I think, more or less, yes. But, just in case high-schoolers who have had trouble in the past are reading this, we should give as much specific advise as we can: Don’t expect university to be easier in social terms; there are less people ready to score a quick status-boost from putting you down, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be charitable with their friendship. I think the most important piece of advise is “join a club.” Really—it’s the quickest and most effective way to hack yourself out of loneliness.
APMason
Karma: 578
I don’t think that’s right. A TDT agent wants people to deduce that TDT would not endorse the action, and therefore TDT would not endorse the action. If it did, it would be the equivalent of defecting in the Prisoner’s Dilemma—the other guy would simulate you defecting even if he cooperated, and therefore defect himself, and you end up choosing a sub-optimal option. You can’t say “the other guy’s going to cooperate so I’ll defect”—the other guy’s only going to cooperate if he thinks you are (and he thinks you wouldn’t if he defects), and if your decision theory is open to the consideration “the other guy’s going to cooperate so I’ll defect”, the other won’t think you’ll cooperate if he does, and will therefore defect. You can’t assume that you’ve thought it all through one more time than the other guy.
Your claim that harms adversely impact reproduction is controversial because of the obvious counter examples. X has already lost their ability to reproduce. X may not even care about reproducing. It’s still harmful to X to strap him down and torture him. Therefore X can be harmed without adversely affecting his ability to reproduce. This is not to mention the imaginable beings who can undergo suffering (and this is not a claim that harm reduces to suffering alone, but that suffering is a kind of harm), but which were not built by natural selection, and which don’t have biology even remotely related to reproducing. There are also counter examples going the other way, equally as obvious. Y doesn’t want to have children. She uses a contraception. She avoids pregnancy. Her ability to reproduce has been impeded, but she quite clearly has not been harmed (indeed, she has been liberated from the shackles of biology by glorious technology).
I don’t think anyone would claim that adverse affects to reproductive ability are completely orthogonal with harm—perhaps a decrease in your ability to reproduce would be more likely to be harmful than not—but to be honest, it doesn’t even look to me like the correlation’s all that strong. What seems downright obvious, though, is that one does not reduce to the other.
Also, natural selection doesn’t care about whether I can reproduce. It’s not a caring-type thing. It’s an optimisation process which doesn’t make use of caring at any point during the process, and I would only care about what natural selection selects if it were important to me to be naturally selected. And why would it be? Producing APMason-like forms is not even close to being my biggest concern.
Okay, you seem to be claiming something and then claiming that you’re not, so just answer me this: if meth addicts systematically out-breed not-meth-addicts, is it still possible their meth addiction is harming them?
I’m not really sure what you’re trying to argue. At first, it seemed fairly obvious that you were trying to say that harm is that which reduces reproduction. Now it seems you’re saying that harm is that, which, if widely inflicted upon a group, probabilistically reduces that group’s rate of reproduction—but I don’t want to take that for granted. Maybe I’m misinterpreting you again. If suppose what you could be saying is that harming people, in general, tends to make them have less children. I don’t in fact think it’s obvious that there’s any such correlation—having lots of children is not generally a sign of high levels of wealth, health, income, education or freedom—but let’s assume that there is. What does that have to do with drug addiction. When we look at a drug addict we don’t think “poor guy—probably won’t have many kids”, nor indeed would we accept a demonstration of his high reproductive capacity as evidence that being a drug addict isn’t harmful. So, confused as I am, could you state your position one more time, as clearly as you can?
Well, now it seems once again that you’re using reproductive success as your criteria for whether or not somebody is being harmed, but you say that’s not what you believe. Maybe it’s better to go full thought-experiment on this, so:
There is a drug called Reproductene. Taking it causes extreme pain, permanently disables your ability to feel happiness, damages your memory, destroys your imagination, and causes you to have strong cravings for more Reproductene. It also creates a new human being with 50% of your genetic code every time you take it. This human being is created an adult already addicted to Reproductene. After taking a hundred doses of the drug and creating a hundred half-copies of you you die. Reproductene is in large supply. Is taking Reproductene harmful?
Okay. I get it now. If you really were just saying that bad things happening to people make it less likely they’ll reproduce, well… I don’t necessarily agree. I don’t have the relevant data. But that’s not the position I thought I was arguing against before, I don’t think it can be resolved without more information, and I’m not sure it’s all that important to resolve it. I’ll assume that you’re answer to the Reproductene question is that, yes, it’s harmful, unless you say otherwise.
I have to say, I’m not actually sure that is trivially true, but I was confused as well.
Very cool.
The original poster did say, “but can make them feel better about it by torturing everyone else”. The point is that the maximin principle implies that making the lives or many people much worse in order to make the life of a single person marginally better is justified as long as the one who benefits is the worst off among all people.
I quess you could call it neutral.
I’ll only speak for myself, but ‘everybody dead’ gives an output nowhere near zero on my utility function. Everybody dead is awful. It’s not the worst imaginable outcome, but it is really really really low in my preference ordering. I can see why you would think it’s neutral—there’s nobody to be happy but there’s nobody to suffer either. However, if you think that people dying is a bad thing in itself, this outcome really is horrifying.
Or at least injustice has stopped being served.
You don’t find deserts beautiful?
Well, this isn’t really something we can argue about, but I can’t say I find deserts beautiful because of how lively they are. Seems to me like eerie, silent vastness is exactly what I find appealing about them.
Is it bad that that sounds to me more like an argument against undereducated juries than against the use of Bayes in court?
Yes. It’s important to remember that guilty defendants aren’t the same thing as convicted defendants. A rational decision-maker using Bayes’ theorem wouldn’t necessarily put all that much weight on the decisions of past juries, knowing as we do that they’re not using Bayes’ theorem at all. And, of course, a Bayesian would need exactly the same amount of evidence to convict a black defendant as they did a white defendant. That question is whether skin colour counts as evidence.
Strange thing about this is, if I’ve calculated it right, the average probability estimate of Guede’s guilt is only ~87%. It seems to me that if this were your real probability estimate of his guilt, and you were on the jury at the guy’s trial, you would be obligated to vote innocent. If you operate on the basis that a 13% chance of innocence is not a reasonable doubt, about thirteen out of every hundred people who go to jail will be innocent. That is (let me check) more than one in ten, which strikes me as rather a lot. I think my own estimate of Guede’s guilt is above 99%, so I would vote guilty, but I’m surprised the average here is so low.
I agree that it wouldn’t be hugely surprising. I meant it strikes me as higher than acceptable.
Yes indeed. My mistake.
Although I largely agree with what you’ve said here for the socially inept, I think the prevalence of the sentiment of that final statement may well lead to a great many people being disappointed when they arrive at university and find themselves more isolated than ever.