toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
Consistent Agents are Utilitarian: If you have an agent taking actions in the world and having preferences about the future states of the world, that agent must be utilitarian,
So is Eliezer calling me a utilitarian?
Your heading talks about consistent agents, but the premise that follows says nothing about consistency. [Sorry if you are just steelmanning someone else's argument, here "you" is that steelman, not necessarily /u/JhanicManifold].
- If there is no such function V(s), then our agent is not consistent, and there are cycles we can find in its preference ordering, so it prefers state A to B, B to C, and C to A, which is a pretty stupid thing for an agent to do.
There's no reason even why a preference ordering has to exist. Almost any preference pair you can think about (e.g. choclate vs. strawberry icecream) is radically contextual.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Orthogonality Thesis: This is the statement that the ability of an agent to achieve goals in the world is largely separate from the actual goals it has.
This assumes that intelligent agents have goals that are more fundamental than value, which is the opposite of how every other intelligent or quasi intelligent system behaves. It's probably also impossible, in order to be smart -- calculate out all those possible paths to your goal -- you need value judgements of what rabbit tracks to chase.
This is with EY is wrong to assume that as soon as a device gets smart enough, all the "alignment" work from dumber devices will be wasted. That only makes sense that what is conserved is a goal, and now it has more sneaky ways of getting to that goal. But you'd have to go out of your way to design a thing like that.
toadworrier
1yr ago
No, he can simply withdraw from India and leave that money on the table. This is what Google eventually did in China, and was better for it.
This is terribly sad for India - not because it needs Twitter, but because it needs free speech. But the Indians are going to have to learn that the hard way (and they will only do it very slowly, I'd say two centuries minimum).
toadworrier
1yr ago
Functions have domains. The real world is not like that, context is only understood (if at all) after the fact. And machines (including brains) simply do what they do in response to the real world. It's only sometimes that we can tell stories about those actions in terms of preference orderings or utility functions.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Sounds about right. But I'm thinking about what would constitute a hard calculus exam while still being "just calculus".
I once bombed an exam a bit easier than the one I described, and it was actually the only subject I failed in Uni.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Yes, it does.
But the US judiciary also has explicit doctrines (the most famous is Chevron) that give enormous deference agencies administering statues. That's what makes it uncharacteristically submissive against the administrative state while being pretty robust against actual legislation.
Other countries also allow parliaments to delegate a lot of their power to agencies, and courts are pretty timid about the delegation itself. But they do a more serious job of reviewing the agency decisions in the light of their enabling legislation. This is not some extraordinary activism, it's just common sense. It is America that has a weirdly deferential doctrine.
toadworrier
1yr ago
I came back to the country a few years ago to find Labor and Liberal in some tedious stouche that I can't even remember; except I was astonished to find that Derren Hinch and Pauline Hanson were acting like the only grownups in the room.
I thought that was just one weird freak of probability never to happen again, but now I am not so sure. The ONP is starting to look smarter than everyone else, if only because Pauline is merely stupid while the rest of the polity is actively anti-intelligent.
toadworrier
1yr ago
(Though given how much they gained from Mabo, which found Indigenous agriculture and sedentary lifestyles on one island off the coast of Australia and extended a certain level of land rights across the whole country, waiting for courts to interpret in their favor is not a bad strategy
The courts just noted that Terra Nullius was bullshit, and that there was pre-existing land-law just like in any other conquered territory. The courts also made clear that Australian governments could override that land law and extinguish Native Title with little more than a wave of the pen.
But Parliament, under Paul Keating decided pass Native Title Act which went and bolstered native title claims around the country.
toadworrier
1yr ago
In other countries that plan likely goes through without interference from the courts.
I'd be surprised. But it's more likely that governments would just pass legislation, since Parliaments are less independent of the executive. It's not 100% -- e.g. in Australia minor parties tend to have the balance of power in the Senate. But in general you don't see executive orders being used as an end-run around Parliament.
