Nonparametric Ethics

Imagine we had a billion data points which were so noisy that they were the equivalent of a thousand pretty clear data points. Then a parametrized model should have about a thousand parameters, and a non-parametric approach should average about a million noisy neighbors. If we have the equivalent of about ten clear data points, we should have a model with ten free parameters or we should average a hundred million noisy neighbors. The parametrized approach then seems to have clear advantages in terms of how much you need to communicate and remember to apply the approach, and in how easy it is for others to verify that you are applying the approach well. Remember that much of human morality is about social norms that we check if others are following, and reward or punish them accordingly. I suspect that these communication advantages are why academics focus on parametrized models. On accuracy, are there good canonical sources showing that non-param tends to beat param holding other things constant? Also, it isn't clear to me that non-param approaches don't have just as much trouble with error-prone application as param approaches.

k-nearest-neighbors seems to be a reasonable method of interpolation, but what about extrapolation? I'm having trouble seeing how nonparametric methods can deal with regions far away from existing data points.

I have a technical question that's orthogonal to the discussion of morality.

You write:

But the nearest-neighbors estimator doesn't assume a particular shape of underlying curve - not even that the curve is a polynomial. Technically, it doesn't even assume continuity. It just says that we think that the true values at nearby positions are likely to be similar.

I've never studied this algorithm before. But the description "true values at nearby positions are likely to be similar" reads to me like an informal description of continuity, except for the word "likely". Except for that word, I could see giving your description word-for-word as a "preview" for students of the more precise epsilon-delta definition of continuity.

If I understand the algorithm correctly, if you thought it likely that the underlying phenomenon had discontinuities, and you didn't want your model to smooth them out, you wouldn't use this algorithm, would you? Taking averages is sure to smooth out discontinuities in the true values, isn't it?

typo fix

society is failing to deal with the error-proneness of its own moral reasoning

I am still not sure that there is such a thing as an "error" in moral reasoning. Suppose I decide that the rule, equality before the law should be replaced with, say, equality before the law, except for blacks. In what sense have I made an error?

It seems to me that there is something fishy going on with both Eliezer's and Robin's uses of moral words in the above debate. Both speak of moral errors, of better approximations to the correct moral rules, etc, whilst I presume both would deny that, in a case of moral disagreement about who has made the "error" and who has got it right, there is any objective truth of the matter.

We can probably get further if we talk about the moral truth according to one particular individual; in this case it is more plausible to argue that when Tim Tyler, aged 14, decided that the one objective moral truth was "don't hurt other people", he was simply wrong, even with respect to his own moral views.

This system seems problematic for base-level (i.e. assessing murder, theft, etc.) morality. This is because of the limitations of "similarity." We would not want a system that treated all murders as essentially the same. We want one that incorporates certain exceptions. Those exceptions may be "he was trying to kill me, so it was OK that I murder him" or "she did not prove to be a virgin on her wedding night, so I rounded up her brothers and we stoned her to death." It seems like you need a reasonably well-defined parametric morality before you are capable of saying which situations are "similar" and which are "different," since we don't think "She lied about being a virgin" is sufficiently different from the null to merit separate treatment, where "He was trying to kill me" does merit separate treatment.

Though trying to condense morality into singular propositions seems ineffectual. Morality seems to serve many functions, and it deals with vastly different events and behaviours, so assuming a single maxim can properly capture all of morality, or even much of it, seems wrong, or at least unreasonably error-prone.

RH's "People should get what they want..." is the perfect example of this. It's really incredibly weak (in a technical sense), as it says nothing about cases where people do object in any way, and it doesn't even say something about all cases where they don't object ("usually"). It would be much better described as "value demonstrating libertarian belief system" than "universal moral code." It seems like it is a principle at the core of a libertarian ethics system and not present in almost any other ethical system, but it is totally ineffectual at condensing morality, given its tremendously limited scope.

