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Intelligence, whether you use it as a fuzzy concept or a narrow one, assumes a goal. It's impossible to say if an actor acts intelligently, without assuming wha

Intelligence, whether you use it as a fuzzy concept or a narrow one, assumes a goal. It's impossible to say if an actor acts intelligently, without assuming what it's trying to achieve. It's peak this guy, and peak "rationalists" in general, to defend the concept of "objective" intelligence, intelligence towards unspecified goals. This is what they actually care about: that there's an objective scale of intelligence, and that they're above most people on it. Everything else they believe is tangential. They choose other beliefs according to how they can strengthen the core belief, that they are the intelligent ones. (And you bet they downvote people challenging it). What goals their intelligence are directed at, they're evasive and inconsistent about, and that others might have different goals is certainly not a permissible option. In THAT area, they are platonists, no matter how fuzzy their forms are: playing the flute is the task of a professional flautist, and steering the ship of humanity is a task for professional captain smart. Where the ship should be heading is not a subject of debate.

drdeca 3y ago
If a process has in it a place where a representation of a goal is stored, and for a wide range of goals, if represented in this format, if stored in this location, the process would tend to effectively achieve the goal, then it seems like the “what the goal is” (within the aforementioned wide (but not necessarily universal) range of goals) and the “capability of achieving goals” (within that range of goals) would be things that could be factored out as separate properties. Do you think that that condition doesn’t occur? Or, do you think that the “the range of goals for which this works” being limited, makes the “how capable is this process at achieving goals” concept illegitimate, no matter how broad the limited range is? Also, the reason you are getting downvoted is presumably in part because you talked about being downvoted. Your accusations are false and uninteresting, so I’m only addressing the object-level topics I can extract from your comment.
- vintermann 3y ago
  But definitively not universal. You can't pursue all goals equally well, unless you don't pursue goals at all. So when you start talking about "goal representations", you implicitly talk about a set of possible sub-goals - the set you would like to be able to represent, and the process by which you plan to pick them, implicitly defines the actual goal. You're not interesting either, "rationalist", and I think you believe a lot of false things too. But unfortunately people who should know better listen to you.
  - drdeca 3y ago
    I said the accusations weren't interesting, not that you weren't interesting. I'm sure you have plenty of interesting things to say on other topics, and the other parts of what you are saying on this topic are (clearly) interesting enough to engage with. I'm just not interested in mud-slinging. I'm not entirely sure what it would mean to say that something is equally competent at pursuing any possible goal, but it does seem very likely to me that, whatever it might mean, things can't be equally competent at all possible goals (for reasons of description length, if nothing else). Ah, hm, it seems you are phrasing things in terms of simultaneously pursuing all possible goals? I think that's a rather different thing than what I'm describing. Do you agree? Something can be highly capable with regards to each of two goals which are each-other's opposite (while perhaps not in fact pursuing either), but it certainly can't be simultaneously be effective in pursuing two goals that are in direct opposition. [emphasis] None of these things are obstacles to it being possible to say of two mechanisms W and Z, that for every goal, that if W has any competency towards achieving that goal at all, then Z is at least as competent towards achieving that goal. [/emphasis] (where what it means for W or Z to have competency towards a goal, is that, the goal can be encoded in whatever goal-representation system the mechanism uses, and if that representation were to be what is stored in the part of the mechanism that determines what goal is pursued, then the mechanism would be effective at achieving that goal. Though I suppose in some cases it might be unclear whether two representations in different systems are representing "the same goal"?) You say that talking about "goal representations" implicitly talks about a set of possible sub-goals. I guess you mean, like, goals that would be used to achieve some larger fixed goal? I'm not convinced that has to be true. It could be that the end-goal is exactly the one which is represented. Additionally, I don't see a reason why there can't be any languages capable of representing arbitrary goals. At the least, it seems pretty clear to me that there is a language capable of describing any particular goal you could communicate to me, and so any refutation that you might provide me, of the claim that there are such universal goal description languages, would have to be non-constructive, and this makes me doubt the relevance of any such counterexamples.
    - vintermann 3y ago
      You need to be really careful about not assuming what you're trying to show when talking about teleology. I know teleology is something like a swear word in old new-atheist circles, but when we're talking about goals, it's teleology as literally as it gets. You brought up goal representations. Can you explain what a representation is, without sneaking in the notion of "meaning", and thus the notion of "goal"? I certainly can't!

