Alicorn comments on A Less Wrong singularity article? - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 17 November 2009 02:15PM

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Comment author: Alicorn 19 November 2009 09:51:28PM *  1 point [-]

Not at all, if we started out by wanting to arrive in the same city.

And we did exactly that (metaphorically speaking). I said:

We will arrive at superficially similar answers much of the time because "appeal to intuition" is considered a legitimate move in ethics and we have some similar intuitions about the kinds of answers we want to arrive at.

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).

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 November 2009 10:21:43PM 3 points [-]

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.