Just to be clear, I don’t think that you would ever torture children.
I totally would. Then—if the situation demanded it and if I didn’t have a fat guy available—I’d throw them all in front of a trolley. Because not torturing children is evil when the alternative to the contrived torturing is a contrived much worse thing.
I meant that I didn’t ever think he’d torture children for no reason other than to increase the level of entropy in the universe (in my original contrived hypothetical the entropy increase was accomplished by having sadistic alien make a star go nova in return for getting to watch the torture. The star was far enough away from inhabited systems that the radiation wouldn’t harm any living things).
I wasn’t meaning to set up “not torturing children” as a deontological rule. Obviously there are some circumstances where it is necessary, such as torturing one child to prevent fifty more children from being tortured for an equal amount of time per child. What I was trying to do was illustrate that Tim’s Maximum Entropy Principle was a really, really bad “maximand” to follow by creating a hypothetical where following it would make you do something insanely evil. I think we can both agree that entropy maximization (at least as an end in itself rather than as a byproduct of some other end) is far less important than preventing the torture of children.
Tim responded to my question by sidestepping the issue, instead of engaging the hypothetical he said that a nova was a bad way to maximize entropy because it might kill living things that would go on to produce more entropy, even though I tried to constrain the hypothetical so that that wasn’t a possibility.
I totally would. Then—if the situation demanded it and if I didn’t have a fat guy available—I’d throw them all in front of a trolley. Because not torturing children is evil when the alternative to the contrived torturing is a contrived much worse thing.
I meant that I didn’t ever think he’d torture children for no reason other than to increase the level of entropy in the universe (in my original contrived hypothetical the entropy increase was accomplished by having sadistic alien make a star go nova in return for getting to watch the torture. The star was far enough away from inhabited systems that the radiation wouldn’t harm any living things).
I wasn’t meaning to set up “not torturing children” as a deontological rule. Obviously there are some circumstances where it is necessary, such as torturing one child to prevent fifty more children from being tortured for an equal amount of time per child. What I was trying to do was illustrate that Tim’s Maximum Entropy Principle was a really, really bad “maximand” to follow by creating a hypothetical where following it would make you do something insanely evil. I think we can both agree that entropy maximization (at least as an end in itself rather than as a byproduct of some other end) is far less important than preventing the torture of children.
Tim responded to my question by sidestepping the issue, instead of engaging the hypothetical he said that a nova was a bad way to maximize entropy because it might kill living things that would go on to produce more entropy, even though I tried to constrain the hypothetical so that that wasn’t a possibility.