It seems more useful to defer the problem of "what is right" temporarily and pursue instead the related problem: "what do people think is right?". This latter question can be approached from the perspective of traditional science. One develops a descriptive moral theory that makes a prediction (e.g. "most people will judge the actions of a man who steals to feed his family to be morally acceptable"), and then you test the prediction by giving out a lot of surveys. The theories developed in this way will of course be subject to Occam's Razor, but if a lot of data were obtained, one could justify the construction of complex models.

If a good descriptive moral theory could be found, it would be widely useful. One could then state a strong normative principle: act in such a way that the theory judges to be acceptable. This solution is not perfect, but if we hold out for perfection we will be waiting a long time.

"Robin Hanson, in his essay on "Minimal Morality", suggests that the unreliability of our moral reasoning should lead us to seek simple moral principles"

I very much agree with this. Most specific moral rules people make, are in fact nothing more than frequently accurate pre-made decisions as to what would be good in a given situation. But asking why a given rule is good rather than bad, will often help someone figure out their actual moral code, the one they would have to use in novel situations. Specific moral rules also have the functions of providing guidance to those who can't properly use their generalized moral rule, either due to not understanding consequences or a tendency to game rules that aren't specific enough, and also give pause to people who are faced with a difficult moral decision, such as whether it is good to murder a very evil person.

Morality does not, and should not, match legality. This is because legality has as a pre-requisite the ability to be enforced, whereas morality must be able to guide someone even when there is no outside enforcement. Ambiguities in laws cause a reduction in their usefulness, as the threat of force is reduced by ambiguity, ambiguity can increase inaction due to fear of mis-guided interpretation, and ambiguity will allow biases of judge and jury to taint judgement. Thus we have and need many specific legal rules, whereas "Do to others as you would have them do to you" is enough to build a complete moral system.

I wonder if you could comment on the desirability, from the perspective of Friendly AI, of trying to figure out the "human utility function" directly.

As I understand it, the current default strategy for Friendliness is to point the seed AI at an instance of humanity and say, turn yourself into an ideal moral agent, as defined by the implicit morality of that entity over there. This requires a method of determining the decision procedure of the entity in question (including some way of neglecting inessentials), extrapolating a species-relative ideal morality from the utility-function-analogue thereby deduced (this is to be the role of "reflective decision theory"), and also some notion of interim Friendliness which ensures (e.g.) that bad things aren't done to the human species by the developing AI while it's still figuring out true Friendliness. If all this can be coupled to a working process of raw cognitive self-enhancement in the developing AI, then success, the first superhuman intelligence will be a Friendly one.

This is a logical strategy and it really does define a research program that might issue in success. However, computational and cognitive neuroscientists are already working to characterize the human brain as a decision system. In an alternative scenario, it would not be necessary to delegate the process of analyzing human decision procedures to the seed AI, because it would already have been worked out by humans. It could serve as an epistemic check for the AI - give it some of the data and see if it reaches the same conclusions - just as basic physics offers a way to test an AI's ability to construct theories. But we don't need an AI to figure out, say, QED for us - we already did that ourselves. The same thing may happen with respect to the study of human morality.

I am trying to contextualize this discussion, given that my background in rhetoric and ethos is far removed from the background of the author.

So, I'm going to ask this simply (pun intended) to hopefully generate some useful complexity.

Is the goal of this analysis to systematize the implementation of pre-established ethical guidelines, or, as implied by Soulless Automaton's comment, to derive the ethical guidelines themselves?

Also, does this assume that ethics are derived from observing behavior and then selecting the best behavior given observed results? (If so, I would have to suggest most ethical choices are trained into people before they have enough experience to act outside of the ethical systems developed through our history. In effect, is this discussion assuming a tabula rosa that doesn't exist?)

"Nonparametric" methods focus on the observations too much. It's better to change representation from raw data to something else. The specific stressed in nonparametric methods is that there is lots of data, and it's possible to easily run requests on that data. At the same time, representation with too few parameters can present the results directly, but fails to be useful for different kinds of requests. The right balance is somewhere in between, with lots of data allowing to run custom requests, but only data that is expected to pay its rent. Parametric approach, but with many parameters.

As I recall, I tried to compress my morality down to One Great Moral Principle when I was 14 years old. My attempt was: "Don't hurt other people". Not too bad for four words.