Welcome to class An Essay by Bill Tozier vaguery.com I differ from almost all your previous instructors in three ways: First, I acknowledge that this is true, whereas they have for the most part lied to you (and themselves) and declared you competent, even though they’ve had to re-train you from scratch in every damned class. Second, unlike them I intend to do something about it. And, third, in order to do something about it, I will let you—no, make you—cheat. teaching
Lost purposes There’s chocolate at the supermarket, and you can get to the supermarket by driving, and driving requires that you be in the car, which means opening your car door, which needs keys. If you find there’s no chocolate at the supermarket, you won’t stand around opening and slamming your car door because the car door still needs opening. I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves. It’s another matter when incentives must flow through large organizations—or worse, many different organizations and interest groups, some of them governmental. Then you see behaviors that would mark literal insanity, if they were born from a single mind. Someone gets paid every time they open a car door, because that’s what’s measurable; and this person doesn’t care whether the driver ever gets paid for arriving at the supermarket, let alone whether the buyer purchases the chocolate, or whether the eater is happy or starving. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies So many tactics, so well entrenched metricsgoals