Are you saying, to use an analogy, that this is the equivalent of a Pong AI directly increasing its score by modifying its value in RAM, without going through the song and dance of controlling the paddle and beating its opponent?
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Replying to @AbstractMonkey9
This is just the first step. Eventually you eradicate the relevance of the score itself.
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Replying to @Plinz
That seems like a leap to me - I don't see how that would be the natural progression of an intelligent entity.
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Replying to @AbstractMonkey9 @Plinz
In other words, there are high IQ, nihilistic misanthropes who are still fulfilling their evolutionary reward functions...e.g. Sam Harris. Are the childless monks smarter than him?
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Replying to @AbstractMonkey9
What? Sam Harris is a totally regular guy, and he is not nihilist or misanthropic in the least.
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Replying to @Plinz
I wrote a rebuttal, but it isn't relevant to the main discussion. Your post provoked a lot of thought in me this afternoon, and I really appreciate it. I'm just trying to work out questions I still have, like if the monks are truly smarter than us, the relationship to IQ, etc.
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Replying to @AbstractMonkey9
The monks are not smarter in the sense that they have higher IQ. They just recognized the relevance of dealing with their reward system (all your happiness depends on how well you serve your needs, after all), and may then spend decades of focused attention on hacking it.
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Replying to @Plinz
Theirs is a dead end though (and I understand that this is your central point), as hacking your reward function is usually going to be detrimental (from an evolutionary perspective). At the very least, it flies in the face of all the evolution that created you.
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Replying to @AbstractMonkey9
Which is the whole point. Evolution is a fascist slaughterhouse; the purpose of life is to eat, i.e. to scrape negentropy from the universe until it sucked its puddle dry and the tides of entropy suffocate it. Humans are a glorified kind of yeast.
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Replying to @Plinz
BTW, having said that, do you consider yourself nihilistic?
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Me? No, I am just sometimes depressed, but that is quite unrelated to my theoretical understanding of reward and cognition. (Nihilism is an unrequited need for meaning.)
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