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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

Politics is the policies caused by the awareness/understanding of human abstractions that exist at a societal and global level, which includes things like "morality".

I don't see how "intelligence" would be possible without "politics" emerging, in a very strong way.

Many answers to many questions aren't factual, they're answers deemed appropriate by society. Removing the ability to include any of these would make AI much less useful, and certainly dangerous (for example, global warming is trivial to fix, with politics aside).

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I think differences in politics are largely formed through a lack of knowledge; information overload limits access to other people's mindsets.

Instead of seeing the other as a black box that won't change and thus must be exterminated, which is a human thing, people can use AI to visualise their own cognitive dissonance.

Some things are better off apolitical. For example, I don't want my psychotherapist to be political. Also, it is upon knowledge to explain why customs exist, or will AI never be able to identify what Chesterton's fences are for? Is culture necessarily partially ineffable?

> I think differences in politics are largely formed through a lack of knowledge

Knowledge doesn't make everyone want or value the same things. There's significant evidence that gene's play a role in a persons interests, desires, and even morality [1]. You're speaking of a Utopia that would require forced mental uniformity, requiring a perspective that there are no grey areas in life. I don't think this is compatible with the reality of humanity.

> Is culture necessarily partially ineffable?

My friend once said something like "Anything that's useful, we call technology. Anything that's not useful, but cute, we call culture".

1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2021...

(apologies, don't have have time for proper references)

> Knowledge doesn't make everyone want or value the same things.

It doesn't, but if I understand why you do seemingly irrational things, I'll give you more respect. Tolerance is not acceptance.

> There's significant evidence that gene's play a role in a persons interests, desires, and even morality [1].

Of course. I said 'largely formed' because I had that in mind.

> You're speaking of a Utopia that would require forced mental uniformity, requiring a perspective that there are no grey areas in life. I don't think this is compatible with the reality of humanity.

No. While some people want that, I think we should get there by choice. You are responsible for your own confusion. You can live in hell if you want to. I would like to understand those kinds of choices, but maybe we humans are irrational capricious creatures to the core, deceiving ourselves about the power of understanding.

Regardless, knowledge, accelerated by AI, will push us to some conclusions as to what we are and what we are doing, but what we will do is on us. I do not believe disembodied AGI will ever be a reality, but it would definitely force a monoculture like the one you described.

I can formulate my disagreement with you as a question in the hopes of finding common ground:

Here in the US we've seen major political parties completely realign themselves, Goldwater conservatives bear more resemblance to today's Democratic party than they do to today's GOP. Doesn't the fact that politics changes, imply that it's a reincarnation of opinion and tribalism, rather than a science rooted in fact (which is immutable)?

Not to put words in your mouth, I think the space between us is that I see a separation between policy and politics. I view politics as the science of cultivating power, and policy as something measurable and scientifically testable. Not a matter of opinion.

IMO opinion is a reflection of people's inability to commit to statistical facts, and operate using mathematical precision. There is actually no need to make decisions on the basis of opinion, if one has unlimited resources for computation, decisions are just optimization of a Bellman loss.

> I view politics as the science of cultivating power, and policy as something measurable and scientifically testable.

My use was definitely loose. I agree, with an additional separation: politics is the science, policy is the reality, and propaganda is a corrupting force, influencing both.

I think the science and propaganda are too intertwined to make sense of, leaving the reality as the true signal.

I believe that if we were very careful, and removed all data relating to "propaganda" and "political science", while training an AI, and just feed it reality, both the propaganda (the outcome of this policy is "better") and science (this results in this) would be emergent in anything we considered "intelligent".

I guess my basic point was that avoiding politics is not possible, because we're living in the result of politics, and an understanding of the abstractions of the world results in politics. It's a strong feedback loop with few degrees of "rational" freedom, causing the emergence. An "intelligence" that could look at policy, and create a scaffolding of understanding for why it was built, wouldn't be "intelligent".

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