Utilitarianism isn’t a description of human moral processing, it’s a proposal for how to improve it.
wiresnips
Karma: 114
That’s not necessarily false, but it’s a dangerous thing to say to yourself. Mostly when I find myself thinking it, I’ve just wasted a great deal of time, and I’m trying to convince myself that it wasn’t really wasted. It’s easy to tell myself, hard to verify, and more pleasant than thinking my time-investment was for nothing.
This is transformative. Thank you.
This may not be strictly true. Consider the basilisk.
Either both are true, or neither.
Anyone smart enough to be dangerous is smart enough to be safe? I’m skeptical- folksy wisdom tells me that being smart doesn’t protect you from being stupid.
But in general, yes- the threat becomes more and more tangible as the barrier to AI gets lower and the number of players increases. At the moment, it seems pretty intangible, but I haven’t actually gone out and counted dangerously smart AI researchers- I might be surprised by how many there are.
To be clear, I was NOT trying to imply that we should actually right now form the Turing Police.
Edited, in the interest of caution.
However, this is exactly the issue I’m trying to discuss. It looks as though, if we take the threat of uncaring AI seriously, this is a real problem and it demands a real solution. The only solution that I can see is morally abhorrent, and I’m trying to open a discussion looking for a better one. Any suggestions on how to do this would be appreciated.
If we accept that what someone ‘wants’ can be distinct from their behaviour, then “what do I want?” and “what will I do?” are two different questions (unless you’re perfectly rational). Presumably, a FAI scanning a brain could answer either question.
The question of which is kind of still there, though. Procrastination is lazy, but getting drunk at work is irresponsible.
One more for Ottawa. Interest is yes.
You tip when you pay, whether you’re running a bill or buying drinks one by one.
If you’re paying by card, usually the little card-swipey-machine(?) will ask if you want to tip, and how much. Nice and easy.
If you’re paying cash, you can drop some into a visible tip jar, or leave a little pile on the bar/table. It’s convenient to overpay and then use some or all of your change for this. You don’t need to stick around to watch this be picked up. edit: absolutely agree with JoshuaZ- you should wait for your change. After accepting it you don’t need to be present when the bartender gets the tip.
Sometimes, more in semi-classy restaurants, a waiter/ess will ask if you want change- if you say no, the difference is tip.
I’ll take a swing at it- let me know if it’s helpful at all.
Ordering at a bar is easiest if you’re friendly with the bartender. A jovial attitude, a confession of ignorance, and a vague description of a target drink (ie, “colorful and with rum”, or “something delicious”) will prompt a short exchange wherein the tender narrows their options down a little. Err towards generous tipping.
Note that I stick to quiet establishments. This probably doesn’t work nearly as well in a very busy bar.
Whatever elaborate, and grotesquely counter-intuitive, underpinnings there might be to familiar reality, it stubbornly continues to be familiar. When Rutherford showed that atoms were mostly empty space, did the ground become any less solid? The truth itself changes nothing.
-- Greg Egan, Quarantine
“properly applied” qualifies it as practice
Isn’t beauty a set of built-in fitness testing heuristics? If so, fitness really does cause beauty.
It’s worth pointing out that beauty also really does cause fitness. The runaway cycle is the peacock effect.
I have a guess:
Let’s say that studying philosophy is gratifying in and of itself. That would make the study of philosophy an intrinsic good. There might be some parts of philosophy whose study yields an instrumental good. These would be the “pragmatic” parts.
if you can translate them, they’re hardly untranslatable
I explicitly uninstalled my other browsers, in point of fact. Reinstalling them is enough trouble that it’s no worth it. I know that I’ve known about the disable-the-addon trick, but I definitely forgot about it.
It’ll be interesting to see if you’ve just sabotaged me with the reminder.
Solo, I’ve had pretty good results with aggressive leechblock settings. My habitual timesinks are only accessible for a half-hour block each day.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476/
Agreed. Squicky dilemmas designed to showcase utilitarianism are not generally found in real life (as far as I know). And a human probably couldn’t be trusted to make a sound judgement call even if one were found. Running on untrusted hardware and such.
Ah- and this is the point of the quote. Oh, I like that.