This delightful piece applies thermodynamic principles to ethics in a way I haven’t seen before. By framing the classic “Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” through free energy minimization, the author gives us a fresh mathematical lens for examining value trade-offs and population ethics.
What makes this post special isn’t just its technical contribution—though modeling ethical temperature as a parameter for equality vs total wellbeing is quite clever. The phase diagram showing different “walk away” regions bridges the gap between mathematical precision and moral intuition in an elegant way.
While I don’t think we’ll be using ethodynamics to make real-world policy decisions anytime soon, this kind of playful-yet-rigorous exploration helps build better abstractions for thinking about ethics. It’s the kind of creative modeling that could inspire novel approaches to value learning and population ethics.
Also, it’s just a super fun read. A great quote from the conclusion is “I have striven to make this paper a pleasant read by enriching it with all manners of enjoyable things: wit, calculus, and a non indifferent amount of imaginary child abuse”.
That is the type of writing I want to see more of! Very nice.
This delightful piece applies thermodynamic principles to ethics in a way I haven’t seen before. By framing the classic “Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” through free energy minimization, the author gives us a fresh mathematical lens for examining value trade-offs and population ethics.
What makes this post special isn’t just its technical contribution—though modeling ethical temperature as a parameter for equality vs total wellbeing is quite clever. The phase diagram showing different “walk away” regions bridges the gap between mathematical precision and moral intuition in an elegant way.
While I don’t think we’ll be using ethodynamics to make real-world policy decisions anytime soon, this kind of playful-yet-rigorous exploration helps build better abstractions for thinking about ethics. It’s the kind of creative modeling that could inspire novel approaches to value learning and population ethics.
Also, it’s just a super fun read. A great quote from the conclusion is “I have striven to make this paper a pleasant read by enriching it with all manners of enjoyable things: wit, calculus, and a non indifferent amount of imaginary child abuse”.
That is the type of writing I want to see more of! Very nice.