Wow, you’ve laid out the benefits very nicely. I’d like to try it this Sunday. But I have some personal projects that are very fun and take up most of my free time. Should I stay away from those too?
cousin_it
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I’m normalizing on my effort—eventually, on my pleasure and pain as a common currency. That’s not quite the same as normalizing on chickens, because the number of dead chickens in the world isn’t directly qualia.
But if you can answer questions like “how much money would I pay to save a human life under the first hypothesis” and “under the second hypothesis”, which seem like questions you should be able to answer, then the conversion stops being a problem.
Sure. Though learning from verbal descriptions of hypothetical behavior doesn’t seem much harder than learning from actual behavior—they’re both about equally far from “utility function on states of the universe” :-)
Yes, less privacy leads to more conformity. But I don’t think that will disproportionately help small projects that you like. Mostly it will help big projects that feed on conformity—ideologies and religions.
Implication: more generally available information about what strategies people are using helps “our” enemies more than it helps “us”. (This seems false to me, for notions of “us” that I usually use in strategy)
Maybe I’m misreading and you’re arguing that it will help us and enemies equally? But even that seems impossible. If Big Bad Wolf can run faster than Little Red Hood, mutual visibility ensures that Little Red Hood gets eaten.
Let’s get back to the world of angels problem. You do seem to be saying that removing privacy would get us closer to a world of angels. Why?
We’ve been over this:
steven0461: Who cares about the question what the robot “actually wants”? Certainly not the robot. Humans care about the question what they “actually want”, but that’s because they have additional structure that this robot lacks.
Wei_Dai: In other words, our “actual values” come from our being philosophers, not our being consequentialists.
That’s the right answer as far as I can tell. Humans do have a part that “actually wants” something—we can introspect on our own desires—and the thermostat analogy discards it. Yes, that means any good model of our desires must also be a model of our introspective abilities, which makes the problem much harder.
I think you have been. In every comment you try to cast doubt on justifications for privacy.
I agree that privacy would be less necessary in a hypothetical world of angels. But I don’t find it convincing that removing privacy would bring about such a world, and arguments of this type (let’s discard a human right like property / free speech / privacy, and a world of angels will result) have a very poor track record.
I’d call it concentrated vs. diffuse curiosity instead. Strong desire to know one particular thing vs. many weaker desires to know many things.
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You receive a big wrapped gift but can’t unwrap it until tomorrow. This is concentrated curiosity. (Less pleasant variant: the results of your health test are due tomorrow.)
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You unwrap the gift and it’s a strange device with a big green button. You wonder what will happen if you press it? This is still concentrated curiosity.
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You press the button and a panel opens up, showing fifty more buttons. Now your curiosity has become more diffuse and exploratory, spread out across all the buttons.
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I think if you try weightlifting twice a week for a month and pay a lot of attention to form, there’s a >20% chance that by the end of the month you’ll find the fun in it and keep going. Though I agree that going to a gym can be a hassle. Luckily we have a gym at the office, so I just go every day.
Exercise can also make you stronger, more flexible, improve your posture, give you muscle mass that burns fat just by existing, teach your mind that you can overcome difficulties, etc. Biking to work every morning has almost none of these benefits. Why not spend the same 30min/day on something that gives you all the benefits?
Wow, if this is you writing metafiction a la Northern Caves, count me in.
Compare photos of sprinters (anaerobic) to marathon runners (aerobic) and ask yourself who you’d rather look like.
It’s great that you’ve seen past your philosophy and noticed another living person. That realization has blown your mind and rewritten your values. Good job! But here’s a hint: there are many other alive people in the world. Imagine how full of value your life would become if you removed some more of your philosophy and noticed a few more people!
I think taking risks is okay if it’s fun, but biking on car roads isn’t very fun, so why? And I’m not sure about the exercise benefits: breathing heavily while next to cars is probably more harm than help, and having aerobic as your only exercise is overrated anyway. So I guess in your place I’d choose the most pleasant way to commute, without regard for risk or exercise or whatever. If it’s still biking, then fine!
Yeah, it came across.
the kind of cognition Malfoy used in hpmor to think about whether magic is heritable
Magic is heritable in hpmor. The only question was whether it’s binary (one gene) or continuous (many genes, leading to a spectrum of blood purity). If you want to teach that kind of critical thinking, get ready for the fireworks when your students start asking which abilities in our world are heritable, binary or continuous.
Until now no one has managed to make political discussion healthy. There’s certainly room for experiment, e.g. I’d like to see a space for political discussion with a norm like “please stick to easily checkable claims”. But norms like “please speak in good faith” or “please try to be rational in a vague general way” have been already tried and found not to work.