From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 10:19:52 MDT
Robin Hanson wrote:
> On 6/23/2003, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
>>>>> ... Most of the "disagreements" on the list are not really
>>>>> disagreements.
>>>>> Different people have different data or assign different values.
>>>>> Most of the facts themselves are not in dispute. ...
>>
>> I disagreed that "the facts themselves are not in dispute" and that
>> disputes derive from assigning different values. It seems to me that
>> much of the disputation derives from disagreement on facts, and the
>> remainder from differences on values that are perceived as
>> disagreements and on which people would not agree to disagree. Little
>> of it appears to be genuinely "assigning different" values.
>
> I agree with Eliezer; most disagreements on this list are not on their
> face people declaring different values. That may be the real cause
> behind the scenes, but the actual statements that people dispute seem to
> mostly be statements about which of many possible worlds the actual
> world is.
Some disputes about values are not statements about which of many possible
worlds the actual world is, unless you extend possible-world semantics to
cover alternate laws of mathematics or inconsistent worlds; some disputes
about values are disputes about the output of a computational process.
For example, two people arguing about "rationality" are better thought of
as arguing about properties emergent in Bayesian decision theory, rather
than arguing about the contents of a black box labeled "rationality" which
contains different things in different possible worlds. There's a black
box, but it's internal, not external, and it contains the same thing in
all possible worlds which obey our rules of mathematics.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jun 24 2003 - 10:31:01 MDT