How are you doing cross-person utility comparisons?
VoiceOfRa
Karma: −557
Mind you, I do not discriminate against literal retards, or blacks, or gays, or anything. I do, however, incorporate the words “retard”, “nigger”, and “faggot” into my vocabulary literally exclusively because it triggers humans and demonstrates the fact that the validity of one’s argument and one’s ability to defend themselves in argument does not matter to the human.
You have this almost exactly backwards. Discriminating against people, a.k.a., applying Baysian priors, is in fact rational, despite modern hangups against saying this publicly. In fact you probably do actually discriminate, i.e., use evidence about people in making decisions. For example, let’s say you need someone to help you fix your computer, you probably want someone who’s intelligent and knows about computers, thus you will not be happy if a literal retard shows up.
Then why did you use the word “discriminate” when you meant “hate”?
Words may ultimately be arbitrary in some sense, but a language constitutes a consensus mapping of arbitrary symbols to things in the real world, and if you want to have a conversation with someone, it’s helpful to follow the mapping. Or worse use the same word for two different things and slip between the two meanings when making an argument, it is even possible to confuse oneself this way.
This problem is not restricted to you, in our culture there is a tendency to do this with the word “hate”.
Because I thought if that excerpt of mines were to be taken literally it would be understood as my simply not treating a retard, a black human, or a gay any differently from any other human were I to approach them for instance, or were I even to just consider them.
Except as we’ve just established you would (and should treat them differently).
I’ve also seen “discrimination” as a word used as I used it, and assumed my thought would be understood.
“Discriminate” is another word that’s sometimes used in a confused manner. Although, here it’s less about confusing two meanings and more about ritually saying statements perceived as socially desirable even if it would be insane to actually act on the literal advice. This by the way is not just a harmless word game, it means that anybody could be accused of hypocrisy (or usually worse) by noting a specific instance where they do in fact discriminate.
Um, no.
Except the burden is on the employer to “prove” (using only legal evidence) that the test is relevant.
Well, given that one of the purposes of LW/MIRI is to formulate morality explicitly enough to program it into an AI, attempting to explain it to a low-functioning autistic like hoodwall may be good practice.
This old thread is possibly relevant.
The neoreactionaries are more-or-less correct about the nature of government, Cthulhu, leftism, etc.
They have a lot of dangerous ideas and race/gender is only a special case of some of them.
Concrete example—I used to use the Hebrew name of God in theological conversations, as this was normal at my college. I noticed a Jewish classmate of mine was wincing. I discussed it with him, he found it uncomfortable, I stopped doing it. Didn’t cost me anything, happy to do it.
The difference is that the Jews have been using the same set of demands for a long time, so they’re unlikely to present new demands once you accede to their current ones.
What about someone raised in a bizarre alternate universe where tradition, culture and religious belief dictate that those who go faster than 30km/h while sober or in bindings have their souls eaten by demons, so everyone has to drive blind drunk without a seatbelt?
How could such a world possibly exist for more then a couple of years without people noticing that there is a problem?
Truth only looks like trolling when it is sufficiently uncomfortable.
Compassion and denial, mixed together, can be a lethal cocktail.
The point is that traditions, especially long established traditions, generally do in fact contain good advice.
The harder part is precisely defining what constitutes blackmail.
The other problem is that when they dismiss other people, they dismiss their observations, not just their theories.
The problem is that Rawls gets the math wrong even in the case he analyzes.
It is often vague and lets people get away with not thinking things through. It feels like they have an answer, but most people would have no clue how to set the parameters for an AI that implemented their type of deontology (e.g. when dilemma situations become probabilistic, which is, of course, all the time).
The same is true of most discussions of consequentialism and utility functions.
You can pass out from serious injuries, even if they’re not in the head.
In general the problem with Tit-for-tat is that it requires repeated interactions with the same person. In the neighbor example, that’s not necessarily a problem.
Of course that raises the question of what previous interactions with the neighbor were like something the OP hasn’t specified, e.g., does he have a history of making unreasonable demands of the other members of the apartment? Has he been otherwise a nice guy?