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Agreed, but I think the better response to this is: "We should try to create AIs that are aligned to society's shared values, not particular subcultures", and n

Agreed, but I think the better response to this is: "We should try to create AIs that are aligned to society's shared values, not particular subcultures", and not "We should create subculture-specific AIs".

logicchains 3y ago
>We should try to create AIs that are aligned to society's shared values, not particular subcultures That's quite a hard task nowadays; given how polarised society is (at least in the US), the list of shared values may be quite small.
- loudmax 3y ago
  I disagree. Most Republicans and Democrats are moderates, and the polarization is coming from loud vocal minorities at the fringes. Republicans and Democrats erroneously assume that the other party's median is far more extreme than they really are. Most Americans share far more values with each other than they do with the Woke/Maga extremists.
  - veidr 3y ago
    Since you seem quite sure of that, can you name twenty of them?
    - loudmax 3y ago
      Most American voters are moderates. Party primaries and gerrymandering produce politicians that reflect the most active elements of the party base, rather than the majority of party voters. Yes, you can still find moderate politicians if you look hard enough. They tend not to get the level of media attention of the extremists, but as they're inherently in "purple" districts, they tend not to have the political longevity of politicians in deep red or deep blue districts. More's the pity.
      - Capricorn2481 3y ago
        The point is that even moderates do not have an easily shared set of values. Which is why you can't name them
        loudmax 3y ago
        Here are two: * Elaine Luria * Barbara Comstock Both are from Virginia, and both were voted out of their politically moderate districts. This is the tragedy of being a centrist. Most Republicans aren't deeply racist and most Democrats aren't deeply socialist. Americans largely want a functional representative democracy, with minimal restrictions on free markets and free speech and some measure of opportunity for all. Obviously "minimal" is subject to interpretation, but this is tinkering, not an absolute rejection of free speech or free markets or social justice. We take these important fundamental values for granted as we pour political energy into disagreement over which bathrooms trans people should go to.
        veidr 3y ago
        We meant name shared values, not politicians. Free speech? Free markets? Those are good examples of values, if a little vague. But in reality, even with broad definitions of them, I doubt you could get a significantly different percentage to agree on those things than the idiotic bathroom debate. Does free speech include aggressive panhandling in the road? Does include shouting epithets and racist vitriol at a woman trying to enter a Planned Parenthood clinic? Do free markets imply that my mining operation can dump the waste products of my bitcoin mine in the creek behind your house? FWIW I do think you are right that the US political system has over decades so entrenched the two parties that it makes it impossible to see even the scant common ground that would exist otherwise. But I don't think there's a huge amount of that common ground.
hanselot 3y ago
I think you are missing the point entirely. If you want to know what the consensus of a specific echo chamber would be (aka, what the stereotypical pov is), having models trained to represent that echo chamber would be incredibly valuable imo. If you want a sum of all echo chambers, you will obviously need the echo chambers to sum first.
- bsenftner 3y ago
  This is a key take away: anyone in office, seeking to be in office, seeking to introduce new laws can use demographically tuned models to test and revise communications about their intended behaviors for each demographic, crafting language that renders each demographic accepting of the idea, regardless of the idea itself. Oh, Pandora!
smeagull 3y ago
So we get stuck with America's bad set of values, and school shootings and other insanity gets exported? No. The world doesn't want your issues spreading.
yosito 3y ago
As someone who has spent a lot of time in various cultures, it's pretty much impossible to define a universal set of shared values across all cultures. I grew up in subculture that valued intellectual freedom and questioning everything. But we had certain things that we often said were universally wrong (sin) in all cultures, like murder and rape. On the surface this seems true. But then you start asking how something like murder is defined and you realize that cultures do not share specific ideas about this. Some say things like euthanasia and abortion are murder, others say that they're not. Some cultures say all information should be free, other cultures say you should censor information about things like building bombs, or making your own medicine or repairing your own devices. There is no universally agreed on standard that won't offend some culture somewhere.
veidr 3y ago
I think you may be assuming a much larger overlap of shared values than actually exists.
pjc50 3y ago
Does society _have_ shared values that are universally agreed any more? Or, to the extent that it does, do they lead to anything concrete? This is why the culture war has been so successful.
- dahart 3y ago
  You might be right, but I dislike using the culture wars as evidence of a lack of shared values, and I hope that’s not true. The culture wars are almost completely made of up straw man arguments and gas-lighting about the opponent’s motivations. We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. Everyone wants clean air and water. Everyone wants to be able to make a living. All three of those things are being misrepresented and argued over in the ‘culture wars’ despite the fact that we all share these values. I even might argue the whole reason we fight over them is precisely because they are shared values so it’s relatively easy to create arguments where both sides can be right about some core principles and both sides demonize the other over minutiae, and it stays that way.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. The debate over trans people has surfaced lots of incidents in which people will say, to the world and to the faces of their kids, that they would prefer them to be dead rather than transition. Sometimes they take steps to ensure this themselves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knight-transgender-woman-suicide-saudi-arabia-b2301068.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knigh... > Everyone wants clean air and water. .. for themselves. There's always someone who realises that they can make a billion dollars by pouring carcinogens in the river, so why shouldn't they as long as they stick to bottled water? Everything is simple and happy until we get to having to make a tradeoff.
    - dahart 3y ago
      Thankfully these specific examples are extremely rare and not shared by most of society, so these are not at all evidence of a lack of shared values. These aren’t difficult tradeoffs either, neither one of your examples is even the least bit tempting to the average person. Shared values has never meant that every single person agrees including rich business owners who will hurt people to make money, or parents who would wish their kids dead. The whole reason these shocking and horrific viewpoints get talked about is because they’re so rare and so far away, so extreme, from what most people value. The trans debate is in full swing right now and there will continue to be awful headlines and more straw men and gas lighting for a while, but it’s following in the path of what black people, women, gay people, poor people, and others have all endured, and our shared values (in US centric terms, that all people are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) will hopefully keep us moving in the right direction like it has in the past. Same goes for environmental protection. It’s illegal to dump carcinogens in the river for a reason, and that reason is because we already collectively declared that kind of behavior to be anti-social and unsafe. (And BTW the ruthless billionaire might be amoral, but he’s probably not an idiot, and has a decent idea of where bottled water actually comes from.) The one big danger of the culture wars and the war on science is that this all might be a ruse by some enterprising billionaires to get people to distrust government as being representative of our shared values. The billionaire might get his way and be allowed to pollute the river if he can convince us that we don’t share values with our neighbors. It might work, we might end up convinced we don’t share values with our neighbors, even when we actually do.

