cousin_it comments on Blame Theory - Less Wrong

9 Post author: cousin_it 19 May 2010 09:49PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (16)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Yvain 19 May 2010 11:22:22PM *  7 points [-]

No, but guilt is an inherently deontological concept.

Let me give an example. Actually, your example. Your Hitler voter model. Yeah, it successfully makes the person who voted for Hitler feel guilty. But it also makes the person who didn't vote for Hitler, and maybe did everything e could to stop Hitler before being locked up in a German prison, equally guilty. So it actually makes the exact mistake you're warning against - unless your single vote decides whether or not Hitler gets into power, people who votes for and against Hitler end up equally guilty (if your single vote decides it, then your present welfare is greater and you have less difference between present and perfect welfare).

Guilt is there to provide negative reinforcement for acting in an immoral way. So it's only useful if there's some more moral way you could act that it needs to reinforce you towards. Loading someone who's literally done everything e could with a huge burden of guilt is like chronic pain disorder: if the pain's not there to tell you to stop doing something painful, it's just getting in the way.

And if your brain gives you equal squirts of guilt for voting for Hitler vs. fighting Hitler, guilt fails in its purpose as a motivation not to vote for Hitler, and any AI with a morality engine built around this theory of guilt will vote Hitler if there's any reason to do so at all.

(as for Shapley, I see references to it but not a good explanation of how to derive it and why it works. Maybe that's one of those things that actually can't be explained simply and I ought to bite the bullet and try to parse the wiki article.)

Comment author: cousin_it 19 May 2010 11:41:45PM *  6 points [-]

I thought about it a while and your objections are correct. This thing seems to be measuring how much I could regret the current state of the world, not how much I should've done to change it. Added a "WRONG!" disclaimer to the post; hopefully people will still find it entertaining.

Comment author: bogdanb 20 May 2010 01:37:14PM 0 points [-]

It might be helpful to also add your conclusion (i.e., exactly how you think it’s wrong) to the disclaimer. It seems an interesting fact, but I imagine many will miss it by not bothering to read a post marked as “wrong”.