drdeca 3y ago

If a process has in it a place where a representation of a goal is stored, and for a wide range of goals, if represented in this format, if stored in this location, the process would tend to effectively achieve the goal, then it seems like the “what the goal is” (within the aforementioned wide (but not necessarily universal) range of goals) and the “capability of achieving goals” (within that range of goals) would be things that could be factored out as separate properties. Do you think that that condition doesn’t occur? Or, do you think that the “the range of goals for which this works” being limited, makes the “how capable is this process at achieving goals” concept illegitimate, no matter how broad the limited range is? Also, the reason you are getting downvoted is presumably in part because you talked about being downvoted. Your accusations are false and uninteresting, so I’m only addressing the object-level topics I can extract from your comment.

vintermann 3y ago
But definitively not universal. You can't pursue all goals equally well, unless you don't pursue goals at all. So when you start talking about "goal representations", you implicitly talk about a set of possible sub-goals - the set you would like to be able to represent, and the process by which you plan to pick them, implicitly defines the actual goal. You're not interesting either, "rationalist", and I think you believe a lot of false things too. But unfortunately people who should know better listen to you.
- drdeca 3y ago
  I said the accusations weren't interesting, not that you weren't interesting. I'm sure you have plenty of interesting things to say on other topics, and the other parts of what you are saying on this topic are (clearly) interesting enough to engage with. I'm just not interested in mud-slinging. I'm not entirely sure what it would mean to say that something is equally competent at pursuing any possible goal, but it does seem very likely to me that, whatever it might mean, things can't be equally competent at all possible goals (for reasons of description length, if nothing else). Ah, hm, it seems you are phrasing things in terms of simultaneously pursuing all possible goals? I think that's a rather different thing than what I'm describing. Do you agree? Something can be highly capable with regards to each of two goals which are each-other's opposite (while perhaps not in fact pursuing either), but it certainly can't be simultaneously be effective in pursuing two goals that are in direct opposition. [emphasis] None of these things are obstacles to it being possible to say of two mechanisms W and Z, that for every goal, that if W has any competency towards achieving that goal at all, then Z is at least as competent towards achieving that goal. [/emphasis] (where what it means for W or Z to have competency towards a goal, is that, the goal can be encoded in whatever goal-representation system the mechanism uses, and if that representation were to be what is stored in the part of the mechanism that determines what goal is pursued, then the mechanism would be effective at achieving that goal. Though I suppose in some cases it might be unclear whether two representations in different systems are representing "the same goal"?) You say that talking about "goal representations" implicitly talks about a set of possible sub-goals. I guess you mean, like, goals that would be used to achieve some larger fixed goal? I'm not convinced that has to be true. It could be that the end-goal is exactly the one which is represented. Additionally, I don't see a reason why there can't be any languages capable of representing arbitrary goals. At the least, it seems pretty clear to me that there is a language capable of describing any particular goal you could communicate to me, and so any refutation that you might provide me, of the claim that there are such universal goal description languages, would have to be non-constructive, and this makes me doubt the relevance of any such counterexamples.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    You need to be really careful about not assuming what you're trying to show when talking about teleology. I know teleology is something like a swear word in old new-atheist circles, but when we're talking about goals, it's teleology as literally as it gets. You brought up goal representations. Can you explain what a representation is, without sneaking in the notion of "meaning", and thus the notion of "goal"? I certainly can't!