Aside from its obvious artificiality, and despite the fact that all our instincts cry out against it, it’s not at all clear to me that there are any really good reasons to reject the Omelasian solution.
There’s a real world analogue to Omelas. The UK (like other countries) has a child protection system, intended to minimize abuse & neglect of children. The state workers (health visitors, social workers, police officers, hospital staff, etc.) who play roles in the system can try to intervene when the apparent risk of harm to a child reaches some threshold.
If the threshold is too low, the system gratuitously interferes with families’ autonomy, preventing them from living their lives in peace. If the threshold is too high, the system fails to do its job of preventing guardians from tormenting or killing their children. Realistically, a trade-off is inevitable, and under any politically feasible threshold “some children will die to preserve the freedom of others”, as the sociologist Robert Dingwall put it. So the UK’s child protection system takes the Omelasian route.
The real life situation is less black & white than Omleas, but it looks like the same basic trade-off in a non-artificial setting. I wonder whether people’s intuitions about Omelas align with their intuitions about the real life child protection trade-off (and indeed whether both align with society’s revealed collective preference).
I’d agree that these are consequentially similar, but I don’t think they’re psychologically similar at all. There’s an element of exploitation in Omelas that isn’t present in social services: state workers are positioned as protecting children from an evil unrelated to the state, while Omelas is cast as willfully perpetrating an evil in order to ensure its own prosperity. People tend to think of moral culpability in terms of blame, and although some blame might attach itself to social workers for failing to stop abuses that they might prevent with more intrusive intervention thresholds, it’s much diluted by the vastly more viscerally appalling culpability carried by actual abusers. Omelas offers no subjects for condemnation other than the state apparatus and the citizens supporting it.
On top of that, intrusive child protection services have very salient failings: most parents (and most children) would find government intrusion into their family lives extremely unpleasant, unpleasant enough to fear and take political action to avoid. Meanwhile, the consequences of no longer torturing Omelas’ sacrificial lamb are unspecified and thus about as far from salient (re-entrant?) as it’s possible to get. Even in a hypothetical fully specified Omelas where we could point to a chain of effects, I’d expect that chain to be a lot longer and harder to follow, and its endpoints hence less emotionally weighty.
There’s an element of exploitation in Omelas that isn’t present in social services: state workers are positioned as protecting children from an evil unrelated to the state, while Omelas is cast as willfully perpetrating an evil in order to ensure its own prosperity.…
...Omelas offers no subjects for condemnation other than the state apparatus and the citizens supporting it.
Link to me mentioning both Omelas and another “eternally tortured child” short story, SCP-231 (potentially highly distressing so I’m not hotlinking it), as an intuition pump against Mencius Moldbug’s “Patchwork” proposal (the “strong”/”total” vision of Patchwork, with absolute security of sovereigns) along very similar lines of analogy, over in the Unqualified Reservations comments.
There are many, many things in the similarly exploitative franchise known as “Real Life” that also appear to be crafted as “torture & horror porn”. So I don’t see the problem with linking to a fictionalized version.
I dare say that any story without elements that induce horror and revulsion in a reader would be an inadequate source of intuition for considering the most shocking aspects of our own world… or the ethics of knowingly creating a system which offers absolute security indiscriminately to those who would create such nightmares and those who’d seek to prevent them.
Example of a victim testimony 2: - all of the above, except even more outspoken descriptions of the author’s mental anguish. (NSFanywhere. The main blog has… images… that are more gore than extreme porn; don’t look unless you’re massively desensitized.)
...Gurfr cubgbf nyy rkcerff gur fvqr bs zlfrys V fgehttyr jvgu rirel qnl. Guvf vf gur fvqr bs zr gung yrnearq jung frk vf guebhtu encr. Guvf vf gur fvqr bs zr gung gevrq gb pbzzvg fhvpvqr sbe gur svefg gvzr jura V jnf frira lrnef byq. Guvf vf gur cneg bs zr gung V srne jvyy arire urny. Vgf orra fb znal lrnef ohg abg n qnl tbrf ol jurer V qba’g guvax nobhg jung jnf qbar gb zr...
