groups of people who both are doing what they honestly think is right and who both have some good points.

This isn’t an attempt to run away from the problem, it’s the first step toward solving the real problem. The real problem isn’t “who’s the hero and who’s the terrorist scumbag?” it’s “search solution-space for the solution that leads to the least suffering and the most peace and prosperity in the Middle East” There is a degree to which finding out who’s the evildoer is useful here so we can punish them as a deterrent, but it’s a pretty small degree, and the amount of energy people spend trying to determine it is completely out of proportion to the minimal gains it might produce.

And “how do we minimize suffering in the Middle East?” may be an easier question than “who’s to blame?” It’s about distributing land and resources to avoid people being starved or killed or oppressed, more a matter for economists and political scientists then for heated Internet debate. I’ve met conservatives who loathe the Palestinians and liberals who hate all Israelis who when asked supported exactly the same version of the two-state solution, but who’d never realized they agreed because they’d never gotten so far as “solution” before.

My defense of neutrality, then, would be something like this: human beings have the unfortunate tendency not to think of an issue as “finding the best solution in solution-space” but as “let’s make two opposing sides at the two extremes, who both loathe each other with the burning intensity of a thousand suns”. The issue then becomes “Which of these two sides is the Good and True and Beautiful, and which is Evil and Hates Our Freedom?” Thus the Democrats versus the Republicans or the Communists versus the Objectivists. I’d be terrified if any of them got one hundred percent control over policy-making. Thus, the Wise try to stay outside of these two opposing sides in order to seek the best policy solution in solution-space without being biased or distracted by the heroic us vs. them drama—and to ensure that both sides will take their proposed solution seriously without denouncing them as an other-side stooge.

A “neutral” of this sort may not care who started it, may not call one side “right” or “wrong”, may claim to be above the fray, may even come up with a solution that looks like a “compromise” to both sides, but isn’t abdicating judgment or responsibility.

Not that taking a side is never worth it. The Axis may have had one or two good points about the WWI reparations being unfair and such, but on the whole the balance of righteousness in WWII was so clearly on the Allies’ side that the most practical way to save the world was to give the Allies all the support you could. It’s always a trade-off between how ideal a solution is and how likely it is to be implemented.
What links here?
- [deleted]'s comment on Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Argument by palladias (14 Sep 2015 12:37 UTC; 0 points)

Yvain2 19 Feb 2009 1:01 UTC
20 points
on: Against Maturity
“To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”—C.S. Lewis

Yvain2 16 Feb 2009 22:59 UTC
10 points
on: An Especially Elegant Evpsych Experiment
Bruce and Waldheri, you’re being unfair.

You’re interpreting this as “some scientists got together one day and asked Canadians about their grief just to see what would happen, then looked for things to correlate it with, and after a bunch of tries came across some numbers involving !Kung tribesmen reproductive potential that fit pretty closely, and then came up with a shaky story about why they might be linked and published it.”

I interpret it as “some evolutionary psychologists were looking for a way to confirm evolutionary psychology, predicted that grief at losing children would be linked to reproductive potential in hunter-gatherer tribes, and ran an experiment to see if this was true. They discovered that it was true, and considered their theory confirmed.”

I can’t prove my interpretation is right because the paper is gated, but in my support, I know of many studies very similar to this one that were done specifically to confirm evo psych’s predictions (for example, The Adapted Mind is full of them). And most scientists don’t have enough free time to go around doing studies of people’s grief for no reason and then comparing it to random data sets until they get a match, nor would journals publish it if they did. And this really is exactly the sort of elegant, testable experiment a smart person would think up if ze was looking for ways to test evolutionary theory.

It’s true that correlation isn’t causation and so on et cetera, but if their theory really did predict the results beforehand when other theories couldn’t, we owe them a higher probability for their theory upon learning of their results.

Yvain2 11 Feb 2009 0:16 UTC
2 points
on: (Moral) Truth in Fiction?
@Robin: Thank you. Somehow I missed that post, and it was exactly what I was looking for.

@Vladimir Nesov: I agree with everything you said except for your statement that fiction is a valid argument, and your supporting analogy to mathematical proof.

Maybe the problem is the two different meanings of “valid argument”. First, the formal meaning where a valid argument is one in which premises are arranged correctly to prove a conclusion eg mathematical proofs and Aristotelian syllogisms. Well-crafted policy arguments, cost-benefit analyses, and statistical arguments linked to empirical studies probably also unpack into this category.

And then the colloquial meaning in which “valid argument” just means the same as “good point”, eg “Senator Brown was implicated in a scandal” is a “valid argument” against voting for Senator Brown. You can’t make a decision based on that fact alone, but you can include it in a broader decision-making process.

