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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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Proposed litmus test: infanticide.
General cultural norms label this practice as horrific, and most people's gut reactions concur. But a good chunk of rationality is separating emotions from logic. Once you've used atheism to eliminate a soul, and humans are "just" meat machines, and abortion is an ok if perhaps regrettable practice ... well, scientifically, there just isn't all that much difference between a fetus a couple months before birth, and an infant a couple of months after.
This doesn't argue that infants have zero value, but instead that they should be treated more like property or perhaps like pets (rather than like adult citizens). Don't unnecessarily cause them to suffer, but on the other hand you can choose to euthanize your own, if you wish, with no criminal consequences.
Get one of your friends who claims to be a rationalist. See if they can argue passionately in favor of infanticide.
My mother made this argument to me probably when I was in high school. Given my position as past infanticide candidate, it was an odd conversation. For the record, she was willing to go up to two or six years old, I think.
And let us not forget the Scrubs episode she also agreed with: "Having a baby is like getting a dog that slowly learns to talk."
Hey, now you know you were kept around because you were actually wanted, not out of a dull sense of obligation. It's like having a biological parent who is totally okay with giving up children for adoption - and stuck around!
That's an interesting take. She clearly loves me and my siblings and has never hurt anyone to the best of my knowledge, besides. So, it wasn't an uncomfortable topic--only a bit of an odd position to be in.
Although, I also have to point out adoption does not carry the death penalty, so I can imagine a situation in which my hypothetical parent opts not to kill me because they think the fuzz will catch them.
Eliezer, your thought processes and emotions are quite a bit different from those of most currently living humans. And that mostly leaves you quite well-off, but you've always got to account for that before you say something like this.
How the hell do you know what others, especially children, would feel in an odd situation like that? Me, I know for sure that I'd MUCH rather have a cold/distant but dutiful and conscientous parent than one who could really, seriously plan to kill Pre-Me for their own convenience.
(If that was supposed to be a joke, I claim that it was in bad taste, just like an anti-AI LessWronger's joke about planning to assassinate you and your colleagues would be.)
Can you generalize your claim a bit?
I mean, if the general form of your claim is that a joke whose punchline is "your parents wanted you" is in bad taste just as a joke whose punch line is "I'm going to kill you" is, I simply disagree. I find this unlikely, I just mention it because that's the vast difference between the two examples that jumped out at me.
If the general form of your claim is that a joke that mentions the (unactualizable) possibility of my infanticide is in bad taste just as a joke that mentions the (thus-far-unactualized, but still viable) possibility of my assassination, I also disagree, though I have more sympathy for the claim. I find this more likely.
If it's something else, I might agree.
Of course, if you don't actually mean to make a general claim about what is or isn't in bad taste, but rather to assert somewhat indirectly that references to infanticide upset you and you'd rather not read them, that's a whole different kettle of fish and my question is meaningless.
Jokes aren't only about punchlines; here Eliezer was talking about how the (apparently REAL) fact that a murder was contemptated by the guy's own mother ended up having an upside.
Yes, that's true, he was indeed talking about that.
I infer that your claim is that talking about that is in sufficiently bad taste to be worth calling out.
Thanks for clarifying.