OK. Sorry for the gap/delay between parts. I've been doing a substantial rewrite of this section . . . .
Part 4. Despite all of the debate about how to *cause* Friendly behavior, there's actually very little debate about what Friendly behavior looks like. Human beings actually have had the concept of Friendly behavior for quite some time. It's called ethics. We've also been grappling with the problem of how to *cause* Friendly/ethical behavior for an equally long time under the guise of making humans act ethically . . . . One of the really cool things that I enjoy about the Attractor Theory of Friendliness is that it has *a lot* of explanatory power for human behavior (see the next Interlude) as well as providing a path for moving humanity to Friendliness (and we all do want all *other* humans, except for ourselves, to be Friendly -- don't we? :-) My personal problem with, say, Jef Albright's treatises on ethics is that he explicitly dismisses self-interest. I believe that his view of ethical behavior is generally more correct than that of the vast majority of people -- but his justification for ethical behavior is merely because such behavior is ethical or "right". I don't find that tremendously compelling. Now -- my personal self-interest . . . . THAT I can get behind. Which is the beauty of the Attractor Theory of Friendliness. If Friendliness is in my own self-interest, then I'm darn well going to get Friendly and stay that way. So, the constant question for humans is "Is ethical behavior on my part in the current circumstances in *my* best interest?" So let's investigate that question some . . . . It is to the advantage of Society (i.e. the collection of everyone else) to *make* me be Friendly/ethical and Society is pretty darn effective at it -- to the extent that there are only two cases/circumstances where unethical/UnFriendly behavior is still in my best interest: a.. where society doesn't catch me being unethical/unFriendly OR b.. where society's sanctions don't/can't successfully outweigh my self-interest in a particular action. <Note that Vladimir's "crush all opposition" falls under the second case since there are effectively no sanctions when society is destroyed> But why is Society (or any society) the way that it is and how did/does it come up with the particular ethics that it did/does? Let's define a society as a set of people with common goals that we will call that society's goals. And let's start out with a society with a trial goal of "Promote John's goals". Now, John could certainly get behind that but everyone else would probably drop out as soon as they realized that they were required to grant John's every whim -- even at the expense of their deepest desires -- and the society would rapidly end up with exactly one person -- John. The societal goal of "Don't get in the way of John's goals" is somewhat easier for other people and might not drive *everyone* away -- but I'm sure that any intelligent person would still defect towards a society that most accurately represented *their* goals. Eventually, you're going to get down to "Don't mess with anyone's goals", be forced to add the clause "unless absolutely necessary", and then have to fight over what "when absolutely necessary" means. But what we've got here is what I would call the goal of a Friendly society -- "Don't mess with anyone's goals unless absolutely necessary" and I would call this a huge amount of progress. If we (as individuals) could recruit everybody *ELSE* to this society (without joining ourselves), the world would clearly be a much, much better place for us. It is obviously in our enlightened self-interest to do this. *BUT* (and this is a huge one), the obvious behavior of this society would be to convert anybody that it can and kick the ass of anyone not in the society (but only to the extent to which they mess with the goals of the society since doing more would violate the society's own goal of not messing with anyone's goals). So, the question is -- "Is joining such a society in our self-interest?" To the members of any society, our not joining clearly is a result of our believing that our goals are more important than that society's goals. In the case of the Friendly society, it is a clear signal of hostility since they are willing to not interfere with our goals as long as we don't interfere with theirs -- and we are not willing to sign up to that (i.e. we're clearly signaling our intention to mess with them). The success of the "optimistic tit-for-tat" algorithm shows that the best strategy for deterrence of an undesired behavior is directly proportional to the undesired behavior. Thus, any entity who knows about Friendliness and does not become Friendly should *expect* that the next Friendly entity to come along that is bigger than it *WILL* kick it's ass in direct proportion to it's unFriendliness to maintain the effectiveness of deterrence. <Does that meet everyone's expectations for a good reason why it is in an Unfriendly's own self-interest to convert even if it is currently the most powerful kid on the block? If you're gambling on *always* being the biggest when the downside to converting is relatively minimal, you are clearly not that intelligent.> Pretending to be Friendly (i.e. claiming Friendliness but constantly developing scenarios, calculating the odds, and attempting to "slide one past society") is also a bad idea because a truly effective Friendly society will make sure that the expected utility of any given transgression is negative by ratcheting up the sanction to the necessary level to do so (to compensate for the fact that the expense of doing so is a drain on both society and the entity itself). Human society is currently not that effective -- to the extent that it frequently *appears* (if not actually *IS*) more worthwhile to occasionally defect (especially since human society doesn't have it's goals clearly defined enough) . . . . but I believe that we ARE trending in the correct direction (and hopefully the Attractor Theory will help get us there). TAKE-AWAY: You want to be a Friendly member in a Friendly Society because doing so is to your advantage and not doing so has a reasonable probability of getting your butt kicked. Part 5 will include, as promised, either "The nature of evil" or "The good, the bad, and the evil" -- after an interlude that really changed my mind about a number of things. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=95818715-a78a9b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
