[FRIAM] Moral collapse and state failure

[Marcus Daniels]

I think the kind of morality I would find useful would look something like Wikipedia contributors.   Working away in obscurity for the greater good...

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From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2021 10:46 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Moral collapse and state failure

Yes, if you squint. The trick is that both opaque and transparent ML algorithms are *engineered*. So, rather than intension/extension, a better frame would be the gen-phen map, forward-inverse map. The opaque boxes are the, probably irreversible, result of a complicated process. I think information is lost in that process. So even if you can somewhat reverse engineer how an opaque algorithm was built, it wouldn't be very accurate.

A better approach would be to interview a bunch of ML people and catalog how *they* would have created such an opaque model. There's probably an analog of that in ethology.


On 8/10/21 10:41 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> I wonder if the interpretable/explainable distinction maps on to the goal/function distinction  which maps on to the phenomenon/epi-phenomenon distinction which maps on the function spandrel distinction which maps on to the intension/extension distinction which .....
> 
> Nick Thompson
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$
> Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2021 1:23 PM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Moral collapse and state failure
> 
> Yeah, it was long. I only got through half of it during my workout this morning.
> 
> I suppose it's right to say that the normative definition of moral 
> would exclude Trump (or people like him). But if we stuck to your idea 
> that a particular morality be *expressible*. (FWIW, I think the extra 
> qualifier "independently of oneself" is redundant, at least a little. 
> Any expression has to be at least somewhat objective ... spoken word 
> causes air vibrations, video recordings of someone talking, written 
> documents, etc.)
> 
> So, there's a hot debate at the moment in machine learning about the different usage patterns for interpretable ML vs explainable ML, whereas "explainable" is weaker in that it doesn't give any direct access to the mechanism, only describes it somewhat ... "simulates" it. Interpretable ML is supposedly a kind of transparency so that you can see inside, have access to the actual mechanism that executes when the algorithm makes a prediction.
> 
> Targeting your idea that a moral code must be expressible, do you mean a perfect, transparent expression of the mechanism a moral actor uses? Or do you mean simulable ... such that we can build relatively high fidelity *models* of the mechanism inside the actor?
> 
> On 8/10/21 10:11 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>> The Envy video looked like a lot of fun, but it was too long for me to sit through it.
>>
>> Regarding morality, my guess is that it's not predictability that leads people to consider someone moral, it's acting according to a framework that can be expressed independently of oneself. Society-wide utilitarianism would be fine; "someone much like Trump [who] says they're an exploitative, gaming, solipsist" and then behaves in a way consistent with that description, would not be considered moral no matter how consistently their behavior simply optimized short-term personal benefits. After all, to take your own Trump example, I doubt that many people would characterize Trump as moral.
> 
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