I already have a Logic Tournament ques ion and rule set built for middle and high schoolers if you want to use it.
SebastianG
Karma: 863
I’m now on number three.
Definitely on board with children shifting your value function a lot. One of them in particular (the newborn in the photo) shifts my value function more than I had anticipated.
In the recent interview Volodomyr Zelenskii said “if someone takes your child away, you’d bite his head off.” …Definitely true. And come to think of it… is that a Count Ugolino reference from the Divine Comedy?
Futarchy within Civilization 5.
When I participated in the Good Judgment Project’s IARPA research, we had to predict things about a game of civilization. Now, imagine if you had a game of civilization. Six players all playing against each other, and AI agents representing and having full access to each civilization’s data. Then, a common betting market for particular outcomes of the game. For example, by turn 100, who will have the largest army? What will culture be for this civilization at turn 150? Questions of that nature. If futarchy is largely based on betting markets, and AIs are can simulate various betting agents, then WHY NOT SANDBOX THEM AND TRY IT? Surely, someone is already working on this?
You can buy bulk tamiflu powder here: https://www.selleckchem.com/products/oseltamivir-phosphate-Tamiflu.html And instructions for preparation are here: https://dph.illinois.gov/content/dam/soi/en/web/idph/files/publications/tami-flu-flyer-050316.pdf $300 for 13 doses, which would last you about 6 days, dosing the recommended twice daily during a pandemic. Shelf life of the powder is 2 years. Would any medicine nerd sanity check that I am not missing something essential?
Incentives!
Don’t forget that reported cases of H5N1 are actually just reported cases, and that if you don’t test your cattle, you won’t have anything to report. It would be inconvenient if your cows had it, or any of your workers were sick with it (luckily tests aren’t really available), because there would be a pause and perhaps a loss in your already razor thin margins of operation. The incentive to track and understand aren’t there. So just let it rip through the herd. It doesn’t kill cows anyway...
From a historical perspective this is an excellent treasure cache. Truly when you are the cutting edge of something ideas, relationships, personality, and economics all truly come together to drive history.
I would not be surprised if lurking in the background of my thought is Tyler Cowen. He’s a huge influence on me. But I was thinking of specific examples. I don’t know of a good general history of “humanizing”.
What I had explicitly in mind was the historical development of automobile safety: seatbelts and airbags. There is a history of invention, innovation, deployment, and legal mandating that is long and varied for these.
How long did it take between the discovery of damaging chlorofluorocarbons and their demise? Or for asbestos and its abatement—how much does society pay for this process? What’s the delta between climate change research and renewables investment?
Essentially, many an externality can be internalized once it is named and drawn attention to and the costs are realized.
Well said.
The casual policing of positive comments about Sam Altman is unnecessary. Is this Sam Altman sneer club? Grok the author’s intent and choose your own example. SA is a polarizing figure, I get it. He can be a distraction to the point of an example, but in this case I thought it made sense.
It is something for authors to be on the lookout for though. Some examples invite “missing the point.” Sam Altman is increasingly one example of a name that invites distracted thoughts other than the point intended.
Yes I’m assuming a locally run open weight model will be useful, but not ultimately not sufficient for very complex tasks. I hope that something of the sort I describe can and will exist before too much regulation and optimized monetization occurs.
And we don’t have good social models of technology for really any technology, even retrospectively. So AI is certainly one we are not going to align with human flourishing in advance. When it comes to human flourishing the humanizing of technologies take a lot of time. Eventually we will get there, but it’s a process that requires a lot of individual actors making choices and “feature requests” from the world, features that promote human flourishing.
At my school all the students have to deposit their cell phones into pouches at the office the beginning of the day.. cell phone strictness alone does not create interpersonal chatter. You just also spend a lot of time and work creating an actual culture of conversation. It’s an explicitly taught skill!
Your data on the elasticity of behavior matches my experience well..
Oh weird! I didn’t create this one.
You are correct! Let me fix that!
I for one am definitely worse off.
I now have to read Scott on Substack instead of SSC.
Scott doesn’t write sweet things that could attract nasty flies anymore.
Very helpful comment!
Upon further reflection my example was ill-chosen. The flashlight clobbering example doesn’t trigger double-effect considerations, because there is only one immediate effect of the action—an unconscious intruder.I wanted to use a simple example that had two effects , but I think you rightly point out that claiming the home-owner didn’t intend to make the guy unconscious is specious sophistry. His unconsciousness and the safety of the home are two aspects of the same effect. The unconscious intruder entails the safety of the home.
If we claim they are different effects, then we would have to imagine that can be separated, but the safety of the home in the example requires the incapacitation of the intruder. There is no significant difference between claiming “I intended to knock the intruder out” and “I intended to do actions that make my home safe.”
