orthonormal comments on The Preference Utilitarian’s Time Inconsistency Problem - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Wei_Dai 15 January 2010 12:26AM

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Comment author: orthonormal 18 January 2010 08:18:19PM *  7 points [-]

Please don't throw around Gödel's Theorem before you've really understood it— that's one thing that makes people look like cranks!

"When does that ever happen and how does answering that question help me be more ethical?"

Very rarely; but pondering such hypotheticals has helped me to see what some of my actual moral intuitions are, once they are stripped of rationalizations (and chances to dodge the question). From that point on, I can reflect on them more effectively.

Comment author: magfrump 19 January 2010 04:33:58PM 1 point [-]

Sorry to sound crankish. Rather than "simple and inconsistent" I might have said that there were contrived and thus unanswerable questions. Regardless it distracted and I shouldn't have digressed at all.

Anyway thank you for the good answer concerning hypotheticals.