Complexity based moral values.

By writing what he did, he was inviting you to consider the idea of a genuinely arbitrary complex concept

If he picked actual complex concept, there'd be autistic happily doing just this and we'd be happy for this autistic that he found something he likes to do, that also engages his brain in precisely the way in which the GCD does not. Or at least, have found it far less objectionable than GCD example.

With very simple kind that I can write easily. Not with human like that takes immense effort. Detecting a car in image isn't as hard as it sounds. Having been shown pictures of cats and dogs or other arbitrary objects, and then telling apart cats and dogs, that's hard. Bonus points for not knowing which is which and finding out that there's two different types of item.

We can have a low-information reference class with instances of high entropy, the "heat soup". But then, picking a reference class is arbitrary (we can contrive a complex class of heat soup flavors).

Well, suppose I were to make just the rough evolution sim, given really powerful computer. Even if it evolves society with principles we can deem moral once in a trillion societies - which is probably way low given that much of our principles are game theoretic - that just adds 40 bits to description for indexing those sims. edit: and the idea of the evolution sim doesn't really have such a huge complexity; any particular evolution sim does, but we don't care which evolution simulator we are working with; we don't need the bits for picking one specific one, just the bits for picking a working one.

Randomness is Chaitin's omega is God implies stochasticity (mixed Strategies) implies winning in the limit due to hypercomputational advantages universally if not necessarily contingently. Hence randomness isn't at odds as such with morality. Maybe Schmidhuber's ideas about super-omegas are relevant. Doubt it.

Do you think simulating those years and extrapolating the derived values from that simulation is clearly easier and simpler than extrapolating the values from e.g. a study of human neural scans/human biochemistry/human psychology?

It's not clear to me how the second is obviously easier. How would you even do that? Are there simple examples of doing this that would help me understand what "extrapolating human values from a study of human neural scans" would entail?

One could e.g. run a sim of bounded intelligence agents competing with each other for resources, then pick the best one, that will implement the tit for tat and more complex solutions that work. It was already the case that for iterated prisoner's dilemma there wasn't some enormous number of amoral solutions, to the much surprise of AI researchers of the time who wasted their efforts trying to make some sort of nasty sneaky Machiavellian AI.

edit: anyhow i digress. The point is that when something is derivable via simple rules (even if impractical), like laws of physics, that should enormously boost the likehood that it is derivable in some more practical way.

Would "yes" be an acceptable answer? It probably is harder to run the simulations, but it's worth a shot at uncovering some simple cases where different starting conditions converge on the same moral/decision making system.

I'm not proposing the AI, I'm noting that the humans seem to use some intuitive notion of complexity to decide what they like. edit: also had the Eliezer ever written a Rubik cube solving AI? Or anything even remotely equal? Easy to pontificate how other people think wrong when you aren't having to solve anything. The way engineers think, it works for making me a car. The way Eliezer thinks, that works for making him an atheist. Big difference. (I am atheist too, so not a religious stab, and I like Eliezer's sequences, it's just that problem solving is something we are barely at all capable of, and adding any extra crap to shoot down the lines of thought which may in fact work does not help you any)

edit: also, the solution: you just do hill climbing with n-move look ahead. As a pre-processing step you may search for sequences that climb the hill out of any condition. It's a very general problem solving method, hill climbing with move look-ahead. If you want the AI to invent hill climbing, well I know of one example, evolution, and this one does increase some kind of complexity on the line that is leading up to mankind, who invents better hill climbing, even though complexity is not the best solution to 'reproducing the most'. If the point is making the AI that comes up with the very goal of solving Rubik's cube, that gets into the AGI land, but using the cube for improving own problem solving skill is the way it is for us. I like to solve cube into some pattern. An alien may not care into what pattern to solve the cube, just as long as he pre-commits on something random, and its reachable.

I agree that some level of ambiguity is unavoidable, especially on initial exchange.
Given iterated exchange, I usually find that ambiguity can be reduced to negligible levels, but sometimes that fails.
I agree that some folks here have the habit you describe, of interpreting other people's comments uncharitably. This is not unique to AI issues; the same occurs from time to time with respect to decision theory, moral philosophy, theology, various other things.
I don't find it as common here as you describe it as being, either with respect to AI risks or anything else.
Perhaps it's more common here than I think but I attend to the exceptions disproportionally; perhaps it's less common here than you think but you attend to it disproportionally; perhaps we actually perceive it as equally common but you choose to describe it as the general case for rhetorical reasons; perhaps your notion of "the interpretation that makes the least amount of sense" is not what I would consider an uncharitable interpretation; perhaps something else is going on.
I agree that fear tends to inhibit reasonable processing.

ambiguity - unavoidable in human language - of anything that is in disagreement with the opinion here, is resolved in favour of interpretation that makes least amount of sense

Ambiguity should be resolved by figuring out the intended meaning, irrespective of the intended meaning's merits, which should be discussed separately from the procedure of ambiguity resolution.

Netting zero average, though i guess pointing that out is not a very good thing for votes.

I don't understand what you are trying to convey.

Not only that, his defense got downvoted by me before the post itself did and with greater influence.

edit: oh wait, you are speaking of shminux . I was thinking of the answer to a question.

I think I'm just going to bail out

Consistent downvotes can be considered a signal sent by the voter consensus that they would prefer that you either bail or change your behavior. Unfortunately the behavior change in question here amounts to adopting a lower status role (ie. more willing to read and understand the words of others, less inclined to insult and dismiss others out of hand, more likely to change your mind about things when things are explained to you). I don't expect or presume that others will willingly adopt a lower status role - even when to do so will increase their status in the medium term. I must accept that they will do what they wish to do and continue to downvote and oppose the behaviors that I would see discouraged.

because on that same post about the Rubik's cube I could of gotten a lot of 'thanks man' replies on e.g. a programming contest forum, or the like, if there was a Rubik's cube talk like this. edit: or wait, it was at -1, then at +2, then at -1

It is quite possible - in fact my model puts it as highly likely - that your current style of social interaction would result in far greater social at other locations. Lesswrong communication norms are rather unique in certain regards.

I hope you don't end up concluding that it's impossible for contrary idea to be taken seriously around here. Just in case, I've collected some of my highly upvoted posts arguing against or questioning Eliezer's ideas:

• Boredom vs. Scope Insensitivity
• Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome
• Shut Up and Divide?
• Some Thoughts on Singularity Strategies
• What's wrong with simplicity of value?

The trouble is not the simplicity (appropriately enough). The trouble is that complexity is not, not even a little bit, a general basis for what humans value.