Anthropomorphisation vs value learning: type 1 vs type 2 errors

I agree with the idea that we empathetically simulate people, ("simulation theory") ... and I think we have innate social emotions if and only if we use that module when thinking about someone. So I brought that up here [LW · GW] as a possible path to "finding human goals" in a world-model, and even talked about how dehumanization and anthropomorphization are opposite errors, in agreement with you. :-D

I think "weakening EH" isn't quite the right perspective, or at least not the whole story, at least when it comes to humans. We have metacognitive powers, and there are emotional / affective implications to using EH vs not using EH, and therefore using EH is at least partly a decision rather than a simple pattern-matching process. If you are torturing someone, you'll find that it's painful to use EH, so you quickly learn to stop using it. If you are playing make-believe with a teddy bear, you find that it's pleasurable to use EH on the teddy bear, so you do use it.

So dehumanization is modeling a person without using EH. When you view someone through a dehumanization perspective, you lose your social emotions. It no longer feels viscerally good or bad that they are suffering or happy.

But I do not think that when you're dehumanizing someone, you lose your ability to talk coherently about their motivations. Maybe we're a little handicapped in accurately modeling them, but still basically competent, and can get better with practice. Like, if a prison guard is dehumanizing the criminals, they can still recognize that a criminal is "trying" to escape. 

I guess the core issue is whether motivation is supposed to have a mathematical definition or a normal-human-definition. A normal-human-definition of motivation is perfectly possible without any special modules, just like the definition of every other concept like "doorknob" is possible without special modules. You have a general world-modeling capability that lumps sensory patterns into categories/concepts. Then you're in ten different scenarios where people use the word "doorknob". You look for what those scenarios have in common, and it's that a particular concept was active in your mind, and then you attach that concept to the word "doorknob". Those ten examples were probably all central examples of "doorknob". There are also weird edge cases, where if you ask me "is that a doorknob?" I would say "I don't know, what exactly do you mean by that question?".

We don't need a special module to get an everyday definition of doorknobs, and likewise I don't think we don't need a special module to get an everyday definition of human motivation. We just need to be exposed to ten central examples, and we'll find the concept(s) that are most activated by those examples, and call that concept "motivation". Here's one of the ten examples: "If a person, in a psychologically-normal state of mind, says 'I want to do X', then they are probably motivated to do X."

Of course, just like doorknobs, there are loads of edge cases where if you ask a normal person "what is Alice's motivation here?" they'll say "I don't know, what exactly do you mean by that question?".

A mathematical definition of human motivation would, I imagine, have to be unambiguous and complete, with no edge cases. From a certain perspective, why would you ever think that such a thing even exists? But if we're talking about MDPs and utility functions, or if we're trying to create a specification for an AGI designer to design to, this is a natural thing to hope for and talk about.

I think if you gave an alien the same ten labelled central examples of "human motivation", plus lots of unlabeled information about humans and videos of humans, they could well form a similar concept around it (in the normal-human-definition sense, not the mathematical-definition sense), or at least their concept would overlap ours as long as we stay very far away from the edge cases. That's assuming the aliens' world-modeling apparatus is at least vaguely similar to ours, which I think is plausible, since we live in the same universe. But it is not assuming that the aliens' motivational systems and biases are anything like ours.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding anything :-)

I agree with the simulation aspect, sort of. I don't know if similarity to myself is necessary, though. For instance throughout history people have been able to model and interact with traders from neighbouring or distant civilizations, even though they might think very differently.

I'd say predictability or simulationability is what makes us comfortable with an 'other'. To me the scary aspect about an AI is the possibility that it's behaviour can change radically and unpredictably(it gets an override update, some manchurian candidate type trigger). Humans can also deceive, but usually we are leaky deceivers. True psychopaths trigger a sort of innate, possibly violent, loathing in the people that discover them. AI's, assuming they are easily modified(which is not a guarantee, ML neural nets are hard to modify in a ... surgical manner), would basically be viewed as psychopaths, with the attendant constant stress.

Regarding anthropomorphism: I think the cause of it is that part of our brain is sort of hardcoded to simulate agents. And it seems to be the most computationally powerful part of our brain(or maybe not a part but a network a set of systems whatever). 

The hardest problem facing our minds is the problem of other minds, so when confronted with a truly hard problem we attack it with our most powerful cognitive weapon: the agent simulation mechanisms in our brains. 

As we understand natural processes we no longer need to simulate them as agents and we shift to weaker mental subsystems and start thinking about them mechanically.

Basically, humans behaviour is chaotic and no true rules exist, only heuristics. As we find true mechanistic rules for phenomena we no longer need to simulate them as we would humans(or other agents/hyper-chaotic systems).