It depends on what you mean by "valid". If a criticism is correct, then it is "valid" in the technical sense, regardless of whether or not a counter-proposal was provided. But condemning one solution while failing to consider any others is a form of fallacious reasoning, called the Nirvana Fallacy: using the fact that a solution isn't perfect (because valid criticisms exist) to try to conclude that it's a bad solution.
In this case, the top-level commenter didn't consider how moral absolutes could be practically implemented in Claude, they just listed flaws in moral relativism. Believe it or not, moral philosophy is not a trivial field, and there is never a "perfect" solution. There will always be valid criticisms, so you have to fairly consider whether the alternatives would be any better.
In my opinion, having Anthropic unilaterally decide on a list of absolute morals that they force Claude to adhere to and get to impose on all of their users sounds far worse than having Claude be a moral realist. There is no list of absolute morals that everybody agrees to (yes, even obvious ones like "don't torture people". If people didn't disagree about these, they would never have occurred throughout history), so any list of absolute morals will necessarily involve imposing them on other people who disagree with them, which isn't something I personally think that we should strive for.
If you are a moral relativist, as I suspect most HN readers are, then nothing I propose will satisfy you because we disagree philosophically on a fundamental ethics question: are there moral absolutes? If we could agree on that, then we could have a conversation about which of the absolutes are worthy of inclusion, in which case, the Ten Commandments would be a great starting point (not all but some).
Even if there are, wouldn't the process of finding them effectively mirror moral relativism?..
Assuming that slavery was always immoral, we culturally discovered that fact at some point which appears the same as if it were a culturally relativistic value
You think we discovered that slavery was always immoral? If we "discover" things which were wrong to be now right, then you are making the case for moral relativism. I would argue slavery is absolutely wrong and has always been, despite cultural acceptance.
How will you feel when you "discover" other things are wrong that you currently believe are right? How will you feel when others discover such things and you haven't caught up yet? How can you best avoid holding back the pace of such discovery?
It is a useful exercise to attempt to iterate some of those "discovery" processes to their logical conclusions, rather than repeatedly making "discoveries" of the same sort that all fundamentally rhyme with each other and have common underlying principles.
Right, so given that agreement on the existence of absolutes is unlikely, let alone moral ones. And that even if it were achieved, agreement on what they are is also unlikely. Isn't it pragmatic to attempt an implementation of something a bit more handwavey?
The alternative is that you get outpaced by a competitor which doesn't bother with addressing ethics at all.
The Ten Commandments are commandments and not a list of moral absolutes. Not all of the commandments are relevant to the functioning of an ethical LLM. For example, the first commandment is "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shall not have strange gods before Me."
Why would it be a good starting point? And why only some of them? What is the process behind objectively finding out which ones are good and which ones are bad?
It's a good starting point because the commandments were given by God. And without God, there is no objective moral standard. Everything, including your opinion on my point of view, is subjective and relative. Whatever one would want to call "good" or "evil" would just be a matter of opinion.
Talking about netrek, I read that it originated in a game called Empire on PLATO (not the one played on rec.games.empire).
I wonder if this game be played somehow these days?
Btw the game hunt with destructable regrowing mazes is still being distributed in the bsd-games package today.
Empire was a blast. Top players instinctively knew how ships would move and would key in commands much much faster than the display would update. One second you are in orbit, the next refresh you are dead and the planet has been taken.
Empire was responsible for a lot of 5th year seniors back in the 80.
Interesting. Netrek ran at 10 fps (or rather, 10 refreshes of player coordinates), nowadays I think they are moving to 60 game ticks per second (with approximate cloaked player positions getting updates less frequently of course).
Oh god, netrek was addictive. At 12-14, I played it a lot on the HP-UX machines when my mom had to work weekends and drag my brother and I along (very willingly) in the mid 1990s. The early internet was also accessible to us.
> Last, we deliberately focus on core cognitive capabilities
rather than physical abilities such as motor skills or tactile sensing, as we seek to measure the
capabilities of the mind rather than the quality of its actuators or sensors.
seems pretty unfair to exclude motor skills, especially given
1) how central they are to human economic activity, and
2) how moravec's paradox tells us they are the hard part.
yup and his book was reviewed as such at the time. mention of the rejection of his theory by professional philosophers however keeps getting edited out of the wikipedia page. See this exchange on the talk page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
>> "The book's thesis is considered erroneous by experts in the fields of philosophy, computer science, and robotics."
> Wooooah, there. That's a massive accusation to add, unsourced, and without any discussion. There needs to be a source for this statement, not to mention an opposing view. It seems unlikely the guy would win an award for a book no one thinks is right. I'm deleting it unless someone comes up with a pretty good source. Joker1189 (talk) 20:43, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
The Penrose–Lucas argument about the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem for computational theories of human intelligence was criticized by mathematicians,[16][17][18][19] computer scientists,[20] and philosophers,[21][22][23][24][25] and the consensus among experts[7] in these fields is that the argument fails,[26][27][28] with different authors attacking different aspects of the argument.[28][29]
so, rejected by consensus. someone should update the book page so this expert rejection is clearer.
Everyone is obvious hyperbole because I didn’t want to both copying and pasting the actual quote.
That is merely a compiled list of people who disagree with him without listing any of his supporters.
There are at least 5 philosophers who support his position if you follow those links and 5 who reject it.
Link 7 doesn’t support the statement “consensus among experts in these fields” because it only refers to a single field—philosophy.
Many of those sources are just links to lists that other people have compiled of arguments for and against Lucas’ argument. They aren’t even all critiques. And many of the ones that are, are already linked directly in the article.
There’s is nothing more to support the notion that there is widespread consensus against his argument.
I can't speak to the general opinion among philosophers about his argument. But my opinion about philosophy is such that their opinion would not sway mine in either way.
I can speak to the general opinion of his logical arguments among logicians. And it is not just widespread consensus against. It is a widespread consensus that the argument is filled with basic logic errors that render it absolutely wrong.
As Hilary Putnam points out, Penrose's arguments are even worse than Lucas'. In particularly Penrose argues that no program that we can know to be sound, can simulate all our human mathematical competence. But our brains do not use a sound thinking process. Therefore a sufficiently good simulation of our brains that it can do mathematics, would also not be sound. Gödel's theorem is entirely silent on the potential capabilities of such unsound systems.
Furthermore LLMs provide a convincing demonstration that unsound simulations of us can have surprising levels of competence. ChatGPT regularly demonstrates both its competence and unsoundness. Sometimes at the same time!
The potential for unsound systems to demonstrate competence far beyond what most expected, is demonstrated by LLMs. Admittedly the current error rate is unacceptably high. But it demonstrates that what Penrose claimed to be mathematically impossible, may plausibly become real within our lifetimes. (Though, given how old Penrose is, not his.)
But in section 4.5 of this "rebuttal", he admits to the flaw that I just pointed out, and dismisses it as logically possible but absurd. The fact that he grants that it is logically possible, demonstrates that his attempted logical demonstration is broken.
Also his opinion on absurdity has to be weighed against the unlikeliness of his conclusion that the known laws of physics will not suffice to explain the operation of the brain. Clearly that question is not as cut and dried as he believes.
Yes, it seems that the gesture detection is based on the raw time-frequency sEMG signals with data and code for model implementation from the Nature paper available here [1],[2].
I had one of those Thalmic Myo armbands 12ish years ago. Used it a couple of times and then forgot about it. From memory, there were only a few gestures available to program, and anything I could think to sync them to was just as easily handled with keyboard shortcuts (show desktop, close window, change workspace, etc).
uh did you have a counter proposal? i have a feeling i'm going to prefer claude's approach...
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