I cannot speak for Eliezer, but I can speak from my experience. Because you are reading what appears to be only one side of an issue, you cannot get all the facts. Whatever he may write, he cannot write beyond the constraints of the information he currently possesses. If you want to have the whole picture, you need to talk to, and observe, everything, and everyone, not just this blog. So, perhaps Eliezer is beating a straw man. Go talk to some more people, gather some more information, and find out.
Insert_Idionym_Here
Karma: 87
I don’t think “The Incomplete Enchanter” is hard Science Fiction.
How is “unquestioning reductionism” possible?
Guys play it too.
I missed newton by over 150 years. Pray for a curve.
… What is it that frequentists do, again? I’m a little out of touch.
You haven’t said anything. Make a relevant point.
Better late than never.
No, I’m pretty sure it makes you notice. It’s “enough”. “barely enough”, but still “enough”. However, that doesn’t seem to be what’s really important. If I consider you to be correct in your interpretation of the dilemma, in that there are no other side effects, then yes, the 3^^^3 people getting dust in their eyes is a much better choice.
That is in no way what was said. Also, the idea of an event that somehow manages to have no effect aside from being bad is… insanely contrived. More contrived than the dilemma itself.
However, let’s say that instead of 3^^^3 people getting dust in their eye, 3^^^3 people experience a single nano-second of despair, which is immediately erased from their memory to prevent any psychological damage. If I had a choice between that and torturing a person for 50 years, then I would probably choose the former.
Yes. I believe that because any suffering caused by the 3^^^3 dust specks is spread across 3^^^3 people, it is of lesser evil than torturing a man for 50 years. Assuming there to be no side effects to the dust specks.
I don’t agree. The existence 3^^^3 people, or 3^^^3 dust specks, is impossible because there isn’t enough matter, as you said. The existence of an event that has only effects that are tailored to fit a particular person’s idea of ‘bad’ does not fit my model of how causality works. That seems like a worse infraction, to me.
However, all of that is irrelevant, because I answered the more “interesting question” in the comment you quoted. To be blunt, why are we still talking about this?
No-one asked for a general explanation.
The best term I have found, the one that seems to describe the way I evaluate situations the most accurately, is consequentialism. However, that may still be inaccurate. I don’t have a fully reliable way to determine what consequentialism entails; all I have is Wikipedia, at the moment.
I tend to just use cost-benefit analysis. I also have a mental, and quite arbitrary, scale of what things I do and don’t value, and to what degree, to avoid situations where I am presented with multiple, equally beneficial choices. I also have a few heuristics. One of them essentially says that given a choice between a loss that is spread out amongst many, and an equal loss divided amongst the few, the former is the more moral choice. Does that help?
At what point is utilitarianism not completely arbitrary?
I believe I suggested earlier that I don’t know what moral theory I hold, because I am not sure of the terminology. So I may, in fact, be a utilitarian, and not know it, because I have not the vocabulary to say so. I asked “At what point is utilitarianism not completely arbitrary?” because I wanted to know more about utilitarianism. That’s all.
Thank you.
I… Er… What. Where did the whole ‘amplitude’ thing come from? I mean, it looks a lot like they are vectors in the complex plane, but why are they two dimensional? Why not three? Or one? I just don’t get the idea of what amplitude is supposed to describe.
Okay, so where did those arrows come from? I see how the graph second from the top corresponds to the amount of time a particle, were particles to exist, would take if it bounced, if it could bounce, because it’s not actually a particle, off of a specific point on the mirror. But how does one pull the arrows out of that graph?
Thank you very much.
If 3^^^3 people get dust in their eye, an extraordinary number of people will die. I’m not thinking even 1% of those affected will die, but perhaps 0.000000000000001% might, if that. But when dealing with numbers this huge, I think the death toll would measure greater than 7 billion. Knowing this, I would take the torture.