Man, I feel like everyone is eventually going to get got by things like this
andrew sauer
Karma: 20
Sure that would fall into the category of “justice for practical reasons rather than for its own sake”
And so I have concluded that there is no basis on which to judge others as “to blame” or as “morally wrong”. Thus punishment makes no sense in terms of being “deserved”, and neither does vengeance (except possibly in terms of the vengeance seeker seeking their own emotional pleasure/relief/closure).
I think this is a pretty commonly held view on this site, and Yudkowsky would probably agree, especially since you clarified that you still see utility in justice for practical reasons, rather than for its own sake.
I unfortunately can’t find where right now, but I think Yudkowsky has said somewhere that he wants AI to create a utopia for everybody, and not punish criminals, no matter how horrible of people they were. After all, once an FAI has taken power, those criminals are no more threat to society because the FAI can always stop them from doing evil things, and thus there is no reason to try to rein them in with punishment, except for what is essentially spite/arbitrary emotional pleasure.
As for free will, I think it does exist, but not in the sense that libertarians want it to. It exists in a more practical sense, it’s more something like “if we made a law against this thing it might actually deter people” than “people are metaphysically able to take different choices in a way which somehow is neither deterministic nor random”.
I dunno, man, my angst at the state of the universe isn’t that it is meaningless, but that it is all too meaningful and horrible and there is no reason for the horror to ever stop.
Surely the one with the bumper sticker didn’t like it either, and was using it as an analogy to attack some other argument?
At least, that’s what I’d hope.
I think this is a confusion of two different types of thinking. One is the classical thought of one being responsible only for the consequences of one’s individual actions. If you think of yourself as an individual making independent decisions like this, then you are justified in thinking that there is a 90% chance of heads upon seeing a green room: 90% of individuals in green rooms, in expectation, are there when the coin flips heads.(note that if you modify the problem so that the outcomes of the bet only apply to the people making it, the bet becomes favorable even in advance, regardless of whether the agents are altruistic or selfish).
However, in this case you cannot claim that your “yes” decision has utility based on the result of the entire group’s response to the question. If you did, then in heads flips, if all 18 people say “yes”, all 18 people will claim that the utility of their action was $18, but only $18 of utility was gained by the group in total as a consequence of all these decisions, so they cannot all be right.(Note that if you modify the problem so that you really are the only one responsible for the decision, like by saying that everyone in green rooms except one person is mind-controlled to say “yes”, then saying “yes” really is the right decision for that free-willed person, even in advance.)
It is also possible to reason in a TDT sort of way, acting as though you are making decisions for all identical copies of yourself. This is effectively defining yourself, as an agent, as the set of all identical copies of yourself with identical input. In this case, it does make sense to take responsibility for the decision of the entire group, but it no longer makes sense to do an anthropic update: you as an agent, as a set of copies of yourself seeing green rooms, would exist whether or not the coin came up heads, and would make the same observations.
In conclusion, it makes sense to do an anthropic update if you think of yourself as an individual, it makes sense to take utilitarian responsibility for the whole group of actions if you think of yourself as a group of identical copies, but in neither case does it make sense to do both, which is what you would need to justify saying “yes” in this situation.
A simulation basilisk
Okay, maybe the NUs wouldn’t interpret the problem as I phrased it in this way, but the problem can be slightly changed to have a similar conclusion, by saying that the sadists are mildly annoyed when the guy isn’t being tortured, instead of wanting it for their pleasure.
This situation is more like “they eat babies, but they don’t eat that many, to the extent that it produces net utility given their preferences for continuing to do it.”
I’m referring to the fact that utility functions are equivalent under positive affine transformations (if you add a constant and multiply it by a positive constant, the UF remains the same in the sense that it has the same preference in every situation)
Assuming we are computing the utility of an outcome by assigning a utility to each person and then summing them, adding a constant value to any person’s utility doesn’t change the comparison between outcomes, because the net effect is just to add a constant to the utility of each outcome(as long as the person we are adding a constant value to exists in every outcome).
Therefore, we can convert the situation to negative utilitarian without functionally changing it, by subtracting the maximum utility from each person, ensuring that everyone’s utility will be negative in every outcome. We can also convert it to positive utilitarian by subtracting the minimum in a similar way.
This analysis assumes that there is a maximum and a minimum utility, and that every outcome has the same set of people in it, so if these assumptions break there may be relevant differences.
I’m not sure how negative utilitarianism changes things. Positive and negative utilitarianism are equivalent whenever UFs are bounded and there are no births or deaths as a result of the decision.
Negative utilitarianism interprets this situation as the sadists suffering from boredom which can be slightly alleviated by knowing that the guy they hate is suffering.
Although under strict preference utilitarianism, wouldn’t change in values/moral progress be considered bad, for the same reason a paperclip maximizer would consider it bad?
I should say we assume that we’re deciding which one a stable, incorruptible AI should choose. I’m pretty sure any moral system which chose torture in situations like this would not lead to good outcomes if applied in a practical circumstance, but that’s not what I’m wondering about, I’m just trying to figure out which outcome is better. In short, I’m asking an axiological question, not a moral one. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
My intuition strongly says that the torture is worse here even though I choose torture in the original, but I don’t have an argument for this because my normal axiological system, preference utilitarianism, seems to unavoidably say torture is better.
[Question] Torture vs Specks: Sadist version
Just shows how effective the disagreement is at getting people to care deeply about it I guess
Well, if it’s eternal and sufficiently powerful, a kind of omnibenevolence might follow, insofar as it exerts a selection pressure on the things it feels benevolent towards, which over time will cause them to predominate.
Unless it decides that it wants to keep things it hates around to torture them
This is often overlooked here (perhaps with good reason as many examples will be controversial). Scenarios of this kind can be very, very bad, much worse than a typical unaligned AI like Clippy.
For example, I would take Clippy over an AI whose goal was to spread biological life throughout the universe any day. I expect this may be controversial even here, but see https://longtermrisk.org/the-importance-of-wild-animal-suffering/#Inadvertently_Multiplying_Suffering for why I think this way.
You might not even need to go to a different Tegmark universe lol, given that multiple people have independently come up with this idea
I wonder if anyone has tried to argue for the existence of God in a similar way to this article?
Holy shit I have rarely seen anything this terrifying. Every country is already doing this