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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25706 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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I think classical utilitarianism as a whole suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near in ways that this sort of misconduct highlights.

I take it a bit further and argue that utilitarianism in general, and the more classical and universalist varieties of utilitarianism in particular are incompatible with "duty" as a concept.

One of the core reasons that I continue to maintain that "AI Alignment Problem" is misnamed and has far more to with the inherent flaws of utilitarianism as espoused by men like Singer, Benatar, Yudkowsky, Et Al than it does intelligence artificial or otherwise is that a utilitarian cannot credibly commit to cooperate in a prisoners' dilemma or be held to an existing agreement. Because, contra Scott Alexander, one of the core tenets of utilitarianism is that one has a moral duty to renege on said agreements should it become convenient to do so if doing so can be plausibly framed as "increasing net utility."

ETA: As I have argued previously, the difference between virtue signaling and real virtue is that virtue entails sacrifices. It requires suffering and foregoing things you want, things like defrauding your investors (looking at you SBF) or in this case banging your students/coworkers and cheating on your wife.

Yudkowsky

cannot credibly commit to cooperate in a prisoners' dilemma or be held to an existing agreement.

Come on man. Yudkowsky has made more progress on this general problem than any other living philosopher.

First, I'm not convinced that Yudkowsky Et Al actually demonstrated what they seem to think they've demonstrated (convient assumptions and seemingly arbitrary weights abound). Second, it's debatable whether adding the equivalent of epicycles to geo-centerism constitutes "progress".

If sufficiently advanced utilitarianism approaches virtue ethics in its' outputs, it raises the question; "why bother with utilitarianism in the first place?"

You have to distinguish between the ridiculously-abstract question of what should lie at the base of an ethical system, and the ridiculously-empirical question of what kinds of ethical injunctions people will successfully understand and consistently obey.

There’s no reason that we should have to choose the same answer to both of these questions. Arguing that we should feels to me like arguing that we shouldn’t, say, take the axiom of choice in our system of mathematical logic because the average dude on the street is likely to mis-apply it.

I will further clarify that in both cases, the abstract question of “what should we take at the base of our system?”, divorced from its actual consequences, seems wildly pointless to me. Only what happens when you adopt a rule should matter. Which is, despite everything, what you’re saying above, right?

Because you can't program virtue ethics into an AI. You need a utility function.

All of Yudkowsky's philosophical work is grounded on the framework of AI development.

Because you can't program virtue ethics into an AI. You need a utility function.

I am not even sure Yudkowsky would argue this. In any case this is not defensible unless you think that virtue ethics is in principle not computable.

You need a utility function.

Debatable, there are alternative architectures available and Yudkowsky is pretty open about the fact that he sees AI development as a means not an end. I think it would be more accurate to say that it's the other way. You go back and read his early writings on LessWrong it's all about using advanced computational methods to finally "solve" the question of morality once and for all and immanentize the eschaton be it through Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism or by paving the universe with computronium.

Credit where credit is due though, while he may have started out in the "hyper intelligence for hyper intelligence's sake" camp I think at some point he realized that a true hyper intelligence's that shared his philosophy and preferences would view him with the same indifference/lack-of-moral-regard with which he views "the less intelligent" (IE normies) and that this triggered something of an existential crisis which is the source of his current focus.

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