That’s me downvoting, and a large part of why I downvoted it is because being neutral is actually important, and more importantly there’s a non-trivial cost to the freewheeling norms in search of true love such that I don’t think it’s worth the time to allow nearly as much freewheeling as EA/Rationalists has done.
So freewheeling seems like a policy that *usually* comes at the cost of intrinsic good. I do not have to promote freewheeling in order to prevent the loss of intrinsic good; the correct policy is something else but it should respect intrinsic values and strong moral clues.
I doubt that you think neutrality is *intrinsically* important. That does not mean it is not a strong clue about which choices are moral. I think that efficiency, robust strategy, winning, and accountability are strong moral clues which share this quality of not being intrinsically important.
That being said I am not even convinced that neutrality is a strong moral clue at all; I am interested in what stories you might have to tell me that would inspire me to see the relevance of neutrality.
“But it’s always a lot easier to say what not to do, than to get it right. And one of my fundamental flaws, back then, was thinking that if you tried as hard as you could to avoid everything the Bad Guys were doing, that made you a Good Guy.
Particularly damaging, I think, was the bad example set by the pretenders to Deep Wisdom trying to stake out a middle way; smiling condescendingly at technophiles and technophobes alike, and calling them both immature. Truly this is a wrong way; and in fact, the notion of trying to stake out a middle way generally, is usually wrong. The Right Way is not a compromise with anything; it is the clean manifestation of its own criteria.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky
That’s me downvoting, and a large part of why I downvoted it is because being neutral is actually important, and more importantly there’s a non-trivial cost to the freewheeling norms in search of true love such that I don’t think it’s worth the time to allow nearly as much freewheeling as EA/Rationalists has done.
So freewheeling seems like a policy that *usually* comes at the cost of intrinsic good. I do not have to promote freewheeling in order to prevent the loss of intrinsic good; the correct policy is something else but it should respect intrinsic values and strong moral clues.
I doubt that you think neutrality is *intrinsically* important. That does not mean it is not a strong clue about which choices are moral. I think that efficiency, robust strategy, winning, and accountability are strong moral clues which share this quality of not being intrinsically important.
That being said I am not even convinced that neutrality is a strong moral clue at all; I am interested in what stories you might have to tell me that would inspire me to see the relevance of neutrality.
“But it’s always a lot easier to say what not to do, than to get it right. And one of my fundamental flaws, back then, was thinking that if you tried as hard as you could to avoid everything the Bad Guys were doing, that made you a Good Guy.
Particularly damaging, I think, was the bad example set by the pretenders to Deep Wisdom trying to stake out a middle way; smiling condescendingly at technophiles and technophobes alike, and calling them both immature. Truly this is a wrong way; and in fact, the notion of trying to stake out a middle way generally, is usually wrong. The Right Way is not a compromise with anything; it is the clean manifestation of its own criteria.”
— Eliezer Yudkowsky