I don’t have the time to reply back individually, but I read them all and believe these to be pretty representative of the wider community’s reasons to reject NU as well.
I can’t speak for those who identify strictly as NU, but while I currently share many of NU’s answers to theoretical outweighing scenarios, I do find it difficult to unpack all the nuance it would take to reconcile “NU as CEV” with our everyday experience.
Therefore, I’ll likely update further away from
{attempting to salvage NU’s reputation by bridging it with compassion, motivation theory, and secular Buddhism}
towards
{integrating these independent of NU, seeing if this would result in a more relatable language, or if my preferred kind of theoretical unity (without pluralist outweighing) would still have the cost of its sounding absurd and extreme on its face}
Did you make any update regarding the simplicity / complexity of value?
My impression is that theoretical simplicity is a major driver of your preference for NU, and also that if others (such as myself) weighed theoretical simplicity more highly that they would likely be more inclined towards NU.
In other words, I think theoretical simplicity may be a double crux in the disagreements here about NU. Would you agree with that?
Did you make any update regarding the simplicity / complexity of value?
Yes, in terms of how others may explicitly defend the terminal value of even preferences (tastes, hobbies), instead of defending only terminal virtues (health, friendship), or core building blocks of experience (pleasure, beauty).
No, in terms of assigning anything {independent positive value}.
“Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods and evils; harmony and proportion in one’s own life; power and experiences of achievement; self-expression; freedom; peace, security; adventure and novelty; and good reputation, honor, esteem, etc.”
but I don’t know how to ultimately prioritize between them unless they are commensurable. I make them commensurable by weighing their interdependent value in terms of the one thing we all(?) agree is an independent motivation: preventable suffering. (If preventable suffering is not worth preventing for its own sake, what is it worth preventing for, and is this other thing agreeable to someone undergoing the suffering as the reason for its motivating power?) This does not mean that I constantly think of them in these terms (that would be counterproductive), but in conflict resolution I do not assign them independent positive numerical values, which pluralism would imply one way or another.
Any pluralist theory begs the question of outweighing suffering with enough of any independently positive value. If you think about it for five minutes, aggregate happiness (or any other experience) does not exist. If our first priority is to prevent preventable suffering, that alone is an infinite game; it does not help to make a detour to boost/copy positive states unless this is causally connected to preventing suffering. (Aggregates of suffering do not exist either, but each moment of suffering is terminally worth preventing, and we have limited attention, so aggregates and chain-reactions of suffering are useful tools of thought for preventing as many as we can. So are many other things without requiring our attaching them independent positive value, or else we would be tiling Mars with them whenever it outweighed helping suffering on Earth according to some formula.)
My experience so far with this kind of unification is that it avoids many (or even all) of the theoretical problems that are still considered canonical challenges for pluralist utilitarianisms that assign both independent negative value to suffering and independent positive value to other things. I do not claim that this would be simple or intuitive – that would be analogous to reading about some Buddhist system, realizing its theoretical unity, and teleporting past its lifelong experiential integration – but I do claim that a unified theory with grounding in a universally accepted terminal value might be worth exploring further, because we cannot presuppose that any kind of CEV would be intuitive or easy to align oneself with.
My impression is that theoretical simplicity is a major driver of your preference for NU, and also that if others (such as myself) weighed theoretical simplicity more highly that they would likely be more inclined towards NU.
In other words, I think theoretical simplicity may be a double crux in the disagreements here about NU. Would you agree with that?
Partly, yes. It may also be that all of us, me included, are out of touch with the extreme ends of experience and thus do not understand the ability of some motivations to override everything else.
It is also difficult to operationalize a false belief in independent value: When are we attached to a value to the extent that we would regret not spending its resources elsewhere, on CEV-level reflection?
