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thomblake comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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Comments (207)
While EY might not put it this way, this line:
answered your question
since Eliezer was making a moral observation. The answer: It is obviously so. Do you have conflicting observational data?
How is it rational to treat a "moral observation" as "obviously so"? That's how religion works, isn't it?
This discussion is now about
my view on which is summarized in Joy in the Merely Good.
My question is about the implementation of meta-ethics in the human brain. If I were going to write a program to simulate Eliezer Yudkowsky, what rules (other than "be unhappy when others are unhappy") would I need to program in for you to arrive at this "obvious" conclusion?
In my personal experience, the morality that people arrive at by avoiding negative consequences is substantially different than the morality they arrive at by seeking positive ones.
In other words, a person who does good because they will otherwise be a bad person, is not the same as a person who does good because it brings good. Their actions and attitudes differ in substantive ways, besides the second person being happier. For example, the second person is far more likely to actually be generous and warm towards other people -- especially living, present, individual people, rather than "people" as an abstraction.
So which of these two is really the "good" person, from your moral perspective?
(On another level, by the way, I fail to see how contagious, persistent unhappiness is a moral good, since it greatly magnifies the total amount of unhappiness in the universe. But that's a separate issue from the implementation question.)
It seems to me that when you say 'meta-ethics' you simply mean 'ethics'. I don't know why you'd think meta-ethics would need to be implemented in the human brain. Ethics is in the world; meta-ethics doubly so. There's a fact about what's right, just like there's a fact about what's prime. You could ask why we care about what's right, but that's neither an ethical question nor a meta-ethical one. The ethical question is 'what's right?' and the meta-ethical question is 'what makes something a good answer to an ethical question?'. Both of those questions can be answered without reference to humans, though humans are the only reason why anyone would care.
Unless Eliezer has some supernatural entity to do his thinking for him, his ethics and meta-ethics require some physical implementation. Where else are you proposing that he store and process them, besides physical reality?
I think you're shifting between 'ethics' and 'what Eliezer thinks about ethics'. While it's possible that ideas are not real save via some implementation, I don't think it would therefore have to be in a particular human; systems know things too.
You seem to frequently shift the focus of conversation as it happens, hurting the potential for rational discourse in favor of making emotively positive statements that loosely correlate with the topic at hand. Would you be the same pjeby that writes those reprehensible self-help books?
That seemed a bit ad hominem. The commenter pjeby (I know nothing else about him) seems like someone who might be unfamiliar with part of the LW/OB background corpus but is reasoning pretty well under those conditions.
Actually, I'm quite familiar with a large segment of the OB corpus -- it's been highly influential on my work. However, I also see what appear to be a few holes or incoherencies within the OB corpus... some of which appear to stem from precisely the issue I've been asking you about in this thread. (i.e. the role of negative utilities in creating bias)
In my personal experience, negative utilities create bias because they cut off consideration of possibilities. This is useful in an emergency -- but not much anywhere else. If human beings had platonically perfect minds, there would be no difference between a uniform utility scale and a dual positive/negative one... but as far as I can tell (and research strongly suggests) we do have two different systems.
So, although you're wary of Robin's "cynicism" and my "psychological explanations", this is inconsistent with your own statements, such as:
See, I'm as puzzled by your ability to write something like that, and then turn around and argue an absolute utility for unhappiness, as you are puzzled by that Nobel-winning Bayesian dude who still believes in God. From my POV, it's just as inconsistent.
There must be some psychology that creates your position, but if your position is "truly" valid (assuming there were such a thing), then the psychology wouldn't matter. You should be able to destroy the position, and then reconstruct it from more basic principles, once the original influence is removed, no? (This idea is also part of the corpus.)
pjeby,
Are you familiar with Eliezer's take on naturalistic meta-ethics in particular, or just with other large segments of the OB corpus? If the former, maybe you could take more care to spell out that you get the difference between "achieving one's original goals" and "hacking one's goal-system so that the goal-system thinks one has acheived one's goals (e.g., by wireheading)".
I like your writing, but in this particular thread, my impression is that you're "rounding to the nearest cliche" -- interpreting Eliezer and others as saying the nearest mistake that you've heard your students or others make, rather than making an effort to understand where people are coming from. My impression may be false, but it sounds like I'm not the only one who has it, and it's distracting, so maybe take more care to spell out in visible terms a summary of peoples' main points, so we know you're disagreeing with what they're saying and not with some other view.
More generally, you've joined a community that has been thinking awhile and has some unusual concepts. I'm glad you've joined the commenters, because we badly need the best techniques we can get for changing our own thinking habits and for teaching the same to others -- we need techniques for learning and teaching rationality -- and I find your website helpful here, and your actual thinking on the subject, in context, can probably become better still. But I wonder if you could maybe take a bit more care in general to hear the threads you're responding to. I've felt like you were "rounding to the nearest cliche" in your thread with me as well (I wasn't going off the Lisa Simpson happiness theory), and it might be nice if you could take the stance of a co-participant in the conversation, who is interested in both learning and teaching, instead of repeating the (good) points on your website in response to all comments, whatever the comments' subject matter.
It was deliberately ad hominem, of course - just not the fallacious kind. We seriously need profile pages of some sort. Wish I had the stomach for Python.
I don't expect anyone to be familiar with the LW/OB background corpus - I expect my education and training is quite different from yours, for example. However, I still expect one to follow rules of conduct with respect to reasonable discourse, for example avoiding equivocation and its related vices.
Or maybe I'm just viscerally angered by the winky smileys. Who knows.
I don't see how I can separate "ethics" from "what Eliezer thinks about ethics" and still have a meaningful conversation with him on the topic.
Meanwhile, reading back through the thread, the only digressions I see in my comments are those made in response to those raised by you or Eliezer. Perhaps you could point to some specific examples of these shifted foci and emotively positive statements? I do not see them.
As for my "reprehensible" books, I trust you formed that judgment by actually reading them, yes? If so, then yes, I'm that person. But if you didn't read them, then clearly your judgment isn't about the books I actually wrote... and thus, I could not have been the person who wrote the (imaginary) ones you'd therefore be talking about. ;-)
I was not referring only to this thread, but to several ongoing discussions. If you'd like clear examples, feel free to contact me via http://thomblake.com or http://thomblake.mp
As Eliezer has kindof pointed out, I'm weary enough from this discussion to be on the verge of irrationality, so I shall retire from it (if only because this forum is devoted to rationality!).
I'm not aware of religions that work that way.
However, that's how observation works.
How is it rational to treat an observation as not obviously so? I'm pretty sure that's inconsistent, if not contradictory.