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Seems accurate to me. This has been an exercise in the initial step(s) of CCC, which indeed consist of "the phenomenon looks this way to me. It also looks that way to others? Cool. What are we all cottoning on to?"
david-lorell on [deleted]Wait. I thought that was crossing the is-ought gap. As I think of it, the is ought gap refers to the apparent type-clash and unclear evidential entanglement between facts-about-the-world and values-an-agent-assigns-to-facts-about-the-world. And also as I think of it, "should be" always is short hand for "should be according to me" though possibly means some kind of aggregated thing but also ground out in subjective shoulds.
So "how the external world is" does not tell us "how the external world should be" .... except in so far as the external world has become causally/logically entangled with a particular agent's 'true values'. (Punting on what are an agent's "true values" are as opposed to the much easier "motivating values" or possibly "estimated true values." But for the purposes of this comment, its sufficient to assume that they are dependent on some readable property (or logical consequence of readable properties) of the agent itself.)
We have at least one jury rigged idea! Conceptually. Kind of.
david-lorell on [deleted]Yeeeahhh.... But maybe it's just awkwardly worded rather than being deeply confused. Like: "The learned algorithms which an adaptive system implements may not necessarily accept, output, or even internally use data(structures) which have any relationship at all to some external environment." "Also what the hell is 'reference'."
johnswentworth on [deleted]We Humans Learn About Our Values
I'd kinda like to wrap this whole section in a thought-bubble, or quote block, or color, or something, to indicate that the entire section is "what it looks like from inside a human's mind". So e.g. from inside my mind, it looks like we humans learn about our values. And then outside that bubble, we can ask "are there any actual 'values' which we're in fact learning about"?
david-lorell on [deleted]Seconded. I have extensional ideas about "symbolic representations" and how they differ from.... non-representations.... but I would not trust this understanding with much weight.
david-lorell on [deleted]Seconded. Comments above.
david-lorell on [deleted]Indeed, our beliefs-about-values can be integrated into the same system as all our other beliefs, allowing for e.g. ordinary factual evidence to become relevant to beliefs about values in some cases.
Super unclear to the uninitiated what this means. (And therefore threateningly confusing to our future selves.)
Maybe: "Indeed, we can plug 'value' variables into our epistemic models (like, for instance, our models of what brings about reward signals) and update them as a result of non-value-laden facts about the world."
But clearly the reward signal is not itself our values.
Ahhhh
Maybe: "But presumably the reward signal does not plug directly into the action-decision system."?
Or: "But intuitively we do not value reward for its own sake."?
in a hand-wavy reinforcement-learning-esque sense
language