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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on A Less Wrong singularity article? - Less Wrong
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I find it a suspicious coincidence that we should arrive at similar answers by asking dissimilar questions.
Do you also find it suspicious that we could both arrive in the same city using different vehicles? Or that the answer to "how many socks is Alicorn wearing?" and the answer to "what is 6 - 4?" are the same? Or that one could correctly answer "yes" to the question "is there cheese in the fridge?" and the question "is it 4:30?" without meaning to use a completely different, non-yes word in either case?
Not at all, if we started out by wanting to arrive in the same city.
And not at all, if I selected you as a point of comparison by looking around the city I was in at the time.
Otherwise, yes, very suspicious. Usually, when two randomly selected people in Earth's population get into a car and drive somewhere, they arrive in different cities.
No, because you selected those two questions to have the same answer.
Yes-or-no questions have a very small answer space so even if you hadn't selected them to correlate, it would only be 1 bit of coincidence.
The examples in the grandparent do seem to miss the point that Alicorn was originally describing.
It is still surprising, but somewhat less so if our question answering is about finding descriptions for our hardwired intuitions. In that case people with similar personalities can be expected to formulate question-answer pairs that differ mainly in their respective areas of awkwardness as descriptions of the territory.
And we did exactly that (metaphorically speaking). I said:
It seems to me that you and I ask dissimilar questions and arrive at superficially similar answers. (I say "superficially similar" because I consider the "because" clause in an ethical statement to be important - if you think you should pull the six-year-old off the train tracks because that maximizes your utility function and I think you should do it because the six-year-old is entitled to your protection on account of being a person, those are different answers, even if the six-year-old lives either way.) The babyeaters get more non-matching results in the "does the six-year-old live" department, but their questions - just about as important in comparing theories - are not (it seems to me) so much more different than yours and mine.
Everybody, in seeking a principled ethical theory, has to bite some bullets (or go on an endless Easter-epicycle hunt).
To me, this doesn't seem like superficial similarity at all. I should sooner call the differences of verbal "because" superficial, and focus on that which actually produces the answer.
I think you should do it because the six-year-old is valuable and precious and irreplaceable, and if I had a utility function it would describe that. I'm not sure how this differs from what you're doing, but I think it differs from what you think I'm doing.