Yeah, I think it’s a severe problem that if you are good at decision theory you can in fact validly grab big old chunks of deontology directly out of consequentialism including lots of the cautionary parts, or to put it perhaps a bit more sharply, a coherent superintelligence with a nice utility function does not in fact need deontology; and if you tell that to a certain kind of person they will in fact decide that they’d be cooler if they were superintelligences so they must be really skillful at deriving deontology from decision theory and therefore they can discard the deontology and just do what the decision theory does. I’m not sure how to handle this; I think that the concept of “cognitohazard” gets vastly overplayed around here, but there’s still true facts that cause a certain kind of person to predictably get their brain stuck on them, and this could plausibly be one of them. It’s also too important of a fact (eg to alignment) for “keep it completely secret” to be a plausible option either.
Yeah, I think it’s a severe problem that if you are good at decision theory you can in fact validly grab big old chunks of deontology directly out of consequentialism including lots of the cautionary parts, or to put it perhaps a bit more sharply, a coherent superintelligence with a nice utility function does not in fact need deontology; and if you tell that to a certain kind of person they will in fact decide that they’d be cooler if they were superintelligences so they must be really skillful at deriving deontology from decision theory and therefore they can discard the deontology and just do what the decision theory does. I’m not sure how to handle this; I think that the concept of “cognitohazard” gets vastly overplayed around here, but there’s still true facts that cause a certain kind of person to predictably get their brain stuck on them, and this could plausibly be one of them. It’s also too important of a fact (eg to alignment) for “keep it completely secret” to be a plausible option either.