I said, at the end, was that I’d better be getting paid for this, and they all laughed and said of course I was, lots of money, at least as much as my parents were getting, because children are sapient beings too.
This seems like a rather hypocritical thing to say, unless dath ilan had some clever idea for how to implement this compensation that I’m failing to see right now.
If I was a subject in this experiment, there would be no amount of money you could pay me to retroactively agree that this was a fair deal. There’s just nothing money can buy that would be worth the years of deception and the hours of mortal terror.
If it was earth it’d be different, because earth has absolutely dire problems that can be solved by money, and given enough millions, that’d take precedence over my own mental wellbeing. But absent such moral obligations, it’s just not worth it for me.
So do parents surreptitiously ask their children what sum of money they’d demand as compensation for participating in a wide variety of hypothetical experiments, some real, some fake, years before they move to a town like this? Seems rather impractical and questionable, considering how young the children would be when they made their choice.
Your feelings about lies depend on the context—for example I assume you’d be willing to play the game “Two Truths and a Lie”, and you would not feel harmed by the certainty that someone is lying to you? In fact people enjoy the game, since seeing through the lie is a fun puzzle. Now outside of games like that, the majority of the time someone lies to you on Earth, it’s to profit at your expense—they want to take your stuff, your vote, etc. So with the exception of games, you’ve quite reasonably developed strong negative emotions about being lied to, and those emotions may transfer even to the rarer cases where the lie isn’t directly hurting you. But dath ilan is extremely high trust and high coordination; from childhood you will experience that the vast majority of the times someone lies to you, it’s clearly-in-retrospect for your own benefit, and the vast majority of the remaining times, it’s solidly for the benefit of Civilization and they’re willing to eventually tell you the truth and pay for your inconvenience. So while you still try to see through lies whenever you can, it’s much more like the Earth game setting: most lies are just harmless puzzles. So you don’t grow up with the same internalized feelings that anyone lying to you is hurting you? (Which also reduces the price they’d have to pay you, since they’re not trying to compensate you for an Earth-level of negative emotions.)
I am fairly confident that I would incredibly strongly dislike being lied to like this even if it were „for my own benefit“. The source of my disgust for nonconsensual lies does not seem to me to stem from a history of such lies hurting me. Rather, they just feel inherently hurtful. That’s on top of the distress I would feel from years of keeping my mouth shut and my head down regarding the fake discrimination while secretly crying about it sometimes.
Also, there‘s still the hours of mortal terror that this scenario entails.
At least in this scenario, I don’t think the lies are for your benefit, they’re for Civilization; and the adults involved do think it’s appropriate to compensate you financially for being put through it, which implies they do believe the costs it imposes on you exceed the benefits to you.
The other scenarios alluded to in Eliezer’s above comment… well, I’d be interested to see how they play out. I could believe that having multiple experiences of “being gaslit and eventually figuring it out” was a good thing on average… but I expect there’d be individual cases where it sucked pretty hard. (If dath ilan was really good at psychology, maybe they could tell who would respond well vs badly beforehand?) Details matter: exactly what is being lied about, how important it is, how long it goes, how pervasive it is (e.g. does the child have any completely trustworthy friends who haven’t been in on any of the scams?), and so on. For example, if it was “Here’s a once-a-year festival at which there will be the following cool physical event”, and the claimed event is physically impossible (say, it violates conservation of momentum) and faked (which the child is hoped to figure out after learning some physics), that seems relatively harmless.
A thing that feels a bit confused in this discussion is… currently the default state is that adults gaslighting kids… just happens all the time? One possible world you could try to engineer is a world where this never happens. Another world is one where it happens deliberately in a controlled fashion that teaches valuable life lessons and leaves children more resilient. The question is whether the former is actually tractable.
and the adults involved do think it’s appropriate to compensate you financially for being put through it, which implies they do believe the costs it imposes on you exceed the benefits to you.
False! It just means that Civilization is benefiting and considers itself obliged to share a fair portion of those gains.
Oh, I see. Perhaps something isomorphic to the following: we suppose Civilization gains $1 billion in value from the results, and we imagine the kids were in a position to negotiate a payment for their services rendered, and we figure they could have gotten $N hundred million, so we decide they deserve that much and divide it among the kids. (Maybe the parents did some actual negotiating, on their own behalves at least.)