Want some amnesiacs yet? You might be able to forget those stories faster if you don’t think about the fact that something similar must be happening somewhere in your country, probably in your city, at this very moment. Oops, too late!
(Again, sorry for the confrontational tone and such—I wanted to hammer home the point that sometimes it’s the violently emotional reaction to an objectively terrible problem that would be true to your desires, and trying to stay “detached” and “reasonable” would be self-deception. See: deathism.)
(Again, sorry for the confrontational tone and such—I wanted to hammer home the point that sometimes it’s the violently emotional reaction to an objectively terrible problem that would be true to your desires, and trying to stay “detached” and “reasonable” would be self-deception. See: deathism.)
Indeed. But in the context of the discussion the story primes you to live one kind of horror and not another when making trade offs between the two. This is why I objected to it.
I struggle with conceiving wanting to want, or decision making in general, as a tiered model. There are a great many factors that modify the ordering and intensity of utility functions. When human neurons fire they trigger multiple concurrent paths leading to a set of utility functions. Not all of the utilities are logic-related.
I posit that our ability to process and reason is due to this pattern ability and any model that will approximate human intelligence will need to be more complex than a simple linear layer model. The balance of numerous interactive utilities combine to inform decision making. A multiobjective optimization model, such as PIBEA, is required.
I’m new to LW, so I can’t open threads just yet. I’m hoping to find some discussions around evolutionary models and solution sets relative to rational decision processing.
I sort of agree with your comment, but you should’ve probably posted it as a reply to the main post, not to this specific comment of mine, as the topics seem to be somewhat apart.
(BTW you can open threads in Discussion just fine seeing as you’re at 10 karma—go ahead!)
Disagree. Do look, even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts a lot (if it doesn’t hurt at all, there’s a lot more wrong to fix first). Update your model of reality, avoid availability and (dis)confirmation bias. Face reality head-on. That kind of thing.
All due respect, but I don’t think there is any imperative to view material that will cause serious psychological harm. If the price of knowledge is your right hand you are not required to pay it. The most relevant example would be showing hardcore pornography to small children—it may be knowledge of a kind, but it does more harm than good.
EDIT: Of course, I read them anyway. Very, ah … deep.
I only said that in regards to the many photos of staged degradation, multilation, self-harm, etc on the second blog—they’re cringe-inducing yet presumably taken in a consensual way (for a loose definition of consent), and thus have a worse “unpleasantness-to-facing-reality” ratio than the textual descriptions of real abuse & its consequences. I quite agree that reading those shocking descriptions is epistemologically and morally imperative.
There’s a real world analogue to Omelas. The UK (like other countries) has a child protection system, intended to minimize abuse & neglect of children. The state workers (health visitors, social workers, police officers, hospital staff, etc.) who play roles in the system can try to intervene when the apparent risk of harm to a child reaches some threshold.
If the threshold is too low, the system gratuitously interferes with families’ autonomy, preventing them from living their lives in peace. If the threshold is too high, the system fails to do its job of preventing guardians from tormenting or killing their children. Realistically, a trade-off is inevitable, and under any politically feasible threshold “some children will die to preserve the freedom of others”, as the sociologist Robert Dingwall put it. So the UK’s child protection system takes the Omelasian route.
The real life situation is less black & white than Omleas, but it looks like the same basic trade-off in a non-artificial setting. I wonder whether people’s intuitions about Omelas align with their intuitions about the real life child protection trade-off (and indeed whether both align with society’s revealed collective preference).
I’d agree that these are consequentially similar, but I don’t think they’re psychologically similar at all. There’s an element of exploitation in Omelas that isn’t present in social services: state workers are positioned as protecting children from an evil unrelated to the state, while Omelas is cast as willfully perpetrating an evil in order to ensure its own prosperity. People tend to think of moral culpability in terms of blame, and although some blame might attach itself to social workers for failing to stop abuses that they might prevent with more intrusive intervention thresholds, it’s much diluted by the vastly more viscerally appalling culpability carried by actual abusers. Omelas offers no subjects for condemnation other than the state apparatus and the citizens supporting it.
