This insight is kind of an interpretive gloss on the No Free Lunch Theorem. You can't make a model that's really totally a "value-free" improvement over another: more accurate, for *all* possible minds, in *all* possible situations.
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Lots of other ways to frame this, of course; it's a Nietzschean insight, it seems related to some postmodernist insights (though I'm less familiar with those.)
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Of course in practice you are not talking to an arbitrary conceivable mind. You are talking to a human being, in fact a human who has many things in common with yourself, and you can justifiably say "C'mon, we share all the relevant values implicit in the statement I'm making."
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So the interesting question is not "is this or isn't this a value-free discussion" but "ok, so *which* premises implicit in this framing do you not share?" "ok, there are some broad assumptions you might call political that I'm starting with; I'm ok with those; now what?"
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To go back to
@ESYudkowsky's specific comment, for instance, the question "what's more likely, that bad actors take control of an AGI or that it destroys humanity on its own", each of those possible "events" depends on assumptions. We know@glenweyl doubts that AGI is a thing;2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
he may also doubt that "bad actors" are a thing. (Bad relative to *whom*? Can we assume that the two of you can point at the same group of people and call them "bad actors"? People dispute who counts as "a terrorist" depending on their allegiances.)
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I think this is a fair read, and reminds me of how I felt listening to the Sam Harris / Ezra Klein debate - to what extent can we treat and evaluate sentences "context free"
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No, that’s a different thing. I’m not saying “some people decontextualize statements and some don’t.” I’m saying that *all* people use context. (Which is a broader notion than “popular social connotation”.)
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I do think I'm saying the same thing. Everyone uses context, but the debate is *to what extent* can a statement/person saying something/person being in a debate be evaluated context-free.
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I don’t think it’s really even about degree though. The point is that the critics are right, the fact-value distinction isn’t real, and that means in the long run it’s in your best interest to defend your values, not minimize them.
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Close reading isn’t value-free; it implies believing that there’s something good about being able to distinguish two superficially similar but semantically different statements. That’s a claim about what kind of world you think you live in. It’s a decision strategy.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @BenGoldhaber and
But if the fact/value distinction isn't real, doesn't that imply it's a value and I can chose to reject it? Evaluating it as a value, it strikes me as deeply incongruous with my other values, because it's tearing down the foundation of civil society.
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Replying to @the_aiju @s_r_constantin and
If people accept the ideal of value-free statements as something to aspire to, we can build bridges with those that disagree with us, which is an essential feature of a functioning democracy. Otherwise, all you have is tribal warfare.
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