I think it’s an issue I hadn’t formulated explicitly at the time. I’m still unsure about where the balance between verbal decision and urges should lie.
I might take a different direction for the heroin addicts. I’d try and argue that their desire for heroin has some features that we can use to directly strike it off. Some relevant features could be whether past version of the person would want (or would have wanted—UDT?) the desire removed, whether a person with the desire removed (and very little else changed) would agree that in retrospect it was a positive development. More generally, heroin addiction seems a perfect example of a pathological desire: a sort of self-protecting desire that hacks the human mind to provide a desire out of proportion with the positive effects it generates.
I’m not saying the line is sharp between heroin and, say, sex, but it seems better to deal directly with the negative features of heroin than to go too meta and hope we get a system that does the division for us.
I think it’s an issue I hadn’t formulated explicitly at the time. I’m still unsure about where the balance between verbal decision and urges should lie.
See also http://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/96877436365/ (some NSFW because the debate originated on Tumblr, and, well...)
Interesting.
I might take a different direction for the heroin addicts. I’d try and argue that their desire for heroin has some features that we can use to directly strike it off. Some relevant features could be whether past version of the person would want (or would have wanted—UDT?) the desire removed, whether a person with the desire removed (and very little else changed) would agree that in retrospect it was a positive development. More generally, heroin addiction seems a perfect example of a pathological desire: a sort of self-protecting desire that hacks the human mind to provide a desire out of proportion with the positive effects it generates.
I’m not saying the line is sharp between heroin and, say, sex, but it seems better to deal directly with the negative features of heroin than to go too meta and hope we get a system that does the division for us.