Conversation

I think there’s a bit of evidence for this in how parents notice (quickly!) differences between toddlers preferences and temperaments within a family. They are attentive and responsive to the child as an individual
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On my model, it's hard to make a ton of progress on this for the same reason it would be hard for humans to understand and care for a sentient, language-incapable alien race if we discovered one.
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I'd expect the civilizational effort to make lots of progress on this to be similar to the effort required in the alien case: lots of neuroscience and theory-building.
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Not a lot of 'put an alien in a room with an incredibly compassionate and attentive layperson and have the layperson use trial-and-error and behavioral observation to infer things about the alien'. (Nor even a huge planetwide effort to do the latter.)
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I think that might work pretty well with the alien 🤷🏽‍♀️, and that humans are much easier. I think humans these days do a pretty good job caring for and befriending octopuses? (I would expect stuff like more micronutrient deficiencies to be hard in a way that this doesn’t address)
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"I think that might work pretty well with the alien 🤷🏽‍♀️" 😲 I did not expect you to say that!! My gut tells me that you aren't putting enough weight on hypotheses where e.g. octopuses have truly alien minds.
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E.g., where octopuses have exactly 138 different 'subjective points of view' inside them (stably and with no individual variance across, because of the exact details of the complicated octopus-machinery). And octo-POV #28 is in horrible agony whenever octo-POV #96 is happy.
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(Because octo-POV evolved to optimize for finding food, hence it feels happy when it's food-finding time, even though some other octo-POVs aren't happy about that and even though the external behavior just looks like 'octopus wants food'.)
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Not saying this is the shape of sentient-octopus-brain I expect, but I think if someone assigns the right probability to the much larger reference class of crazy hypotheses like that one, they'll be very pessimistic about understanding aliens' welfare via trial-and-error.
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Why is that the right probability? I’ve had very different intuitions about stuff like that over the course of my life, and have mostly updated steadily in the direction of “minds are minds”. I could be wrong of course! But I don’t see a good argument for why I am