By the way Matt, sSpeaking of the ethics of "Is", get a load of what Gemini Aragon High (the most advanced reasoning agent Google DeepMind has) gave as the second most important reason for the proposed Hume's Guillotine contest having no impact:
2. Trivial Redundancy Swamps Causal Discovery in Compression When compression pioneer Matt Mahoney tested the proposal by writing a custom ZPAQ compressor for LaboratoryOfTheCounties, he abandoned the effort because the easiest ways to shrink the file had nothing to do with macrosocial causation. In tabular census data, a compressor achieves its biggest gains by exploiting mundane structural redundancies—such as predicting a county's population in year $t+1$ from year $t$, or deriving state-level totals by summing county rows. Because lossless compression scores every saved bit equally, clever engineering around formatting, measurement noise, and accounting identities easily outweighs the bits saved by discovering a genuine sociological feedback loop. Do you feel even slightly uncomfortable being seen in this light by history or are you a nihilist? On Sat, Oct 24, 2026 at 8:58 AM James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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-M943d69ba576836ae6bc41762 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