On top of that, intrusive child protection services have very salient failings: most parents (and most children) would find government intrusion into their family lives extremely unpleasant, unpleasant enough to fear and take political action to avoid. Meanwhile, the consequences of no longer torturing Omelas’ sacrificial lamb are unspecified and thus about as far from salient (re-entrant?) as it’s possible to get. Even in a hypothetical fully specified Omelas where we could point to a chain of effects, I’d expect that chain to be a lot longer and harder to follow, and its endpoints hence less emotionally weighty.
Link to me mentioning both Omelas and another “eternally tortured child” short story, SCP-231 (potentially highly distressing so I’m not hotlinking it), as an intuition pump against Mencius Moldbug’s “Patchwork” proposal (the “strong”/”total” vision of Patchwork, with absolute security of sovereigns) along very similar lines of analogy, over in the Unqualified Reservations comments.
Disagree SCP-231 is bad source of intuition because it is crafted to be torture & horror porn.
There are many, many things in the similarly exploitative franchise known as “Real Life” that also appear to be crafted as “torture & horror porn”. So I don’t see the problem with linking to a fictionalized version.
I dare say that any story without elements that induce horror and revulsion in a reader would be an inadequate source of intuition for considering the most shocking aspects of our own world… or the ethics of knowingly creating a system which offers absolute security indiscriminately to those who would create such nightmares and those who’d seek to prevent them.
Example of a victim testimony 1: - trigger warnings for extreme child abuse, rape, pedophilia and psychological damage.
Example of a victim testimony 2: - all of the above, except even more outspoken descriptions of the author’s mental anguish. (NSFanywhere. The main blog has… images… that are more gore than extreme porn; don’t look unless you’re massively desensitized.)
Want some amnesiacs yet? You might be able to forget those stories faster if you don’t think about the fact that something similar must be happening somewhere in your country, probably in your city, at this very moment. Oops, too late!
(Again, sorry for the confrontational tone and such—I wanted to hammer home the point that sometimes it’s the violently emotional reaction to an objectively terrible problem that would be true to your desires, and trying to stay “detached” and “reasonable” would be self-deception. See: deathism.)
Indeed. But in the context of the discussion the story primes you to live one kind of horror and not another when making trade offs between the two. This is why I objected to it.
I struggle with conceiving wanting to want, or decision making in general, as a tiered model. There are a great many factors that modify the ordering and intensity of utility functions. When human neurons fire they trigger multiple concurrent paths leading to a set of utility functions. Not all of the utilities are logic-related.
I posit that our ability to process and reason is due to this pattern ability and any model that will approximate human intelligence will need to be more complex than a simple linear layer model. The balance of numerous interactive utilities combine to inform decision making. A multiobjective optimization model, such as PIBEA, is required.
I’m new to LW, so I can’t open threads just yet. I’m hoping to find some discussions around evolutionary models and solution sets relative to rational decision processing.
I sort of agree with your comment, but you should’ve probably posted it as a reply to the main post, not to this specific comment of mine, as the topics seem to be somewhat apart.
(BTW you can open threads in Discussion just fine seeing as you’re at 10 karma—go ahead!)
Disagree. Do look, even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts a lot (if it doesn’t hurt at all, there’s a lot more wrong to fix first). Update your model of reality, avoid availability and (dis)confirmation bias. Face reality head-on. That kind of thing.
All due respect, but I don’t think there is any imperative to view material that will cause serious psychological harm. If the price of knowledge is your right hand you are not required to pay it. The most relevant example would be showing hardcore pornography to small children—it may be knowledge of a kind, but it does more harm than good.
EDIT: Of course, I read them anyway. Very, ah … deep.
I only said that in regards to the many photos of staged degradation, multilation, self-harm, etc on the second blog—they’re cringe-inducing yet presumably taken in a consensual way (for a loose definition of consent), and thus have a worse “unpleasantness-to-facing-reality” ratio than the textual descriptions of real abuse & its consequences. I quite agree that reading those shocking descriptions is epistemologically and morally imperative.
Good point. If there are written descriptions available, they’re a better weighted alternative.
It would surprise me if they did, given that Omelas was constructed as an intuition pump.