Do you do it?
No.
You would be harming another human being without expecting any benefit from doing so. Punishment is only justified when it prevents more harm than it causes, and this is specified not to be the case.
Our sense that people ‘deserve’ to be punished is often adaptive, in that it prevents further wrongdoing, but in this case it is purely negative.
Minor error: judging from context, I think you mean the Milgram Experiment, which focuses on obedience to authority, and not the Stanford Prison Experiment, which is about how social roles affect personalities.
I’m currently working on a summary of some of the central Less Wrong ideas, with links to the original Sequences posts. First paragraph of the (very) rough draft, currently sans links:
The purpose of beliefs is to correspond with the state of the world and therefore allow you to predict reality. The ‘truth’ of a belief is therefore how accurately it predicts the world, which means that there can be degrees of truth, not simply a right and wrong answer. The way to arrive at beliefs which predict the world (at true beliefs) is to base your beliefs on evidence—to entangle yourself with the world, and therefore let the state of the world control the state of your beliefs.
Would this be considered valuable?
Reality is very large—just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I don’t mean to be insulting, but PUNY HUMAN, YOU CANNOT CONTAIN REALITY WITHIN YOUR TINY BRAIN
That’s pretty much Deism, I think. Not right, but not quite as wrong as some other possible approaches.
Welcome! I don’t know much/how systematically you’ve read, but if you’re wondering about what makes something “true”, you’ll want to check out The Simple Truth (short answer: if it corresponds to reality), followed by Making Beliefs Pay Rent and What is Evidence.
But it sounds like you’ve made a very good start.
A (highly intelligent) friend of mine posted a link to this on Facebook tagged with “Reason #217 why the singularity isn’t that big of a thing.” I’m wondering if there’s a concise way to correct him without a link to Less Wrong.
Very much, thank you. Your feedback has been a great help.
Given that others arrived at some of these conclusions before me, I can see why there would be disapproval—though I can hardly feel disappointed to have independently discovered the same answers. I think I’ll research the various models more thoroughly, refine my wording (I agree with you that using the term ‘deontology’ was a mistake), and eventually make a more complete and more sophisticated second attempt at morality as a decision theory problem.
Your article is an excellent one, and makes many of the same points I tried to make here.
Specifically,
...in Dilemma B, an ideal agent will recognize that their decision to pick their favorite ice cream at the expense of another person suggests that others in the same position will do (and have done) likewise, for the same reason.
is the same idea I was trying to express with the ‘cheating student’ example, and then generalized in the final part of the post, and likewise the idea of Parfitian-filtered decision theory seems to be essentially the same as the concept in my post of ideally-rational agents adopting decision theories which make them consciously ignore their goals in order to achieve them better. (And in fact, I was planning to include in my next post how this sort of morality solves problems like Parfit’s Hitchhiker when functionally applied.)
Upon looking back on the replies here (although I have yet to read through all the decision theory posts Vladimir recommended), I realize that I haven’t been convinced that I was wrong—that there’s a flaw in my theory I haven’t seen—only that the community strongly disapproves. Given that your post and mine share many of the same ideas, and yours is at +21 while mine is at −7, I think that the differences are that a. mine was seen as presumptuous (in the vein of the ‘one great idea’), and b. I didn’t communicate clearly enough (partially because I haven’t studied enough terminology) and include answers to enough anticipated objections to overcome the resistance engendered by a. I think I also failed to clearly make the distinction between this as a normative strategy (that is, one I think ideal game-theoretic agents would follow, and a good reason for consciously deciding to be moral) and as a positive description (the reason actual human beings are moral.)
However, I recognize that even though I haven’t yet been convinced of it, there may well be a problem here that I haven’t seen but would if I knew more about decision theory. If you could explain such a problem to me, I would be genuinely grateful—I want to be correct more than I want my current theory to be right.
Your objection and its evident support by the community is noted, and therefore I have deleted the post. I will read further on the decision theory and its implications, as that seems to be a likely cause of error.
However, I have read the meta-ethics sequence, and some of Eliezer’s other posts on morality, and found them unsatisfactory—they seemed to me to presume that morality is something you should have regardless of the reason for it rather than seriously questioning the reasons for possessing it.
On the point of complexity of value, I was attempting to use the term ‘utility’ to describe human preferences, which would necessarily take into account complex values. If you could describe why this doesn’t work well, I would appreciate the correction.
That said, I’m not going to contend here without doing more research first (and thank you for the links), so this will be my last post on the subject.
The idea of “free will” probably best approximates “deliberate, unforced decision-making in a typical mental state”, in the sense that someone who twitches doesn’t do it of their “free will” and neither does someone who wanders miles away in a sudden fugue. On Newcomb’s Problem, someone can be meaningfully said to have decided whether to one-box or two-box “of their own free will” even if Omega’s ability to predict their action means that their decision wasn’t uncausedly “free”.
I’m pretty sure the point of the lie detector that it conveys essentially no information. Real lie detectors are notoriously unreliable.
I thought it was a nice touch.
This is very good advice—especially since postulating a cause probably increases your credence for a purported fact. Quote filed away and advice taken to heart.
Also, this ties in well with Your Strength as a Rationalist.
No, no, you’ve both got it wrong. You speak Italian to women, French to men, and German to your horse.
I am unhappy about this comic because I found that article some time ago, and now everyone knows about it and will think I got it from xkcd if I mention it.
I am meta-unhappy because being unhappy about that makes me feel like a hipster.
I sincerely doubt that the discussions which began on the leading edge would return anywhere near the same amount of progress as those which start in the scholarly middle. After all, those problems are on the edge because they’re difficult to solve given the intellectual tools we have today. Though Less Wrong is often insightful, I suspect it’s the result not of discovering genuinely new tools, but of applying known tools in ways most readers haven’t seen them used. For Less Wrong to make progress with a problem that a lot of smart people have been thinking about in detail for a long time either requires that the entire field is so confused that no one has been able to think as clearly about it as we can (probably hubristic), or that we have developed genuinely new intellectual techniques that no one has tried yet.
The mere fact that it is possible to frame a question does not make it legitimate or sensible to do so. There are many things about which you can ask, “What is its temperature?” or “What color is it?” but you may not ask the temperature question or the color question of, say, jealousy or prayer. Similarly, you are right to ask the “Why” question of a bicycle’s mudguards or the Kariba Dam, but at the very least you have no right to assume that the “Why” question deserves an answer when posed about a boulder, a misfortune, Mt. Everest, or the universe. Questions can be simply inappropriate, however heartfelt their framing.
Richard Dawkins, God’s Utility Function
Do not bear this single habit of mind, to think that what you say and nothing else is true. …For a man, though he be wise, it is no shame to learn – learn many things, and not maintain his views too rigidly.
Sophocles, Antigone
Extensive searching does not turn up a single result for such a person or study. The only result I can find that seems in the right vein is on a different aspect of rat behavior. What turned up more than anything else were quotations of the essay itself.
Apparently there is some doubt as to whether he actually exists.
Note also the follow-up article by the author on Wired. Much of which centers around him saying “No, you guys, this doesn’t mean you can believe in anything you want.”
Robert Heinlein