logicchains 3y ago

>We should try to create AIs that are aligned to society's shared values, not particular subcultures That's quite a hard task nowadays; given how polarised society is (at least in the US), the list of shared values may be quite small.

loudmax 3y ago
I disagree. Most Republicans and Democrats are moderates, and the polarization is coming from loud vocal minorities at the fringes. Republicans and Democrats erroneously assume that the other party's median is far more extreme than they really are. Most Americans share far more values with each other than they do with the Woke/Maga extremists.
- veidr 3y ago
  Since you seem quite sure of that, can you name twenty of them?
  - loudmax 3y ago
    Most American voters are moderates. Party primaries and gerrymandering produce politicians that reflect the most active elements of the party base, rather than the majority of party voters. Yes, you can still find moderate politicians if you look hard enough. They tend not to get the level of media attention of the extremists, but as they're inherently in "purple" districts, they tend not to have the political longevity of politicians in deep red or deep blue districts. More's the pity.
    - Capricorn2481 3y ago
      The point is that even moderates do not have an easily shared set of values. Which is why you can't name them
      - loudmax 3y ago
        Here are two: * Elaine Luria * Barbara Comstock Both are from Virginia, and both were voted out of their politically moderate districts. This is the tragedy of being a centrist. Most Republicans aren't deeply racist and most Democrats aren't deeply socialist. Americans largely want a functional representative democracy, with minimal restrictions on free markets and free speech and some measure of opportunity for all. Obviously "minimal" is subject to interpretation, but this is tinkering, not an absolute rejection of free speech or free markets or social justice. We take these important fundamental values for granted as we pour political energy into disagreement over which bathrooms trans people should go to.
        veidr 3y ago
        We meant name shared values, not politicians. Free speech? Free markets? Those are good examples of values, if a little vague. But in reality, even with broad definitions of them, I doubt you could get a significantly different percentage to agree on those things than the idiotic bathroom debate. Does free speech include aggressive panhandling in the road? Does include shouting epithets and racist vitriol at a woman trying to enter a Planned Parenthood clinic? Do free markets imply that my mining operation can dump the waste products of my bitcoin mine in the creek behind your house? FWIW I do think you are right that the US political system has over decades so entrenched the two parties that it makes it impossible to see even the scant common ground that would exist otherwise. But I don't think there's a huge amount of that common ground.

