Anonymous asked: How much do you agree with Yudkowsky on? Aren't you just bitching about 2% of his writing?
I don’t know his writing well enough. If someone wants to give me a bullet point list, I could go through it.
Here is my stance on various things:
I disagree strongly that there is one “proper” way to do inference, which seems to be the core of his Bayesianism. I disagree strongly that you should just make up numbers and plug them into formulas, if you want a qualitative answer use a qualitative method, don’t fool yourself into thinking you have mathematical proofs justifying yourself.
I think utilitarianism is utterly devoid of content without rules on aggregating utility and definitions of utility functions. As such, when people make utilitarian arguments they are making a lot more assumptions than they think. This ties back to the above- sometimes there is no “mathematical” way to make a decision- if you insist on creating one, you’re just fooling yourself.
I think his quantum sequence is misleading. I think “transhumanism” is more of a sci-fi fandom than a serious ethical system (we can argue about whether or not people should be allowed to die once we have some way of stopping death).
I think his free will and consciousness stuff is confusing. Personally, I think that we don’t yet have good methodology to explore these types of questions, so 1. I don’t think they can be resolved 2. I try not to exhaust effort thinking too much about it.
I think most of MIRIs technical output is worthless.
I guess I do agree with what I’d call the atheist/internet-humanism pieces. Change your mind with new evidence, etc.