AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
. Everything about this essay seemed naive and wrong-headed, as if the author was a stranger to how actual humans operate.
Yudkowsky's underlying epistemology is representational objectivism – There are some objective facts in the world; the job of the brain is to represent them with maximal accuracy and the job of communication is to transmit them honestly.
To say this is wrong is kind of an understatement; it strikes me as aggressively wrong, deliberately retro, an attempt to stick one's head in the sand to evade the postmodern condition. And it's foundational to Rationalism.
One observation: Robin Hanson is one of the founding intellects behind LessWrong and a frequent collaborator with Rationalist types, and he's cited several times here. But, he also wrote a book (with Kevin Simler) about how we are constantly lying to ourselves about our motivations.
This is not an inconsistency, since these are works by different people and one is descriptive while the other is prescriptive. Still it seems strikingly like pulling in two incompatible directions. If we comprehensively lie to ourselves, an effort to be absolutely honest with others isn't likely to get very far.
I have some quarrels with Simler and Hanson, but their approach seems better, more generative, more capable of capturing the actual dynamics of human communication. Yudkowsky's approach seems more like wishing it away.
It's also weird that the essay doesn't even mention Kant's categorical imperative even though it uses exact duplicate thought experiments (if you always must tell the truth what do you do when the Nazis come to your door and ask where the Jews are hiding). I mean, we are all tech-nerds here and so feel free to mostly ignore anything from traditional philosophy, but this is pretty basic.