I think you need to read more of the writings here re: scepticism of one’s own beliefs
frankybegs
It does remove the flaw, because it’s a thought experiment. It doesn’t have to be plausible. It merely tests our evaluative judgements and intuitions.
I’m no expert on this sort of thing, but if I understood correctly this seems exactly right. The complexity of the expression of each observer case shouldn’t differ based on the assigned position of the observer in an imaginary order. They’re all observer 1a, 1b, 1c, surely?
I sort of went the other way from most people, in that while I came in thinking blackmail should be illegal (which I think is true of almost everyone who hasn’t really considered it in depth), I immediately was sympathetic to Robin’s argument.
But actually, by the end, I was more firmly convinced of the desirability of illegality. Zwi’s point about incentives is the most important consideration, I think: the prohibition of the most powerful material incentive to obtain and release information will make the average information release much likelier to be morally motivated, which in turns makes it more likely to be the kind of information release we want. Robin’s main contention, that it it’s a strange, arbitrarily one-sided sort of a rule, seems comparatively unimportant if it produces better outcomes.
So assuming there is an autobiographical element to this, I’m surprised. As a very clever person who knows a lot about what drugs people should or should not take, do you recommend trying DMT? I had it, without actually looking at the evidence myself, in the ‘has permanent negative effects on the mind so never ever do it’ category.
Whether or not you were able to suspend disbelief seems irrelevant, as the purpose of the post is not to tell a plausible story. It’s to illustrate certain concepts. In fact, if you had been able to suspend your disbelief entirely then the post would have failed, as your attention would have been on the story, rather than the underlying points being made.
Criticising a parable such as this for its implausibility is rather like doing the same for the trolley problem, or the utility monster. I think it misses the point.
Quick question about the NBA snippet- are you saying that someone who has had COVID is certain to be immune at this point? Even from being able to spread it? Or just those confirmed to have antibodies? Or did I misunderstand that segment?
I ask primarily because I’ve had COVID myself, and have been considering myself likely immune from illness arising from reinfection, but not necessarily from passing the virus on. There don’t seem to be many people willing to venture a confident opinion on this, but your implication seems to be that it’d be ridiculous to think that I am able to spread it. Am I misinterpreting you, or is there evidence I’m not aware of?
“it is a straightforwardly observable fact that, for many people, their shoulder advisors occasionally offer thoughts and insights that the people literally would not have thought of, otherwise.”
How can this be observable, let alone straightforwardly?
“severe disease” vs. “infected”
Note how crazy it is that there are 68% of people support mandatory vaccination but only 70% (2% more!) people support encouraging booster shots. There are almost no people with the ‘encourage people to do useful things but don’t force them to do those things’ position. Sigh.
This seems almost wilfully cynical, given that the poll actually says ‘COVID vaccination requirements’. That’s quite vague, and could plausibly not be all that much different from ‘encouraging booster shots’, e.g. if full vaccination is a requirement to enter certain events and venues.
How can you say it’s a coin flip, but also “the people saying there’s no evidence [of the affirmative] have no leg to stand on”?
Sure, literally speaking, there is some evidence.
But as far as I can tell, when people say ‘there’s no evidence that x’ they don’t mean that there is literally no evidence. There is some shred of compatible evidence with almost everything- with all sorts of ridiculous things that no-one rational believes.
As far as I can tell, when someone says there is ‘no evidence for x’ they mean that there is no evidential basis to believe x. The evidence doesn’t give you any reason to prefer the hypothesis.
That seems to me like a vaguer, and probably less useful, way of taking essentially the same position as yours. It kind of proves the benefit of putting concrete probabilities on things, but I don’t think it’s all that substantively different from your position.
But what I’m saying is that the fact isn’t observable. You can’t know what you would have thought of otherwise.
This seems like a pretty paradigmatic case of scope insensitivity.
But you can absolutely gather tons and tons of relevant and reliable evidence that allows you to have high confidence.
So when you say “you definitely can”..?
I would be interested in your explanation of how you can have any idea what you would have thought of otherwise. As far as I’m aware it’s a pretty basic and obvious truth of empirical inquiry that you really can’t make almost any reliable causal/counterfactual observations about yourself at all, for self evident methodological reasons. Why do you think this is an exception? And why is your confidence so high that you describe it as “definite”?
Preferring not to experience something is not the same thing as it being net negative. You are comparing it to a baseline of your normal life (because not experiencing it is simply continuing to experience your usual utility level).
I don’t think that that follows either, though. Because in practice temporarily not experiencing anything basically just means skipping to the next time you are experiencing something. So you may well intuit that you’d rather that any time the quality of your experience dips a lot.
For example, if you have a fine but mostly quite boring job, but your life outside of work is exceptionally blissful, you may well choose to ‘skip’ the work parts, to not experience them and just regain consciousness when you clock off to go live your life of luxury unendingly. That certainly doesn’t mean your time at work has negative value- it’s just nowhere near as good as the rest, so you’d rather stick to the bliss.
So I would say that no, actually this intuition merely proves that those experiences you’d prefer not to experience are below average, rather than below zero.
Hi, instead of clogging up the thread I just thought I’d alert you that I responded to MichaelStJules, which should function equally as a response to your comment.
In the comments, I don’t understand why people seem to be so swayed by the comparison of sleep deprivation to fasting or exercise. The only thing that tells you is that things that might seem harmful sometimes aren’t, which is obviously the case. It doesn’t speak at all to whether or not acute sleep deprivation is good for you no more than it speaks to whether not getting occasionally getting blitzed is good for you.
Which comments are you referring to?
And I thought it was clear enough that those analogies were meant to demonstrate that there’s no necessary connection between something feeling bad in the short term and being bad for you. There was no claim that things that feel bad in the short term are, therefore, good for you. As you point out, that would not follow. But the author never attempts to make that argument.
I think we can safely infer that that was not to be taken as a serious claim.
But by his own logic, it doesn’t belong in a post that offers itself for citation!
But for most people, those drivers are not the result of abstracted thought to the point where they could not be satisfied by an artificial child. Most people, it seems to me, just experience the symptoms of the biological imperative, as opposed to any higher-order desire to propagate their genetic material. So I would expect it to be possible to overcome the preference for genuine biological offspring by, for example, designing the artificial replacements to look like the “parents”- especially if that resemblance was actually derived *from* the parent e.g. by scanning their features- thereby satisfying one of the symptoms of the imperative.