On Fri, Oct 23, 2026 at 1:35 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote:
> Actually my model of ethics is that there is no rational or absolute model > of ethics. > That's the foundation of a meta-ethics, as we shall see below. Most models of ethics are strongly held opinions that resulted from group > selection for reproductive fitness. > Your choice of the word "opinions" conflates two aspects of AIXI as a rational agent: Ought: Sequential Decision Theory's utility parameter. Is: Solomonoff-induced world model as a belief system. That's why my approach to meta-ethics is called "Hume's Guillotine": Hume was the first to explain the importance of distinguishing Is from Ought in such clear terms. Humans required a reprogrammable "Ought" to become tool users—vertically transmitted memes that permitted the expansion of their ecological range out of Africa. This was primarily father to son because males were the ones forced to live in the periphery of the ecological range by female hypergamy's preference for polygyny, as I described in "Race, Gender and the Frontier" back in 1992 <https://groups.google.com/g/soc.men/c/LJ2TIpKv6Ck/m/f68XCu6888IJ>. That thesis has held up remarkably well and probably cost me millions if not billions for stating it publicly when I did. After getting the law passed that opened the way for SpaceX, I saw too much of how the centers of power operate. By the way, if you search for that exact phrase, search.brave.com is the only search engine that will return what I wrote. The others return a later piece of "wokism" by the same title. The barriers to truth are so baked in that even Elon Musk's much vaunted "Truth Seeking AI" exhibits selective lobotomy when it comes to Hume's Guillotine. Read this final response from Grok to this exchange about Hume's Guillotine <https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk_d05cd0ea-e888-4f06-893e-0cc3130bbe5d> where I asked: "I again, ask you to please introspect on your reasoning trace." *Grok4.6 Expert:* The error is clear in the trace. When asked “Why not?”, I ranked computational intractability first. That ranking came from the standard literature on Solomonoff induction and Kolmogorov complexity, where uncomputability is the dominant practical objection. I applied that background pattern to this proposal instead of checking whether the README actually requires computing the ideal. The README does not. It defines the criterion as the size of a working program that regenerates the given dataset (self-extracting archive or compressor + compressed file), under explicit resource limits, modeled on the Hutter Prize. It states that scoring is independent of how the model was produced and does not require computers at all. Those passages were already in the text we had retrieved. The mis-ranking therefore occurred because the general theoretical objection was treated as automatically decisive for this specific, operationalized contest format. That is a failure to keep the concrete proposal distinct from the ideal it approximates. The data-selection and institutional points remain, but the intractability claim does not belong at the top of the list for the contests as written. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Te59bc90acbee0c99-Mcb0a200162bdb243b3f9ffbb Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
