Jemist's Shortform

There's a court at my university accommodation that people who aren't Fellows of the college aren't allowed on, it's a pretty medium-sized square of mown grass. One of my friends said she was "morally opposed" to this (on biodiversity grounds, if the space wasn't being used for people it should be used for nature).

And I couldn't help but think, how tiring it would be to have a moral-feeling-detector this strong. How could one possibly cope with hearing about burglaries, or North Korea, or astronomical waste.

I've been aware of scope insensitivity for a long time now but, this just really put things in perspective in a visceral way for me.

Seems like there's a potential solution to ELK-like problems. If you can force the information to move from the AI's ontology to (it's model of) a human's ontology and then force it to move it back again.

This gets around "basic" deception since we can always compare the AI's ontology before and after the translation.

The question is how do we force the knowledge to go through the (modeled) human's ontology, and how do we know the forward and backward translators aren't behaving badly in some way.

Getting rid of guilt and shame as motivators of people is definitely admirable, but still leaves a moral/social question. Goodness or Badness of a person isn't just an internal concept for people to judge themselves by, it's also a handle for social reward or punishment to be doled out. 

I wouldn't want to be friends with Saddam Hussein, or even a deadbeat parent who neglects the things they "should" do for their family. This also seems to be true regardless of whether my social punishment or reward has the ability to change these people's behaviour. But what about being friends with someone who has a billion dollars but refuses to give any of that to charity? What if they only have a million dollars? What if they have a reasonably comfortable life but not much spare income?

Clearly the current levels of social reward/punishment are off (billionaire philanthropy etc.) so there seems an obvious direction to push social norms in if possible. But this leaves the question of where the norms should end up.

The UK has just switched their available rapid Covid tests from a moderately unpleasant one to an almost unbearable one. Lots of places require them for entry. I think the cost/benefit makes sense even with the new kind, but I'm becoming concerned we'll eventually reach the "imagine a society where everyone hits themselves on the head every day with a baseball bat" situation if cases approach zero.

Just realized I'm probably feeling much worse than I ought to on days when I fast because I've not been taking sodium. I really should have checked this sooner. If you're planning to do long (I do a day, which definitely feels long) fasts, take sodium!