A thought experiment is a lot like a regular experiment, in that you need to isolate the variables being tested if you actually care about answering the question. All of those other factors (i.e. societal implications of torture, the physics which might allow you to inconvenience 3^^^3 people, the effects of mass eye irritation on the annual GDP of Peru) are all irrelevant to the issue; is an incomprehensibly huge amount of harm which is very widely distributed preferable to a large amount of harm inflicted on one person? And, in either case, why?
In other words, what would your answer be in the Least Convenient Possible World?
Hey everyone, nice to finally join the party.
My name’s Pat, I’m a 22 year old man studying biochemistry at the undergraduate level, and I’ve been an on-and-off lurker for at least the last five years. My two favorite animals are the platypus and the water bear, my favorite food is calamari and I love cheesy action movies un-ironically.
If I had to put together a narrative of how I became a rationalist and made it to this site, it would look something like this (1);
My parents were quite a bit smarter than they were emotionally stable or perceptive, so they raised me as an atheist while forgetting the somewhat-important step of not making non-existence sound utterly horrifying (2). From a fairly young age I had a nearly paralyzing fear of death, and being a smart arrogant kid I figured that if anyone ought to live forever it should be me. I remember on my twelfth birthday talking to a few of my friends and deciding that genetic modification would probably allow for practical immortality before brain uploading was developed. That thought led immediately to the next; that I would be the person to solve mortality forever. (Yeah, I was pretty childish back then.)
I had already been interested in science beforehand, and with a powerful drive like that spent an inordinate amount of time studying so that I could hit ‘escape velocity’ in my lifetime. Even as the fear evaporated later on and I became indifferent as to whether I lived or died the interest in biology remained and intensified, and overall it has served me well. The scientific method helped me nail down my more intuitive-associative style of thinking into a logical framework while my passion helped me set clear goals for the future.
But I wouldn’t say I was really a rationalist until about a year or so ago, when three key events combined to shape me into the person I am now. The first was reading this site and hearing about Bayes Theorem for the first time in about 2008-2009, which helped me structure my understanding of science in a clearer way and for which I owe Mr Yudkowski a huge debt. The second was recovering from a severe depression caused by my anxiety disorder about a year later; unsurprisingly it’s a lot easier to be rational when you are actually sane, not to mention that cognitive-behavioral therapy taught me more about biases and neurology than I had learned in years of logic or neuroscience courses. The third is that I started reading a lot of Nietzsche, which helped me clear up a lot of the distracting moral detritus I had rolling around in my head.
So today I’m a more-or-less stable and happy guy who’s just gotten back into my field, trying to improve his life and the world. I’m primarily interested in genetics, nanotechnology (3), and transhumanism / eugenics, but really I’ll read about anything which doesn’t lean too heavily on pure math or religious evangelism.
Thanks for reading all this, and I look forward to getting to know all of you.
1 Technically, exactly like this. If you haven’t noticed, I can be a bit of a pedant. 2 For a long time I thought of the idea of hell as comforting; as bad as eternal torture sounds, at least you’re still there. 3 I’ve heard some fascinating things about the potential of deoxyribozymes as a substitute for proteins in terms of nanotech, which is great for lazy people like me because I’d like to be able to understand the folding of things I work with without having to take a supercomputer’s word for it.