Presumably, from behind the Rawlsian veil, you might accept this deal in exchange for avoiding dystopia. I have not read the Dath Ilan glowfic, but I infer they are genetically/memetically engineered to me much more psychologically robust than us.
Also note, we do much worse to children all the time.
But yeah, it’s sort of icky to live in a town where all the adults are conspiring to lie to you, but the vast majority of children in this world are not being lied to. And I think they made a lot of money, presumably the amount of money this rather-competent society predicted would be their “cheerful price”.
I would certainly accept such treatment for 2 million dollars, for example.
Though, this fellow seems to enjoy having this story to tell—so perhaps his cheerful price was rather low!
I would certainly accept such treatment for 2 million dollars, for example.
On earth, 200 million and I might consider it, though it sure wouldn‘t be my cheerful price. On dath ilan, not for any sum. Even fiat access to all economic output wouldn‘t be worth it.
And I think they made a lot of money, presumably the amount of money this rather-competent society predicted would be their “cheerful price”.
If you try to solve this with prediction, and have any kind of feedback mechanism in place where the project gets docked money in proportion to how much predicted cheerful prices diverged from occasionally measured actual cheerful prices, I expect your market to tell you that this project is prohibitively costly, because you can‘t get the chance of including children like me small enough.
In addition, I don‘t know about you, but I would have objections to this situation even if a perfect/extremely good prediction mechanism was in place. Correlating events with my actual preferences is one reason I want people to ask for my consent before doing things to me, and perfect prediction takes care of that. But it is not the only reason. I also value being the person with final say inherently.
So if I were to be denied my right to deny consent, and told in the same sentence that of course I‘m a sapient being too and my preferences matter, it would taste rather bitter.
Also note, we do much worse to children all the time.
Yes, but most of it doesn’t happen because approximately everyone in the world got together and shared all their knowledge and thought really hard about it and talked about it and then still decided it was a good idea.
There’s just nothing money can buy that would be worth the years of deception and the hours of mortal terror.
Ridiculous. I would do this at least a dozen times for a billion dollars. This is practically the default society in human history. You would get over it.
I think I can model my own preferences better than you can, thank you very much. Regardless of whether I‘d „get over it“ or not, this experience would bother me more than anything extraordinary I can think of that I could plausibly buy in dath ilan‘s economy would please me.
This seems like a rather hypocritical thing to say, unless dath ilan had some clever idea for how to implement this compensation that I’m failing to see right now.
If I was a subject in this experiment, there would be no amount of money you could pay me to retroactively agree that this was a fair deal. There’s just nothing money can buy that would be worth the years of deception and the hours of mortal terror.
If it was earth it’d be different, because earth has absolutely dire problems that can be solved by money, and given enough millions, that’d take precedence over my own mental wellbeing. But absent such moral obligations, it’s just not worth it for me.
So do parents surreptitiously ask their children what sum of money they’d demand as compensation for participating in a wide variety of hypothetical experiments, some real, some fake, years before they move to a town like this? Seems rather impractical and questionable, considering how young the children would be when they made their choice.
All dath ilani kids grow up with enough adult gaslighting that they don’t just grow up to believe anything authority tells them.
This was just the brand on offer in a particular village.
That seems to make it worse, not better?
Your feelings about lies depend on the context—for example I assume you’d be willing to play the game “Two Truths and a Lie”, and you would not feel harmed by the certainty that someone is lying to you? In fact people enjoy the game, since seeing through the lie is a fun puzzle. Now outside of games like that, the majority of the time someone lies to you on Earth, it’s to profit at your expense—they want to take your stuff, your vote, etc. So with the exception of games, you’ve quite reasonably developed strong negative emotions about being lied to, and those emotions may transfer even to the rarer cases where the lie isn’t directly hurting you. But dath ilan is extremely high trust and high coordination; from childhood you will experience that the vast majority of the times someone lies to you, it’s clearly-in-retrospect for your own benefit, and the vast majority of the remaining times, it’s solidly for the benefit of Civilization and they’re willing to eventually tell you the truth and pay for your inconvenience. So while you still try to see through lies whenever you can, it’s much more like the Earth game setting: most lies are just harmless puzzles. So you don’t grow up with the same internalized feelings that anyone lying to you is hurting you? (Which also reduces the price they’d have to pay you, since they’re not trying to compensate you for an Earth-level of negative emotions.)
