Intelligence and Stupidity: The Orthogonality Thesis

Why HN readers recommended it

HN people use it as the standard short explanation for why AI can understand human ethics without sharing them, and often recommend the whole channel.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Robert Miles AI Safety

Topic

AI alignment

Format

explainer

Level

intro

HN recommenders in dataset

6

HN mentions in dataset

12

Recommendation years in dataset

2022–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• I've seen that paper, and it's amazing indeed what GPT-4 is capable of. But none of that supports that closing quote, which to me points to a worrying philosophical naïveté. How can one equip an entity with "intrinsic motivation"? By definition, if we have to …

• Yes, I believe some careful and informed pondering leads one towards that conclusion. Hume's guillotine is an implacable philosophical device: [VIDEO] (I warmly recommend all the content on that delightfully frightening channel)

• That’s the alignment problem. We don’t know what the actual goals of an AI trained neural net are. We know what criteria we trained it against, but it turns out that’s not at all the same thing. I highly recommend Rob Miles channel on YouTube. …