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comment by johnnyFive
johnnyFive  ·  2935 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Has anyone read "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" by Eliezer Yudkowsky

I started it, but didn't find it especially interesting or persuasive. I mean, there's something to the idea of cognitive bias, but I'm wary of anyone who takes a "this one thing is the source of all our ills" approach to ... well, anything. Plus, his book reads like it was written by a 14-year-old who just discovered the Wikipedia article on epistemology and Nizkor's summary of logical fallacies on the same day, and now he has all the answers.

Take for example when he lectures about how the "selling hope" interpretation of lotteries is still bad because it's a "waste of emotional energy." He argues that "maybe" (cue weasel words note a la Wikipedia) people would instead dream about going back to school or improving themselves in some way. He then adds:

    Their dreaming brains might, in the 20th visualization of the pleasant fantasy, notice a way to really do it. Isn't that what dreams and brains are for?

Life, according to Yudkowski, is just a matter of maximizing specific bars a la The Sims. If you choose to maximize a different bar, that's a "stupid" or "biased" decision. But he never really makes a compelling case for why his bars are actually better. And at some point, this so-called "rationalist" approach just removes the human portion of life. As the saying goes,

    Life is not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

In the alternative, XKCD nicely sums up some of my objections.

But I'm not really sure why Yudkowsky thinks that what he's arguing is in some way different or new, especially on things like ethics. He says at one point that

    So my values are not strictly reducible to happiness: There are properties I value about the future that aren't reducible to activation levels in anyone's pleasure center; properties that are not strictly reducible to subjective states even in principle.

This idea (said less pretentiously) has been part of pretty much every human ethical system since the dawn of time.

Side note: I couldn't help but laugh when he says, in the same post, "When I'm deciding where to steer the future, I take into account not only the subjective states that people end up in, but also whether they got there as a result of their own efforts" (emphasis mine).

More generally, what I can gleam of his ethical thought seems to go around in circles a lot (but of course, this is the reader's fault), and I'm still not 100% sure what his ethical system actually is.

And, of course, his writings on religion (e.g. here) are so laughably wrong-headed that they border on Poe's Law territory. I'm reminded of the opening line from a review of The God Delusion:

    Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

To summarize, my impression is of someone who's trying desperately to systematize the whole of human thought so that (a) he can be correct at will, and (b) can ignore emotions he doesn't want to deal with.





blackbootz  ·  2935 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Those are some great points, thanks for illustrating.

I hate to admit it, but my reading comprehension skills are so affected by presentation. If someone I trust prefaces a link with "this stuff is brilliant and changed how I think" I can be reliably taken in by it. And just now, you pointing out to me to look for a bit of sanctimony and assumed-but-unexplained-premises primed me well to find them. These predilections might be so obvious as to be mundane. I mean, we all judge books by their covers even though we know better.

I'm at the very beginning of Yudkowsky's book, where the author is on best behavior to woo, so I'm not bored yet. But it's over 1000 pages, and I have a backlog a mile long, so we'll see.

johnnyFive  ·  2935 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    And just now, you pointing out to me to look for a bit of sanctimony and assumed-but-unexplained-premises primed me well to find them.

I think that's pretty much everyone :)

I take that approach on anything trying to teach me something. But some of that is my own priming; my background is in history and then law, both of which train you to be a very skeptical and analytical reader. For fiction I don't care, so don't really worry about it as much.

As you allude to, it's ultimately a question of where to spend your limited hours. If you're getting something out of reading it (even if it's just refining your own thoughts via your disagreements with Yudkowsky), then there's nothing wrong with doing so. And who knows, even a blind squirrel can find nuts, so you may find or two ideas there that are useful. If someone's right they're right, even if they come across as self-important and shallow.