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Hi. This is Eliezer Yudkowsky. I work at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute on reflective decision theory for eventually building stable self-modifyi
by Eliezer 13y ago
Hi. This is Eliezer Yudkowsky. I work at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute on reflective decision theory for eventually building stable self-modifying AIs. I do this because I think it's literally the most important problem in the world. I do not have issues with a dead-end job or think that I haven't found anything worthy of leaving it.
I wish entrepreneurs would stop working on First World Problems. I think a planet that raises its best and brightest to dream of building the next Instagram is on its way to doom.
Thereby your psychological hypothesis is shown, by this clear counterexample, to be factually false as a generalization about a necessary cause of worrying about "First World Solutions"; or to put it another way, someone already working on an important problem would arrive at the same worry for much the same reason that others say they are worried.
With that out of the way, I remark that it furthermore constitutes a fallacy of ad hominem / poisoning the well.
- angersock 13y agoWhat's reflective decision theory, and why should I fund it? :)
- revorad 13y agoHi Eliezer, what are your thoughts on people not as smart as you, working on lesser problems with the aim of donating heaps of money to fund your work?
- saucetenuto 13y agoThat's a pretty unfair standard; no psychological statement is true of literally all humanity, and only someone very naive would try to generalize that broadly. I don't know the author at all, but I'm willing to give them that much credit. Let me try to reframe his point in a way you might find more palatable. When you feel anger, it's an opportunity to learn something about yourself--an opportunity that most people ignore. You'll always feel like you have a good immediate reason to be angry because that's how emotion works, but those explanations are often retroactive and superficial; they don't point toward a change in the world that would make your anger go away. Projection one such failure mode, and a very common; so common, in fact, that many people would do well to check themselves for it every single time they feel anger. The author illustrates his point with a concrete example. Perhaps none of this is useful to you personally. That's fine. But you aren't representative.
- Eliezer 13y agoOne counterexample can't outweigh a lot of positive examples, but we don't have verified positive examples of people making the reasoning error the OP claims - we don't have verified positive examples of people secretly thinking what OP claims they were secretly thinking. It seems to me that I went through the same thought processes that other people worried about FWS say they underwent, while being in an utterly different context from what OP is claiming to produce motivated cognition. That makes me extremely skeptical that OP is correct in trying to thus undermine the thought processes producing worry about FWS. In this case it's not clear that OP is successfully generalizing over any of humanity.