What is the point of this post? I seem to have missed it entirely. Can anyone help me out?
The mirror challenge for decision theory is seeing which option a choice criterion really endorses. If your stated moral principles call for you to provide laptops to everyone, does that really endorse buying a $1 million gem-studded laptop for yourself, or spending the same money on shipping 5000 OLPCs?
Is the point that predicting the end result of particular criterion is difficult because bias gets in the way? And, because it is difficult, start small with stuff like gene fitness and work up to bigger problems like social ethics?
Where is the pure moral reasoner [...] whose trustworthy output we can contrast to human rationalizations of the same utility function? [...] Why, it’s our old friend the alien god, of course! Natural selection is guaranteed free of all mercy, all love, all compassion, all aesthetic sensibilities, all political factionalism, all ideological allegiances, all academic ambitions, all libertarianism, all socialism, all Blue and all Green.
Or… is the point that natural selection is a great way to expose the biases at work in our ethics choice criterion?
I am not tracking on something here. This is a summary of the points in the post as I see them:
We are unable to accurately study how closely the results of our actions match our own predictions of those results.
The equivalent problem in decision theory is that we are unable to take a set of known choice criteria and predict which choice will be made given a particular environment. In other words, we think we know what we would/should do in event X but we are wrong.
We possess the ability to predict any particular action from all possible choice criteria.
Is it possible to prove that a particular action does or does not follow from certain choice criteria, thereby avoiding our tendency to predict anything from everything?
We need a bias free system to study that allows us to measure our predictions without interfering with the result of the system.
Natural selection presents a system whose only “goal” is inclusive genetic fitness. There is no bias.
Examples show that our predictions of natural selection reveal biases in ourselves. Therefore, our predictions were biased.
To remove our bias with regards to human ethics, we should use natural selection as a calibration tool.
I feel like the last point skipped over a few points. As best as I can tell, these belong just before the last point:
When our predictions of the bias-proof system are accurate, they will be predictions without bias.
Using the non-biased predictors we found to study the bias-proof system, we can study other systems with less bias.
Using this outline, it seems like the takeaway is, “Don’t study ethics until after you studied natural selection because there is too much bias involved in studying ethics.”
Can someone tell me if I am correct? A simple yes or no is cool if you don’t feel like typing up a whole lot. Even, “No, not even close,” will give me more information than I have right now.
What is the point of this post? I seem to have missed it entirely. Can anyone help me out?
Is the point that predicting the end result of particular criterion is difficult because bias gets in the way? And, because it is difficult, start small with stuff like gene fitness and work up to bigger problems like social ethics?
Or… is the point that natural selection is a great way to expose the biases at work in our ethics choice criterion?
I am not tracking on something here. This is a summary of the points in the post as I see them:
We are unable to accurately study how closely the results of our actions match our own predictions of those results.
The equivalent problem in decision theory is that we are unable to take a set of known choice criteria and predict which choice will be made given a particular environment. In other words, we think we know what we would/should do in event X but we are wrong.
We possess the ability to predict any particular action from all possible choice criteria.
Is it possible to prove that a particular action does or does not follow from certain choice criteria, thereby avoiding our tendency to predict anything from everything?
We need a bias free system to study that allows us to measure our predictions without interfering with the result of the system.
Natural selection presents a system whose only “goal” is inclusive genetic fitness. There is no bias.
Examples show that our predictions of natural selection reveal biases in ourselves. Therefore, our predictions were biased.
To remove our bias with regards to human ethics, we should use natural selection as a calibration tool.
I feel like the last point skipped over a few points. As best as I can tell, these belong just before the last point:
When our predictions of the bias-proof system are accurate, they will be predictions without bias.
Using the non-biased predictors we found to study the bias-proof system, we can study other systems with less bias.
Using this outline, it seems like the takeaway is, “Don’t study ethics until after you studied natural selection because there is too much bias involved in studying ethics.”
Can someone tell me if I am correct? A simple yes or no is cool if you don’t feel like typing up a whole lot. Even, “No, not even close,” will give me more information than I have right now.
Seems about right. Note: “To train ourselves to see clearly, we need simple practice cases.”