The problem with the second definition is that it makes “Slavery increases cotton production” a valid argument for slavery, which invites confusion. I’d rather say that the statement about cotton production is a “good point” (even better: “truthful point”) and then call the cost-benefit analysis where you eventually decide “increased cotton production isn’t worth the suffering, and therefore slavery is wrong” a “valid argument”.

I can’t really tell from the original post in which way Eliezer is using “valid argument”. I assumed the first way, because he uses the phrase “valid form of argument” a few times. But re-reading the post, maybe I was premature. But here’s my opinion:

Fiction isn’t the first type of valid argument because there are no stated premises, no stated conclusion, and no formal structure. Or, to put it another way, on what grounds could you claim that a work of fiction was an invalid argument?

Fiction can convincingly express the second type of valid argument (good point), and this is how I think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Slavery is bad because slaves suffer” is a good point against slavery, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin is just a very emotionally intense way of making this point that is more useful than simple assertion would be for all the reasons previously mentioned.

My complaint in my original post is that fiction tends to focus the mind on a single good point with such emotional intensity that it can completely skew the rest of the cost-benefit analysis. For example, the hypothetical sweatshop book completely focuses the mind on the good point that people can suffer terribly while working in a sweatshop. Anyone who reads the sweatshop book is in danger of having this one point become so salient that it makes a “valid argument” of the first, more formal type much more difficult.

Yvain2 9 Feb 2009 23:54 UTC
11 points
on: (Moral) Truth in Fiction?
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not a valid argument that slavery is wrong. “My mirror neurons make me sympathize with a person whose suffering is caused by Policy X” to “Policy X is immoral and must be stopped” is not a valid pattern of inference.

Consider a book about the life of a young girl who works in a sweatshop. She’s plucked out of a carefree childhood, tyrannized and abused by greedy bosses, and eventually dies of work-related injuries incurred because it wasn’t cost-effective to prevent them. I’m sure this book exists, though I haven’t personally come across it. And I’m sure this book would provide just as emotionally compelling an argument for banning sweatshops as Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for banning slavery.

But the sweatshop issue is a whole lot more complex than that, right? And the arguments in favor of sweatshops are more difficult to put into novel form, or less popular among the people who write novels, or simply not mentioned in that particular book, or all three.

The problem with fiction as evidence is that it’s like the guy who say “It was negative thirty degrees last night, worst snowstorm in fifty years, so how come them liberals are still talking about ‘global warming’?”. It cuts off a tiny slice of the universe and invites you to use it to judge the entire system.

But I agree that fiction is not solely a tool of the dark side. Eliezer’s comment about it activating the Near mode thinking struck me as the most specifically useful sentence in the entire post, and I would like to see more on that. I would also add one other benefit: fiction drags you into the author’s mindset for a while against your will. You cannot read the book about the poor girl in the sweatshops without—at least a little—cheering on the labor unions and hating the greedy bosses, and this is true no matter how good a capitalist you may be in real life. It confuses whatever part of you is usually building a protective shell of biases around your opinion, and gets you comfortable with living on the opposite side of the argument. If the other side of the argument is a more stable attractor, you might even stay there.

...that wasn’t a very formal explanation, but it’s the best way I can put it right now.

Yvain2 3 Feb 2009 12:35 UTC
31 points
on: Three Worlds Decide (5/8)
Assuming the Lord Pilot was correct in saying that, without the nova star, the Happy Fun People would never be able to reach the human starline network …and assuming it’s literally impossible to travel FTL without a starline …and assuming the only starline to the nova star was the one they took …and assuming Huygens, described as a “colony world”, is sparsely populated, and either can be evacuated or is considered “expendable” compared to the alternatives

...then blow up Huygens’ star. Without the Huygens-Nova starline, the Happy People won’t be able to cross into human space, but the Happy-Nova-Babyeater starline will be unaffected. The Happy People can take care of the Babyeaters, and humankind will be safe. For a while.

Still not sure I’d actually take that solution. It depends on how populated Huygens is and how confident I am the Super Happy People can’t come up with alternate transportation, and I’m also not entirely opposed to the Happy People’s proposal. But:

If I had a comm link to the Happy People, I’d also want to hear their answer to the following line of reasoning: one ordinary nova in a single galaxy just attracted three separate civilizations. That means intelligent life is likely to be pretty common across the universe, and our three somewhat-united species are likely to encounter far more of it in the years to come. If the Happy People keep adjusting their (and our) utility functions each time we meet a new intelligent species, then by the millionth species there’s not going to be a whole lot remaining of the original Super Happy way of thinking—or the human way of thinking, for that matter. If they’re so smart, what’s their plan for when that happens?

