It seems weird to me that you would expect that if people had never used nuclear bombs before they would be more reluctant to use them. I would expect exactly the opposite (not that I am confident about this, but it’s what I would expect). Consider that the US used nuclear bombs immediately after it got them.
jsalvatier
Sebastian Hagen:
My intuition is that a good deal of people would take the psychopath pill. At least if the social consequences were minimal, which is besides the point.
Richard I think the difference is that in a world where one of them is miscalculating, that person can be shown that they are miscalculating and will then calculate correctly. However, in a world where their idealized calculations are actually significantly different, they would simply become enemies.
Moreover, even if they did have moralities, they would probably be very very different moralities, which means that the act of doing opposing things does not mean they are disagreeing, they are just maximizing for different criteria. The only reason it’s useful to talk about human’s disagreeing is that it is very likely that we are optimizing for the same criteria if you look deep enough.
I haven’t thought about this in-depth, but I almost always wait a while before I try to get off the plane.
IL My understanding was that Terminal Values are not something you ever observe directly (nobody can simply list their Terminal Values). Moral arguments change what use as our approximation to the Moral Calculation. However, if moral arguments did make our actual moral calculations diverge (that is, if our actual moral calculation is not a state function with respect to moral arguments) then that does disprove Eliezer’s meta-ethics (along with any hope for a useful notion of morality it seems to me).
Excellent analogy TGGP. (and I say that as a meat eater)
“you cannot come up with clever reasons why the gaps in your model don’t matter.” Sure, sometimes you can’t, but sometimes you can; sometimes there are things which seem relevant but which are genuinely irrelevant, and you can proceed without understanding them. I don’t think it’s always obvious which is which, but of course, it’s a good idea to worry about falsely putting a non-ignorable concept into the “ignorable” box.
Maybe people have an instinct to preserve their former strategies, because doing so often works. If you find out a new fact, you don’t usually have to abandon your whole set of beliefs. Are view shattering facts/arguments more common for abstract issues?
Didn’t we already have this exact post?
haha, that’s great!
OK, Tim Tyler’s link is interesting. I don’t know every much about evolution (basically what I’ve read here plus a little bit); can someone who knows more say whether this is an idea worth paying attention to? And if it’s not, why is it confused?
OK, Tim Tyler’s link is interesting. I don’t know every much about evolution (basically what I’ve read here plus a little bit); can someone who knows more say whether this is an idea worth paying attention to? And if it’s not, why is it confused?
I am sure this had been said, but I would really like a full-post RSS feed. I don’t want to come to the actual site every time I want to read a post; I just want to be able to read it on my RSS reader.
Remember that risk aversion does not exist in a value-vacuum. In normal circumstances you are risk averse in money because your first $100 is more valuable than your last $100. You have to solve the problem that wei_dai brought up in order to explain why you would be risk averse in #’s of simulations running.
I really appreciate this post. I am in the cryonics process, so it is nice to read an evaluation of the prospects. Even if I have made my decision for now, I could always cancel my life insurance.
Indeed, there are huge differences between how much good the best charities accomplish and how much good the middle of the road charities accomplish. I am not sure why this was downvoted.
Spanish has the same thing, but it’s spelled “eso” which means “that” and pronounced ‘eso’ with the e as in “bet”.
I recall one of the Evolutionary Psychology books I read discussing this (I think it was The Moral Animal). It claimed that polygamy was relatively beneficial to high quality males and low quality females; high quality males would end up with more mates and low quality females would end up with a higher quality mate than they would otherwise. For the same reasons, monogamy was relatively beneficial to low quality men and high quality females; low quality men would have a higher chance of finding a mate at all and high quality females would end up with a higher quality mate.
I second Robin’s request that you summarize your positions. It helps other folks organize and think about your ideas.