What you do see is ministers being granted enormously broad powers by existing legislation. These powers are broad enough that they don't need help from the judiciary to get away with acting arbitrarily. Although when they but up against the constitution, the courts might conveniently forget that the constitution exists.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Having said that the Beeb is an interesting construct. Its funding mostly comes from the public by way of a government law for the License fee.
Just because you call it ship money a licence fee, doesn't mean it isn't a tax. The government impose it.
However its existence is part of a Royal Charter which mandates its independence from the government itself.
More importantly the BBC is perfectly willing to attack the government. But by "government" here, I mean the democratically elected institutions of the state. The BBC does however loyally represent (and is part of) the permanent state institutional structure.
So is it accurate to say it is government funded? Kind of yes, kind of no
Yes, and every kind of yes.
toadworrier
1yr ago
I don't understand what the motivation behind attempts to have it scrubbed would be. ... So the only benefit of scrubbing it now would be making it harder for the public to find
So you answer your own question!
toadworrier
1yr ago
And this is why the focus on the Civil Rights Act as a new constitution is a bit skewed.
Elites have been attacking the US constitution ever since the Alien and Sedition Acts. More importantly, by the Progressive Era there was a well-established ideology that was hostile to the way classical liberal constitutionalism interfered with energetic technocratic government action. This is why FDR wanted to pack the court.
There's a certain amount of stupid in the CRA, but the 1960's had the virtue that people were returning to the idea that individual had inherent rights that ought to be vindicated against the higher "wisdom" of the powers that be. America's strong 1st Amendment jurisprudence emerges from the same era.
toadworrier
1yr ago
I think that it also correctly pointed out that this whole thing vs symbol manipulator distinction is a lot more complicated.
While I instinctively believe things are more complicated than Hlynka's distinction, I became less and less convinced of this the more I waded through Bing's verbiage on the matter.
toadworrier
1yr ago
The problem is that it's defense of humanities professors was exactly the sort of meaningless pastiche that you would expect if it was a pure symbol manipulator. Now you could argue that it sounds very much like the real arguments that would come out of the mouths of real humanities professors. But that just means Hlynka wins on both sides.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Community organizing, meetups, and church ladies have genuine value, but are not exactly scalable. You want probably 5 of them in a group of 100.
Nah, you want a participatory pitchfork where every one turns up regularly to the local volksrat. I don't expect such a thing, but it's what we need.
toadworrier
1yr ago
indictment of the American right, that there haven't been terrorist attacks on gender clinics and assassination attempts against transition doctors.
Doing that sort of shit on abortion clinics certainly has saved any babies. If anything, it's done the opposite.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Calvin's Geneva and Yankee Boston
These are two notorious theocracies. They had the advantage that they were also bearers of new ideas that were on the up. But those ideas only came to be of importance in the context of a healthier, non-theocratic society.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Why biological sex and not 'gender identity' matters for norms, culture and language
I hope you are also communicating with him about what matters for his child.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Can you link some of your arguments. It fits my priors, but I'd like to see the reasoning behind it.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Gender ideology asks people to assert things that aren't actually true and to accept this untruth promulgated through public institutions,
The same is true for affirmative action. Which is how we got into this mess.
toadworrier
11mo ago
(he's confidentially told me that he fears our center-right government is looking to pick fights with academia over 'cancel culture', and he has been given a top mandate by university central to avoid anything that would give the press 'woke academia gone mad' headlines)
It's working!
toadworrier
11mo ago
I think you'd need to unpack the details of that assertion if it is to carry much weight.
toadworrier
11mo ago
It can be more than "vague centre-right". America is growing some smart-but-hard right wing doers. DeSantis is the obvious one, but not the only one. Then there's activists like Chris Rufo who can work through whatever politician has power.
toadworrier
11mo ago
In Bertrand Russell's chapter about Locke, he says something like "Given a choice between being inconsistent and being absurd, Locke will always chose to be inconsistent".
Bentham however, was not like that.
I think we are talking about the kind of undergrad exam where you have you have to evaluate a bunch of fairly difficult but still turn-the-crank type integrals and also some fairly easy ODEs.
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