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Those "rational methods" are essentially just pascal's wager. You stick some ~infinitely bad outcome (nasal daemons torturing simulations of you and everyone y
by nullc 15d ago
Those "rational methods" are essentially just pascal's wager. You stick some ~infinitely bad outcome (nasal daemons torturing simulations of you and everyone you love for all time) and/or ~infinitely good outcome (perfect paradise for as many sentient minds as could fit in the physical universe), then you can get whatever conclusion you want by multiplying any finite probability by these things, and even give yourself bonus asspats for being conservative by adding several order of magnitude fudge factors against your claims.
The rationalist doom and sex cult uses convoluted mathematics inspired language to justify their faith-- but at the end of the day it's just faith no matter how they dress it up.
- hollerith 15d agoNo, it's not Pascal's wager because Pascal's wager works even when the probabilities are tiny whereas Eliezer's p(doom) is about 99% unless AI "progress" is shut down and kept shut long enough that the current crop of AI researchers is going to have to find something else to do for a career. In other words, it's not Pascal's wager if the very bad outcome is what you naturally expect to happen. And what I just wrote applies to not just Eliezer and his allies: I don't know a single person or a single published argument that has ever used Pascal's-wager-like argumentation to argue that AI "progress" needs to be stopped. Eliezer is the author of a blog post titled "Pascal's mugging", but that blog post and any follow-up discussion are completely silent on the dangers of AI.