I am fairly confident that I would incredibly strongly dislike being lied to like this even if it were „for my own benefit“. The source of my disgust for nonconsensual lies does not seem to me to stem from a history of such lies hurting me. Rather, they just feel inherently hurtful. That’s on top of the distress I would feel from years of keeping my mouth shut and my head down regarding the fake discrimination while secretly crying about it sometimes.
Also, there‘s still the hours of mortal terror that this scenario entails.
Given your perspective, you may enjoy: Lies Told To Children: Pinocchio, Which I found posted here.
Personally I think I’d be fine with the bargain, but having read that alternative continuation, I think I better understand how you feel.
At least in this scenario, I don’t think the lies are for your benefit, they’re for Civilization; and the adults involved do think it’s appropriate to compensate you financially for being put through it, which implies they do believe the costs it imposes on you exceed the benefits to you.
The other scenarios alluded to in Eliezer’s above comment… well, I’d be interested to see how they play out. I could believe that having multiple experiences of “being gaslit and eventually figuring it out” was a good thing on average… but I expect there’d be individual cases where it sucked pretty hard. (If dath ilan was really good at psychology, maybe they could tell who would respond well vs badly beforehand?) Details matter: exactly what is being lied about, how important it is, how long it goes, how pervasive it is (e.g. does the child have any completely trustworthy friends who haven’t been in on any of the scams?), and so on. For example, if it was “Here’s a once-a-year festival at which there will be the following cool physical event”, and the claimed event is physically impossible (say, it violates conservation of momentum) and faked (which the child is hoped to figure out after learning some physics), that seems relatively harmless.
A thing that feels a bit confused in this discussion is… currently the default state is that adults gaslighting kids… just happens all the time? One possible world you could try to engineer is a world where this never happens. Another world is one where it happens deliberately in a controlled fashion that teaches valuable life lessons and leaves children more resilient. The question is whether the former is actually tractable.
False! It just means that Civilization is benefiting and considers itself obliged to share a fair portion of those gains.
Oh, I see. Perhaps something isomorphic to the following: we suppose Civilization gains $1 billion in value from the results, and we imagine the kids were in a position to negotiate a payment for their services rendered, and we figure they could have gotten $N hundred million, so we decide they deserve that much and divide it among the kids. (Maybe the parents did some actual negotiating, on their own behalves at least.)
Presumably, from behind the Rawlsian veil, you might accept this deal in exchange for avoiding dystopia. I have not read the Dath Ilan glowfic, but I infer they are genetically/memetically engineered to me much more psychologically robust than us.
Also note, we do much worse to children all the time.
But yeah, it’s sort of icky to live in a town where all the adults are conspiring to lie to you, but the vast majority of children in this world are not being lied to. And I think they made a lot of money, presumably the amount of money this rather-competent society predicted would be their “cheerful price”.
I would certainly accept such treatment for 2 million dollars, for example.
Though, this fellow seems to enjoy having this story to tell—so perhaps his cheerful price was rather low!
On earth, 200 million and I might consider it, though it sure wouldn‘t be my cheerful price. On dath ilan, not for any sum. Even fiat access to all economic output wouldn‘t be worth it.
If you try to solve this with prediction, and have any kind of feedback mechanism in place where the project gets docked money in proportion to how much predicted cheerful prices diverged from occasionally measured actual cheerful prices, I expect your market to tell you that this project is prohibitively costly, because you can‘t get the chance of including children like me small enough.
In addition, I don‘t know about you, but I would have objections to this situation even if a perfect/extremely good prediction mechanism was in place. Correlating events with my actual preferences is one reason I want people to ask for my consent before doing things to me, and perfect prediction takes care of that. But it is not the only reason. I also value being the person with final say inherently.
So if I were to be denied my right to deny consent, and told in the same sentence that of course I‘m a sapient being too and my preferences matter, it would taste rather bitter.
I’m wondering if I would accept a price even if I got to opt in to an experiment.
Might be, to overthrow a government.
Yes, but most of it doesn’t happen because approximately everyone in the world got together and shared all their knowledge and thought really hard about it and talked about it and then still decided it was a good idea.
Ridiculous. I would do this at least a dozen times for a billion dollars. This is practically the default society in human history. You would get over it.
I think I can model my own preferences better than you can, thank you very much. Regardless of whether I‘d „get over it“ or not, this experience would bother me more than anything extraordinary I can think of that I could plausibly buy in dath ilan‘s economy would please me.