wtf is going on with so many of this author’s posts being negative karma? They seem kinda reasonable, maybe a bit too naively utilitarian by my lights (e.g. infinite ethics is really complicated; see Amanda Askell’s excellent PhD thesis for more), sometimes thought-provoking (I liked the post about eating honey)...is there some major beef I don’t know about?
I strong downvoted this post because it tries to silently discharge the premises which it uses for proof and replace them with “really is better”, invokes infinity without naming the class it comes out of, and glosses over things commonly accepted otherwise like ‘declining marginal utility of X’ where X is substituted with ‘shrimp’ in this case.
Using the actual surreal numbers with the surreal VNM rationality theorem would instead show the problem. What if I set one shrimp’s value at the first surreal infinitesimal ϵ? Then it would be a certain preference, but lexicographically below everyday life’s ones.
Recalling the declining marginal utility would instead show the problem. What if I care for arbitrarily many shrimp at most as 5 quality-adjusted-life-years?
So, unsound logic, from my POV, is leveraged to argue for a pre-selected conclusion, which explains the post total karma.
I mean it’s totally coherent to value a shrimp at infinitesimal. But that is unintuitive in the ways I describe in the post (involving some arbitrarily vast gulf between the first generaiton that’s non-infintesimal wrt the spectrum argument) and implying that you should torture 10^10000000 shrimp to prolong a person’s life by one second.
Their post about honey seemed epistemically bad / misleading from my perspective, though maybe still interesting enough to be net positive on net.
This post seems basically fine to me. I’d also note that the argument in this post is basically the same as the argument made in Torture vs. Dust Specks, the original post about Shut Up and Multiply, which was controversial, but considered good.[1] (So, I’d in principle be fine with an objection to this post that it’s totally unoriginal, but I doubt that’s why people are downvoting.)
I’m guessing some downvotes are from spill over from the prior post in practice (as in, people disliking the prior post is counterfactual for many downvotes on this post).
wtf is going on with so many of this author’s posts being negative karma? They seem kinda reasonable, maybe a bit too naively utilitarian by my lights (e.g. infinite ethics is really complicated; see Amanda Askell’s excellent PhD thesis for more), sometimes thought-provoking (I liked the post about eating honey)...is there some major beef I don’t know about?
I strong downvoted this post because it tries to silently discharge the premises which it uses for proof and replace them with “really is better”, invokes infinity without naming the class it comes out of, and glosses over things commonly accepted otherwise like ‘declining marginal utility of X’ where X is substituted with ‘shrimp’ in this case.
Using the actual surreal numbers with the surreal VNM rationality theorem would instead show the problem. What if I set one shrimp’s value at the first surreal infinitesimal ϵ? Then it would be a certain preference, but lexicographically below everyday life’s ones.
Recalling the declining marginal utility would instead show the problem. What if I care for arbitrarily many shrimp at most as 5 quality-adjusted-life-years?
So, unsound logic, from my POV, is leveraged to argue for a pre-selected conclusion, which explains the post total karma.
I mean it’s totally coherent to value a shrimp at infinitesimal. But that is unintuitive in the ways I describe in the post (involving some arbitrarily vast gulf between the first generaiton that’s non-infintesimal wrt the spectrum argument) and implying that you should torture 10^10000000 shrimp to prolong a person’s life by one second.
Their post about honey seemed epistemically bad / misleading from my perspective, though maybe still interesting enough to be net positive on net.
This post seems basically fine to me. I’d also note that the argument in this post is basically the same as the argument made in Torture vs. Dust Specks, the original post about Shut Up and Multiply, which was controversial, but considered good.[1] (So, I’d in principle be fine with an objection to this post that it’s totally unoriginal, but I doubt that’s why people are downvoting.)
I’m guessing some downvotes are from spill over from the prior post in practice (as in, people disliking the prior post is counterfactual for many downvotes on this post).
A related (and not necessarily virtuous) meme: https://imgflip.com/i/a2e7jx
My preferred explanation is some combination of love of wickedness and hatred of the good.