People also differ along their background assumptions on whether AGI makes the universally life-preventing button a relevant question, because for many, the idea of an AGI represents an omnipotent optimizer that will decide everything about the future. If so, we want to be careful about assigning independent positive value to all the things, because each one of those invites this AGI to consider {outweighing suffering} with {producing those things}, since pluralist theories do not require a causal connection between the things being weighed.
Thanks for the replies, everyone!
I don’t have the time to reply back individually, but I read them all and believe these to be pretty representative of the wider community’s reasons to reject NU as well.
I can’t speak for those who identify strictly as NU, but while I currently share many of NU’s answers to theoretical outweighing scenarios, I do find it difficult to unpack all the nuance it would take to reconcile “NU as CEV” with our everyday experience.
Therefore, I’ll likely update further away from
{attempting to salvage NU’s reputation by bridging it with compassion, motivation theory, and secular Buddhism}
towards
{integrating these independent of NU, seeing if this would result in a more relatable language, or if my preferred kind of theoretical unity (without pluralist outweighing) would still have the cost of its sounding absurd and extreme on its face}
Did you make any update regarding the simplicity / complexity of value?
My impression is that theoretical simplicity is a major driver of your preference for NU, and also that if others (such as myself) weighed theoretical simplicity more highly that they would likely be more inclined towards NU.
In other words, I think theoretical simplicity may be a double crux in the disagreements here about NU. Would you agree with that?
Yes, in terms of how others may explicitly defend the terminal value of even preferences (tastes, hobbies), instead of defending only terminal virtues (health, friendship), or core building blocks of experience (pleasure, beauty).
No, in terms of assigning anything {independent positive value}.
I experience all of the things quoted in Complexity of value,
but I don’t know how to ultimately prioritize between them unless they are commensurable. I make them commensurable by weighing their interdependent value in terms of the one thing we all(?) agree is an independent motivation: preventable suffering. (If preventable suffering is not worth preventing for its own sake, what is it worth preventing for, and is this other thing agreeable to someone undergoing the suffering as the reason for its motivating power?) This does not mean that I constantly think of them in these terms (that would be counterproductive), but in conflict resolution I do not assign them independent positive numerical values, which pluralism would imply one way or another.
Any pluralist theory begs the question of outweighing suffering with enough of any independently positive value. If you think about it for five minutes, aggregate happiness (or any other experience) does not exist. If our first priority is to prevent preventable suffering, that alone is an infinite game; it does not help to make a detour to boost/copy positive states unless this is causally connected to preventing suffering. (Aggregates of suffering do not exist either, but each moment of suffering is terminally worth preventing, and we have limited attention, so aggregates and chain-reactions of suffering are useful tools of thought for preventing as many as we can. So are many other things without requiring our attaching them independent positive value, or else we would be tiling Mars with them whenever it outweighed helping suffering on Earth according to some formula.)
My experience so far with this kind of unification is that it avoids many (or even all) of the theoretical problems that are still considered canonical challenges for pluralist utilitarianisms that assign both independent negative value to suffering and independent positive value to other things. I do not claim that this would be simple or intuitive – that would be analogous to reading about some Buddhist system, realizing its theoretical unity, and teleporting past its lifelong experiential integration – but I do claim that a unified theory with grounding in a universally accepted terminal value might be worth exploring further, because we cannot presuppose that any kind of CEV would be intuitive or easy to align oneself with.
Partly, yes. It may also be that all of us, me included, are out of touch with the extreme ends of experience and thus do not understand the ability of some motivations to override everything else.
It is also difficult to operationalize a false belief in independent value: When are we attached to a value to the extent that we would regret not spending its resources elsewhere, on CEV-level reflection?
People also differ along their background assumptions on whether AGI makes the universally life-preventing button a relevant question, because for many, the idea of an AGI represents an omnipotent optimizer that will decide everything about the future. If so, we want to be careful about assigning independent positive value to all the things, because each one of those invites this AGI to consider {outweighing suffering} with {producing those things}, since pluralist theories do not require a causal connection between the things being weighed.