If they answer “We’re fully prepared to compromise our and your utility functions limitlessly many times for the sake of achieving harmonious moralities among all forms of life in the Universe, and we predict each time will involve a change approximately as drastic as making you eat babies,” then it will be a bad day to be a colonist on Huygens.

Yvain2 13 Jan 2009 21:01 UTC
58 points
on: Building Weirdtopia
Political Weirdtopia: Citizens decide it is unfair for a democracy to count only the raw number of people who support a position without considering the intensity with which they believe it. Of course, one can’t simply ask people to self-report the intensity with which they believe a position on their ballot, so stronger measures are required. Voting machines are redesigned to force voters to pull down a lever for each issue/candidate. The lever delivers a small electric shock, increasing in intensity each second the voter holds it down. The number of votes a person gets for a particular issue or candidate is a function of how long they keep holding down the lever.

In (choose one: more/less) enlightened sects of this society, the electric shock is capped at a certain level to avoid potential fatalities among overzealous voters. But in the (choose one: more/less) enlightened sects, voters can keep pulling down on the lever as long as they can stand the pain and their heart keeps working. Citizens consider this a convenient and entirely voluntary way to purge fanaticism from the gene pool.

The society lasts for several centuries before being taken over by a tiny cabal of people with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain Disorder.

Yvain2 31 Dec 2008 7:10 UTC
1 point
on: Dunbar’s Function
Though it’s a side issue, what’s even more… interesting.… is the way that our brains simply haven’t updated to their diminished power in a super-Dunbarian world. We just go on debating politics, feverishly applying our valuable brain time to finding better ways to run the world, with just the same fervent intensity that would be appropriate if we were in a small tribe where we could persuade people to change things.

Thank you. That’s one of those insights that makes this blog worth reading.

Yvain2 28 Nov 2008 14:08 UTC
15 points
on: Thanksgiving Prayer
“O changeless and aeternal physical constants, we give thanks to thee for existing at values such that the Universe, upon being set in motion and allowed to run for thirteen billion years, give or take an eon, naturally tends toward a state in which we are seated here tonight with turkey, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce in front of us.”

Or “O natural selection, thou hast adapted turkeys to a mostly predation-free environment, making them slow, weak, and full of meat. In contrast, thou hast adapted us humans to an environment full of dangers and a need for complex decisions, giving us cognitive abilities that we could eventually use to discover things like iron working. Therefore we thank thee, o natural selection, that we may slaughter and consume arbitrary numbers of turkeys at our pleasure without fear of harm or retribution. Furthermore, we thank thee for giving us an instinctual sense of morality strong enough that we feel compelled to ceremonially express our gratitude to all those who have helped us over the past year, yet not so strong that we dwell too much on what’s happening to the turkey when we do so. Amen.”

Yvain2 18 Nov 2008 21:09 UTC
0 points
on: Whither OB?
I don’t know what’s up with people who say they still haven’t read the archives. When I discovered OB, I spent all my free time for two weeks reading the archives straight through :)

I support Roland’s idea. A few Eliezer posts per week, plus an (official, well-publicized, Eliezer-and-Robin-supported) forum where the rest of us could discuss those posts and bring up issues of our own. Certain community leaders (hopefully Eliezer and Robin if they have time) picking out particularly interesting topics and comments on the board and telling the posters to write them up in more depth as blog posts. Even if people rejected community-based blog posting, just having a forum to keep the Overcoming Bias community together would be worthwhile.

I’m more comfortable with BBSs than complicated upvote systems like Digg or Reddit. The ones I’ve seen tend toward groupthink, fifty topics on the same issue, and inane “Upvote if you don’t like President Bush” threads.

There are some interesting ideas floating around on preventing bulletin boards from degenerating. Require everyone use their real name, or some kind of initial investment of time or money to register an account, or have a karma system.

Kind of off-topic, but in case this is one of my last chances, I want to thank Robin and Eliezer and all the other writers. I usually only comment when I disagree with something, so it’s probably not obvious, but I am in awe of the intelligence and clear thinking you display. You have changed my outlook on life, logic, and the world.

Yvain2 15 Nov 2008 2:48 UTC
20 points
on: Selling Nonapples
I don’t know anything about the specific AI architectures in this post, but I’ll defend non-apples. If one area of design-space is very high in search ordering but very low in preference ordering (ie a very attractive looking but in fact useless idea), then telling people to avoid it is helpful beyond the seemingly low level of optimization power it gives.

