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bellisaurius comments on The Sword of Good - Less Wrong
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If you meet the buddha on the road, you must kill him.
The koan really strikes me in this situation. The character in the end accepts that he alone gets to make the final moral decisions for himself, regardless of what the labels are and what his teachings were. Many religious ceremonies are about abject submission, but many are also about the idea of "I freely give myself, and accept the consequnces of that submission" and so on.
Although I will add that I completely disagree with the hero. If he really was undecided, the current balance was his best bet. The dark lord's spell would have forced the balance into one that might not be corrected. Kill him, and the war continues, and he can learn which side is truly good by his definition. This seems especially true since the hero kind of accepted the idea of balance early on.
Indeed. His willingness to kill Dolf without asking any questions or making any attempts to verify the Dark Lord's statements just shows that Hirou still hasn't learned anything.
I thought his conversion was too quick to be believable - he need to ask more questions, to have more back and forth in a random walk of opinion change.
Random walks are for agents who have thought through the possibilities and are responding to new information. Hirou's response is far, far more realistic for a human, though perhaps too quick.
I've had similar experiences myself, and try not to have them again. Evidence builds up behind a wall of denial, and when the dam breaks the flood is loosed.
There is nothing about status quo that makes it a preferable option in times of uncertainty, except that the expectation of the intervention may at some point be below or above status quo, which gives the decision.
The status quo is preferable when other option is of unknown goodness and irrevocable.
Value is associated with states of knowledge (about consequences), not with precise outcomes. What you are saying is that uncertainty confers low value, and so is generally less preferable than (well-known) status quo. This is not generally correct.
But easily changeable outcomes are preferable when there is uncertainty.