maybe ‘tolerance’ simply means: “the cost of settling our differences outweighs the benefits”
sark
Which suggests rationality may not be as purely instrumental as we would like to think. It can only practically happen between people who already have generally low preferences over beliefs, those who want truth for its own sake.
Deontology treats morality as terminal. Consequentialism treats morality as instrumental.
Is this a fair understanding of deontology? Or is this looking at deontology through a consequentialism lens?
This looks okay as an interpretation of deontology to me. This may be because it sounds like a nice thing to say about it, and a comparatively mean thing to say about consequentialism
I’m a consequentialist, and treating morality as terminal seems to me like missing the point of morality entirely. I’m glad I got it right that deontologists think that way. But I can’t understand why you would consider treating morality as terminal correct.
As a consequentialist I would say: “Morality concerns what you care about, not the fact that you care.”
What does the deontologist think of that?
So morality is one shard of desire from godshatter which deontologists think matters a lot?
The conjunction fallacy applies only when you already have a probability law. (a specification of a probability space). It applies to events in a probability space. The conjunction rule proscribes assigning a subset event higher probability than the event containing it.
Occam’s razor is prescription for what probability laws should look like (e.g each program having a prior probability of (1/2) to the power of its code length in bits). i.e. what constitutes an outcome in the probability space, all outcomes having equal probability.
The conjunction fallacy really says nothing about prior probabilities. The conjunction rule is a theorem in probability. Occam’s razor is a working rule for assigning prior probabilities to hypotheses.
Well I agree. In our everyday lives, Occam tells us to chose the simplest hypotheses. Conjunction rule tells us to keep any particular hypothesis we have as simple as possible.
Also, maybe we should apply conjunction rule first to our candidate hypotheses and then only Occam to chose the simplest among them. (of course, Occam by itself already picks out the simplest hypotheses, but i’m talking about a working procedure here)
Agreed, there is no fundamental distinction. You can certainly update existing probabilities which did not take into account Occam’s Razor, to take it into account. What makes Occam pertinent to priors in particular is that you can apply it to anything, which means it can always also be the first thing you apply to hypotheses. So think of Occam as ‘evidence’ that applies to all hypotheses. (note that the conjunction rule is not similarly ‘evidence’)
Yes it is ideally redundant, but i did emphasize I was suggesting it as a working rule. It seems to me less computationally expensive to remove extraneous elements from hypotheses than to calculate or at least rank their complexity.
You select them. They select you. Selection effect in both cases.
It doesn’t, but the point was about influence vs. selection effects, not different kinds of selection effects.
Yes, but if we still insist on thinking about this, perhaps it would help to keep Hanson’s near-far distinction in mind. There are techniques to encourage near mode thinking. For example, trying to fix plot holes in the above scenario.
I would argue that any humans that had this bug in their utility function have (mostly) failed to reproduce, which is why most existing humans are opposed to wireheading.
Why would evolution come up with a fully general solution against such ‘bugs in our utility functions’?
Take addiction to a substance X. Evolution wouldn’t give us a psychological capacity to inspect our utility functions and to guard against such counterfeit utility. It would simply give us a distaste for substance X.
My guess is that we have some kind of self-referential utility function. We do not only want what our utility functions tell us we want. We also want utility (happiness) per se. And this want is itself included in that utility function!
When thinking about wireheading I think we are judging a tradeoff, between satisfying mere happiness and the states of affairs which we prefer (not including happiness).
I wonder how much of the beneficial effects of coffee are exactly the effects you would get from stress. Stress here being the fight-or-flight response. The theory is that the body diverts resources to make sure you survive (presumably, to your muscles and your short-term memory and executive function) and away from long-term maintenance (reproductive function, immune system, long-term memory formation).
I’ve read somewhere that a component of sleepiness is modulated by amount of cortisol in the body. According to wikipedia, coffee stimulates production of cortisone. Maybe this is evolution adapting the fight or flight response to the circadian rhythm, which explains why they are related.
Perhaps in the case of diminished hippocampal neurogenesis it’s just from stress. And maybe the beneficial effects from coffee are too.
I think when we talk about optimization by proxy we usually compare something that tracks the desired quality much more precisely compared to another variable which we use as a computational shortcut. That is meaningful enough a distinction.
This reminds me of a discussion in some forum where somebody said that it was “impossible to compress a DVD losslessly because it is already lossy”. Of course, what was actually meant was lossless compression of that lossy data, not of the original source.
Perhaps genius requires extraordinary effort, which is only worthwhile if you already have nothing to lose. So maybe the hardships and obstacles that previous highly intelligent people faced actually contributed to their eventual success.
OK, but what does this morality you consider terminal consist of? And why do you take it to be the way you take it to be?
Yes!
This reflects in the fact that great artists are invariably technical virtuosos. Mastery makes way for creativity.
This is due to limited working memory. You may be able to juggle the concepts/math of a particular field in working memory, but that takes away precious space for the combinatorial exploration of novel ideas, or even higher level concepts. Only with practice, when most of the steps in your thought processes can be carried out subconsciously, are you free to do higher-level thinking.
It’s not all about working memory of course, since there is subconscious exploration going on as well. Still, things must surface to working memory to be checked that they make sense.
Also, there is also the fact that concepts are built upon concepts. To think at a higher level, you have to truly understand how concepts of the lower level work. It is simply impossible to do it all with limited working memory capacity.
I think paradoxes/extreme examples work mainly by provoking lateral thinking, forcing us to reconsider assumptions, etc. It has nothing at all to do with the logical system under consideration. Sometimes we get lucky and hit upon an idea that goes further and with less exceptions, other times we don’t. In short, it’s all in the map, not in the territory.
I don’t believe in absolute consistency (whether in morality or even in say, physics). A theory is an algorithm that works. We should be thankful that it does at all. In something like morality, I don’t expect there to be a possible systematization of it. We will only know what is moral in the far future in the only-slightly-less-far future. Self-modification has no well-defined trajectory.
Theories of the known, which are described by different physical ideas may be equivalent in all their predictions and are hence scientifically indistinguishable. However, they are not psychologically identical when trying to move from that base into the unknown. For different views suggest different kinds of modifications which might be made and hence are not equivalent in the hypotheses one generates from them in ones attempt to understand what is not yet understood. --Feynman
Edinburgh. Might be able to travel to other places in the UK.
me too, University of Edinburgh