hanselot 3y ago

I think you are missing the point entirely. If you want to know what the consensus of a specific echo chamber would be (aka, what the stereotypical pov is), having models trained to represent that echo chamber would be incredibly valuable imo. If you want a sum of all echo chambers, you will obviously need the echo chambers to sum first.

bsenftner 3y ago
This is a key take away: anyone in office, seeking to be in office, seeking to introduce new laws can use demographically tuned models to test and revise communications about their intended behaviors for each demographic, crafting language that renders each demographic accepting of the idea, regardless of the idea itself. Oh, Pandora!

smeagull 3y ago

So we get stuck with America's bad set of values, and school shootings and other insanity gets exported? No. The world doesn't want your issues spreading.

yosito 3y ago

As someone who has spent a lot of time in various cultures, it's pretty much impossible to define a universal set of shared values across all cultures. I grew up in subculture that valued intellectual freedom and questioning everything. But we had certain things that we often said were universally wrong (sin) in all cultures, like murder and rape. On the surface this seems true. But then you start asking how something like murder is defined and you realize that cultures do not share specific ideas about this. Some say things like euthanasia and abortion are murder, others say that they're not. Some cultures say all information should be free, other cultures say you should censor information about things like building bombs, or making your own medicine or repairing your own devices. There is no universally agreed on standard that won't offend some culture somewhere.

veidr 3y ago

I think you may be assuming a much larger overlap of shared values than actually exists.

pjc50 3y ago

Does society _have_ shared values that are universally agreed any more? Or, to the extent that it does, do they lead to anything concrete? This is why the culture war has been so successful.

dahart 3y ago
You might be right, but I dislike using the culture wars as evidence of a lack of shared values, and I hope that’s not true. The culture wars are almost completely made of up straw man arguments and gas-lighting about the opponent’s motivations. We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. Everyone wants clean air and water. Everyone wants to be able to make a living. All three of those things are being misrepresented and argued over in the ‘culture wars’ despite the fact that we all share these values. I even might argue the whole reason we fight over them is precisely because they are shared values so it’s relatively easy to create arguments where both sides can be right about some core principles and both sides demonize the other over minutiae, and it stays that way.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. The debate over trans people has surfaced lots of incidents in which people will say, to the world and to the faces of their kids, that they would prefer them to be dead rather than transition. Sometimes they take steps to ensure this themselves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knight-transgender-woman-suicide-saudi-arabia-b2301068.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knigh... > Everyone wants clean air and water. .. for themselves. There's always someone who realises that they can make a billion dollars by pouring carcinogens in the river, so why shouldn't they as long as they stick to bottled water? Everything is simple and happy until we get to having to make a tradeoff.
  - dahart 3y ago
    Thankfully these specific examples are extremely rare and not shared by most of society, so these are not at all evidence of a lack of shared values. These aren’t difficult tradeoffs either, neither one of your examples is even the least bit tempting to the average person. Shared values has never meant that every single person agrees including rich business owners who will hurt people to make money, or parents who would wish their kids dead. The whole reason these shocking and horrific viewpoints get talked about is because they’re so rare and so far away, so extreme, from what most people value. The trans debate is in full swing right now and there will continue to be awful headlines and more straw men and gas lighting for a while, but it’s following in the path of what black people, women, gay people, poor people, and others have all endured, and our shared values (in US centric terms, that all people are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) will hopefully keep us moving in the right direction like it has in the past. Same goes for environmental protection. It’s illegal to dump carcinogens in the river for a reason, and that reason is because we already collectively declared that kind of behavior to be anti-social and unsafe. (And BTW the ruthless billionaire might be amoral, but he’s probably not an idiot, and has a decent idea of where bottled water actually comes from.) The one big danger of the culture wars and the war on science is that this all might be a ruse by some enterprising billionaires to get people to distrust government as being representative of our shared values. The billionaire might get his way and be allowed to pollute the river if he can convince us that we don’t share values with our neighbors. It might work, we might end up convinced we don’t share values with our neighbors, even when we actually do.