A metaphor: religious beliefs constitute a very small and specific area of beliefspace, but that area originally looks very attractive. You could spend your whole life searching within that area and never getting anywhere. Saying “be atheist!” provides an trivial amount of optimization power. But that doesn’t mean it’s of trivial importance in the search for correct beliefs. Another metaphor: if you’re stuck in a ditch, the majority of the effort it takes to journey a mile will be the ten vertical meters it takes to climb to the top.

Saying “not X” doesn’t make people go for all non-X equally. It makes them apply their intelligence to the problem again, ignoring the trap at X that they would otherwise fall into. If the problem is pretty easy once you stop trying to sell apples, then “sell non-apples” might provide most of the effective optimization power you need.
What links here?
- Raemon's comment on Matthew Barnett’s Shortform by Matthew Barnett (20 Aug 2019 4:05 UTC; 2 points)

Yvain2 13 Nov 2008 16:24 UTC
2 points
on: Bay Area Meetup: 11/17 8PM Menlo Park
Robin Gane-McCalla is an Overcoming Bias reader? I knew him back in college, but haven’t talked to him in years. It really is a small world.

Yvain2 6 Nov 2008 15:46 UTC
1 point
on: Hanging Out My Speaker’s Shingle
“Why do people, including you apparently, always hide the price for this kind of thing? Market segmentation? Trying to get people to mentally commit before they find out how expensive it is? Maintaining a veneer of upper-class distaste for the crassness of money (or similarly, a “if you have to ask how much it is, you can’t afford it” type thing)?”

I agree with that, and I have a policy of never buying from anyone who does this.

Often I don’t know how much something would cost even to an order of magnitude; for example, I have no clue whether Eliezer charged Jane Street closer to $1,000 or $10,000 for his talk. This is probably because I’m not a finance company talk arranger, but I have the same problem with things that are targeted at normal people like me (vacation packages especially). I find (though I can’t explain this) that I very rarely bother asking someone who provides no price information for a quote.

Even a “my base fee is $2,000, but varies based on this and this” or a “My fee is in the low four figures” would be better than “my fee is low”.

Yvain2 4 Nov 2008 0:08 UTC
2 points
on: BHTV: Jaron Lanier and Yudkowsky
Disappointing. I kept on waiting for Eliezer to say some sort of amazingly witty thing that would cause everything Jaron was saying to collapse like a house of cards, but either he was too polite to interrupt or the format wasn’t his style.

At first I thought Jaron was talking nonsense, but after thinking it over for a while, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. He said that whether a computer can be intelligent makes no difference and isn’t worth talking about. That’s obviously wrong if he’s using a normal definition of intelligent, but if by intelligent he means “conscious”, it makes a lot of sense and he’s probably even right—there’s not a lot of practical value in worrying about whether an intelligent computer would be conscious (as opposed to a zombie) at this point. He wouldn’t be the first person to use those two words in weird ways.

I am also at least a little sympathetic to his “consciousness can’t be reduced” argument. It made more sense once he said that consciousness wasn’t a phenomenon. Still not perfect sense, but trying to raise something stronger from its corpse I would argue something sort of Kantian like the following:

Goldbach’s conjecture says that every number is the sum of three primes. It hasn’t been proven but there’s a lot of inductive evidence for it. If I give you a difficult large number, like 20145, you may not be capable of figuring out the three primes, but you should still guess they exist. Even if you work quite hard to find them and can’t, it’s still more likely that it’s a failure on your part than that the primes don’t exist.

However, North Dakota is clearly not the sum of three primes. Even someone with no mathematical knowledge can figure this out. This statement is immune to all of the inductive evidence that Goldbach’s conjecture is true, immune to the criticism that you simply aren’t smart enough to find the primes, and doesn’t require extensive knowledge of the history and geography of North Dakota to make. It’s just a simple category error.

Likewise, we have good inductive evidence that all objects follow simple scientific/reductionist laws. A difficult-to-explain object, like ball lightning, probably still follows scientific/reductionist laws, even if we haven’t figured out what they are yet. But consciousness is not an object; it’s the subject, that by which objects are perceived. Trying to apply rules about objects to it is a category error, and his refusal to do so is immune to the normal scientific/reductionist criticisms you would level against someone who tried that on ball lightning or homeopathy or something.

I’m not sure if I agree with this argument, but I think it’s coherent and doesn’t violate any laws of rationality.

I agree with everyone who found his constant appeal to “I make algorithms, so you have to believe me!” and his weird nervous laughter irritating.