Posts
Comments
Any chance that Anthropic might expand the team to remote international collaboration in the future? I would apply but I am from Ukraine. Many great software companies successfully switched to remote work and covid crysis boosted this practice a lot. So just wondering.
Yeah, I think for general activities we can make a list of things that have a positive utilities for most cases. For example:
- Always care about your health and life. It is a base of everything. You can't do much if you are sick or dead.
- Don't do anything illegal. You can't do much if you are in prison.
- Keep good relationships with everybody if that does not take much effort. Social status and connections are useful for almost anything.
- Money and time is a universal currency. Try to maximize your hourly income, but leave enough space for other things from the list.
- Keep your mind in a good shape. Mind degradation can be very fast if you don't care. And you need it for rationality.
- Spend some time for research of the M problem. Not too much because you will lose other items from list, but enough to make progress otherwise you will spend all your life in this goal-less loop and end regretting that you never spent enough effort to break out.
etc. I think this can be a very wide list.
Well, we definitely need a good definition of Morality then. And what is moral and non moral preferences. Looks like it converges to a discussion about terminology. Trying to understand what do you have in mind I can assume that an example of non moral preferences can be something like basic human needs. But when you choose to have this as a base doesn't that become your moral principles?
But here is a problem: how would you calculate your utility if you have no moral system? You need at least more moral axioms.
If you know believe that nothing is right do the following:
- Remember that nothing is 100% true so there is a chance that this is a false assumption.
- Take all candidates for Morality that future you might follow.
- Make a weighted sum of normalized utility functions of every M. Take a somehow calculated (need to think how) probability of you choosing a specific M as a weight.
- Normalize.
- Zero utility function of nothing-is-rightness will not participate as you can't normalize constant zero.
- You have an utility function now. Go and work.
Basically,
Rationality is a servant of Morality. There is no utility function separate from M.
M is like a subset of axioms driving your R. Thus, you cannot prove that nothing is right. But you cannot prove the opposite as well. Just because it is nonsense. You need an origin for your logical chain.
And that origin is our desires. Always. And desires depend on chemical reactions in your brain. We don't even need to imagine all these things. Clinical depression will do the work.
It is when you feel nothing-is-rightness, there is nothing you want, even wake up from the bed. But the utility function says "go and do the best until your M is not so destructive". And it works.