Former LWDC organizer. Hikikomori. Trans woman—she/her or ze/zir pronouns.
RobinZ
Karma: 6,690
Oh, I’m sure someone does, but the real reason I mentioned it is because I usually don’t have a lot more to say about a subject than “that sounds reasonable to me”. (:
Well, like I said, I’ll give it my best!
(Doctors, eh? Y’know, I have this rash on my lower back… ^_^)
This quote is rather unclear—I had to look at the original source to determine what it might mean—and equally importantly, it seems rather useless. Schaffer wants to establish … something about being real, i guess, by his philosophy, but I don’t see how he would expect anything different thereby.
One request I must make of my reader, which is, that in judging these poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others. How common is it to hear a person say, I myself do not object to this style of composition, or this or that expression, but to such and such classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous! This mode of criticism, so destructive of all sound unadulterated judgment, is almost universal: let the reader then abide, independently, by his own feelings, and, if he finds himself affected, let him not suffer such conjectures to interfere with his pleasure.
Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, qtd. in Forms of Verse by Sara DeFord and Clarinda H. Lott, pg. 36
I thought about med school again, the anatomy class I had told Jason about. Candice Boone, my one-time almost-fiancée, had shared that class with me. She had been stoic during the dissection but not afterward. A human body, she said, ought to contain love, hate, courage, cowardice, soul, spirit … not this slimy assortment of blue and red imponderables. Yes. And we ought not to be dragged unwilling into a harsh and deadly future.
But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with. I said as much to Candice.
She told me I was “cold”. But it was still the closest thing to wisdom I had ever been able to muster.
Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
Sagredo: [I]n my opinion nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs. - “Two New Sciences” (1914 translation), Galileo Galilei
No—I choose to talk a lot, in fact. That’s just the reason I expect most of it to be inane. :D
I’m not sure your (or his) argument actually addresses popular beliefs. Two points:
Reductionism has been proposed not (merely) because it is intuitive, but because it is supported by the evidence. Starting with particle physics, you really can infer chemistry, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, heat transfer, and so on—and you can make correct predictions about when the assumptions used in the latter will break down. (For example: when the channels of fluid flow are comparable in size to the particles.) This is just as would be the case in a reductionistic universe.
Eliminativism is no more implied by reductionism than amorality. If you think that rainbows don’t exist once they’ve been unweaved, you’re making a mistake that has nothing to do with science.
It seems to me that the idea of a critical threshold of suffering might be relevant. Most dust-speckers seem to maintain that a dust speck is always a negligible effect—a momentary discomfort that is immediately forgotten—but in a sufficiently large group of people, randomly selected, a low-probability situation in which a dust speck is critical could arise. For example, the dust speck could be a distraction while operating a moving vehicle, leading to a crash. Or the dust speck could be an additional frustration to an individual already deeply frustrated, leading to an outburst. Each conditional in these hypotheticals is improbable, but multiplying them out surely doesn’t result in a number as large as 3^^^3, which means that it is highly likely that many of them will occur. Under this interpretation, the torture is the obvious winner.
If cascading consequences are ruled out, however, I’ll have to think some more.
Eliezer makes the further claim in those pieces that non-reductionism is based on confusion and doesn’t lead to a coherent worldview, but that’s not a property of reductionism.
| If you take reductionism for granted, and some entity does not easily fit it, then you are seduced into eliminating that entity.
Are there any actual individuals you have in mind when you make this generalization? To my knowledge, I have never heard of an individual ignoring observed phenomena they could not predict reductively.
Sure, makes sense. I imagine the probability is much less than 3^^^3/1000 of the consequences I’m hypothesizing, though, which makes the dust specks still worse.
If the utility function for torture were negative infinity:
any choice with a nonzero probability of leading to torture gains infinite disutility,
any torture of any duration has the same disutility—infinite,
the criteria for torture vs. non-torture become rigid—something which is almost torture is literally infinitely better than something which is barely torture,
et cetera.
In other words, I don’t think this is a rational moral stance.
Point taken. Nevertheless, the fact that people draw absurd conclusions from a belief has no bearing on whether that belief should be questioned unless those absurd conclusions are (1) logical, rather than philosophical, inferences, and (2) contrary to evidence. Those conditions do not hold for reductionism (and Dennett, in particular, had a few things to say about “greedy reductionism”).
The criteria you mention don’t exclude a negative singularity to the left, but when you attempt to optimize for maximum utility, the singularity causes problems. I was describing a few.
Edit: I mean to say: in the utilitarianism-utility function, which has multiple inputs.
Sometimes I flip a coin for each hypothetical person I invoke.
But every choice has a nonzero probability of leading to torture. Your proposed moral stance amounts to “minimize the probability-times-intensity of torture”, to which a reasonable answer might be, “set off a nuclear holocaust annihilating all life on the planet”.
(And the distinction between torture and non-torture is—at least in the abstract—fuzzy. How much pain does it have to be to be torture?)
What he said. Also, if you are evaluating the rectitude of each possible choice by its consequences (i.e. using your utility function), it doesn’t matter if you actually (might) cause the torture or if it just (possibly) occurs within your light cone—you have to count it.
headdesk
What Alicorn said, yes. Damnit, I thought I was doing pretty good at avoiding the pronoun problems...
Hey, don’t tell me what I’m not allowed to worry about! :P
(...geez, I feel like I’m about to be deleted as natter...)
Ignoring the more obvious jokes people make in introduction posts: Hi. My name is Robin. I grew up in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, and have lived in the same place essentially all my life. I was homeschooled by secular parents—one didn’t discuss religion and the other was agnostic—with my primary hobby being the reading of (mostly) speculative fiction of (mostly) quite high quality. (Again, my parent’s fault—when I began searching out on my own, I was rather less selective.) The other major activity of my childhood was participation in the Boy Scouts of America.
I entered community college at the age of fifteen with an excellent grounding in mathematics, a decent grounding in physics, superb fluency with the English language (both written and spoken), and superficial knowledge of most everything else. After earning straight As for three years, I applied to four-year universities, and my home state university offered me a full ride. At present, I am a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the same institution.
In the meantime, I have developed an affection for weblogs, web comics, and online chess, much to the detriment of my sleep schedule and work ethic. I suspect I discovered Overcoming Bias through “My Favorite Liar” like everyone else, but Eliezer Yudkowsky’s sequences (and, to a lesser extent, Robin Hanson’s essays) were what drew me in. I lost interest around when EY jumped to lesswrong.com, but was drawn back in when I opened up the bookmark again in the past day or so, particularly thanks to a few of Yvain’s contributions.
Being all of twenty-four and with less worldly experience than the average haddock, I imagine I shan’t contribute much to the conversation, but I’ll give it my best shot.
(P.S. I am not registered for cryonics and I’m skeptical about the ultimate potential of AI. I’m an modern-American-style liberal registered as a Republican for reasons which seemed good at the time. Also, I am—as is obvious in person but not online—both male and black.)