RobinHanson comments on The Sword of Good - Less Wrong

85 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 September 2009 12:53AM

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Comment author: bellisaurius 04 September 2009 10:00:50PM 5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: RobinHanson 06 September 2009 01:43:15AM 6 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 06 September 2009 06:50:24PM 9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 September 2009 06:39:37PM 12 points [-]

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.