But do notice that if we use the definition of intention from OP, which I will stick to, that our intention was to achieve a safe home by using force to incapacitate the intruder with the attitudes appropriate, no gleeful pleasure-taking in finally getting the chance to clobber someone. I think everything in your final paragraph is correct about attitude and steps taken minimize unnecessary harm.Our intention is the goal and will (which includes attitudes) to perform the acts to achieve that goal.
If we go to the terrorist compound case, then there are multiple effects: the deaths of the civilians and the death of the terrorist. These are separable in that the death of the civilians does not cause the death of terrorists nor vice versa. The same missile launch causes both. Because they are separable effects, it is possible to intend/will one effect, without willing the other effect.
My original example of the home intruder failed to identify two separable effects, but only a logical entailment of the clobbering. In that case, the considerations are simple proportionality, not DDE. Obviously, if I knock someone unconscious, I can’t then beat him to death. I have already achieved the goal. If I shoot him, he might die. But that may still be proportional. If I shoot him and then unload two magazine rounds into him, that would be disproportional.
What the SEP article means by “the good effect is not achieved through the bad effect” is not well-defined. But generally people in the lit interpret it to be the abstraction of “No capturing civilians to perform useful medical experiments.” I might rephrase the abstraction to, “No doing an action that has bad effects, in order to do a separate action that has good effects.” (But that’s tentative).
Thanks for commenting. Welcome.
You right on both accounts.
There are some agreed upon universal principles that societies do develop. “No ****ing the young. No randomly killing people.”
Categorical imperative is exactly what I what I had in mind. However, the CI is not based upon what’s acceptable to the actor or to the society at large, but rather according to reason. “Act only on the maxim which you can at the same time will that it should be universal law.”
Your action only makes your home safe by means of knocking him out. This is in fact a nice clean example of something that is not permitted by traditional formulations of the doctrine of double effect, at least not if knocking the intruder out is considered bad.
It is precisely this instance for which DDE was formulated: to explain why it is permitted! https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q64.A7.SCFlashlight clobbering produces the good effect and the bad effect. They are coterminous events, even though one is logically necessary for the other. As you say, “a safe home by means of an unconscious intruder.”
You are also right. I shouldn’t have used “Thomistic” in the first place. But because real discussion of this gets started in Thomas’ work (his account is unclear and too curt), I introduced the term, and thereby introduced a lot more confusion than I intended!
Double-effect is a broad term, not every moral philosophy has discussion of double-effect. Xunzi’s Confucianism, Kant’s Groundwork, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s Republic all of which I have read recently do not have such a discussion. Kant, I guess, kind of does, but for Kant consequences, allegedly, don’t bear on the morality of an action at all.
Of course, you and I whom I presume both hold utilitarianism in at least somewhat high regard expect ethical systems to deal with these questions in detail.
[1] I am not exactly sure what you think I think is meant by intent. Intent means goal. It is debated whether the specific actions taken by the agent should be considered part of intent or not. In the OP, I said it did, especially for epistemic reasons. I argued that specific actions chosen reveal the intent and that is why we should care about “the act itself.”Am I making any headway here?
I would like to find our cruxes, if we in fact have any.
BTW: double-effect discussion is not an RCC thing. It is used in hospital system decision-making, reformulated by professors at Harvard School of Medicine, and used as a framework by military professionals and international law courts.
Like, despite our internet space having a lot antipathy towards these types of discussions. Crafting a better and clearer framework is a worthy project and one I wish to do, at least for my own benefit if not others.
Standard modifies Thomistic, it’s not normative as in “this is the standard”, it’s descriptive, as in “this is how the philosophy books and articles on it generally work”.
I use that as a starting point, because it is the one which has discussion of double-effect. I privilege “double-effect” as a concept because it is the term which describes thinking through actions which have both positive and negative consequences, and also takes account of common sense things people care about like intent, means, and circumstances. Unless a person is a moral purist, one needs some account of double effect. Greater good benthamite utilitarianism would be one such account. I find such an account insufficient for guiding or analyzing action, but I’m not a priori beholden to any particular interpretation of what should be contained within an account of double-effect.
I think you misunderstood what is meant by intent. It’s not a statement one makes to oneself about what one is doing. That’d just be self-deception.
There are interesting questions about self-deception, though. As Bryan Caplan(?) recently wrote, “You never see politicians talk about ‘acceptable rates of human tragedy.’” To what extent do we play-act morality in order to generate the feeling of “clean hands?” When is that necessary? When, if ever, is it beneficial?
Sentence length is clearly a good proxy for the harder to measure “length of independent clause with its subordinates.”
Although, I think it is helpful to bear in mind that punctuation marks at the end of a sentence are only a proxy for this, one can miss the forest for the trees.