"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #6: Seeking Sense

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Day 6, so we're at Mark Xu's Training Regime Day 6: Seeking Sense.  This one is really hard. Xu presents it as having two components: the first "is partially captured by words like "empathy" or "compassion"....[having to treat] other people like human beings instead of just action/reaction APIs."

Starting from that, we're supposed to develop "the rationality version of having social skills.... to observe people's actions and infer things about their values, how they think, what they know about the world, etc."

To me, this seems enormously important. We need to be able to infer things about people's values; that is precisely the problem to be solved by the Stuart Russell approach to AI alignment, in which (in my misinterpretation thereof) the AI is not given a goal of its own but rather an ability to infer what the boss wants, and to update those inferences as time goes on. This happens to be the first approach to AI alignment (other than my own which doesn't go here) which I take seriously, but it does require a rational approach to seeking sense. So I think about it.... 

Well, I've already linked to my post about more or less totally lacking social skills, despite having tried for more than six decades to develop them. So I've spent much of today thinking about that. I do make up story/models for people I meet, and these of course incorporate guesses "about their values, how they think, what they know about the world, etc." But my confidence in these guesses is extremely low; this is a talent which I seem to lack. It's true that Heinrich Schliemann, the guy who excavated Troy (with dynamite) did say "Talent means energy and persistence and nothing more!", and it so happens that today is his birthday, but somehow I'm not convinced.  When I encounter someone I don't understand at all, I know he has a model of the world, he has human emotions, it all makes sense to him somehow. And according to the Roman playwright Terence, it all should make sense to me, too, because nothing human is alien to me. But actually everything human is at least somewhat alien to me, because as Khalil Gibran put it,

“I am a stranger to myself, and when I hear my tongue speak, my ears wonder over my voice; I see my inner self smiling, crying, braving, and fearing; and my existence wonders over my substance while my soul interrogates my heart; but I remain unknown, engulfed by tremendous silence.” 

It's his birthday too, and his attitude, if I dare say it, makes more sense to me. I don't believe that I have any special insight into my own mental processing, except that I've spent a lot of time developing models for it. So.... I dunno. This really bugs me, and I've made very little progress today. Oh well... on to tomorrow, and happy birthday to Schliemann and Gibran.