siodine comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

97 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 March 2010 11:23PM

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Comment author: siodine 20 April 2012 03:03:05AM 6 points [-]

I think you can be confident that he's not agreeing with you.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2012 05:22:35AM 4 points [-]

I ask only that people disagree with me in such a way that my errors are corrected.

Comment author: siodine 20 April 2012 01:22:27PM 9 points [-]

If you've acclimated to torture it's no longer torture.
If you've acclimated to torture the effects have likely left you with a life not worth living.
Torture isn't something you can acclimate yourself to in hypotheticals. E.g., the interlocutor could say "oh you would acclimate to water boarding, well then I'll scoop your brain out, intercept your sensory modalities, and feed you horror. but wait, just when you're getting used to it I wipe your memory."
All this misses the point of the hypothetical by being too focused on the details rather than the message. Have you told someone the trolley experiment and had them say something like "but I would call the police, or I'm not strong enough to push a fat man over" and have to reform the experiment over and over until they got the message?

Comment author: [deleted] comment score below threshold [+] (33 children)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 April 2012 02:36:32PM * 6 points [-]

I think this is wrong: saying you'd yell real loud or call the police or break the game somehow is exactly the right response. It shows that someone is engaging with the problem as a serious moral one,

It is not clear to me that that is a more "right" response than engaging with the problem as a pedagogic tool in a way that aligns with the expectations of the person who set it to me. Indeed, I'm inclined to doubt it.

In much the same way: if I'm asked to multiply 367 by 1472 the response I would give in the real world is to launch a calculator application, but when asked to do this by the woman giving me a neuropsych exam after my stroke I didn't do that, because I understood that the goal was not to find out the product of 367 and 1472 but rather to find out something about my brain that would be revealed by my attempt to calculate that product.

I agree with you that it's no accident that people react like this to trolley problems, but I disagree with your analysis of the causes.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2012 03:24:36PM 0 points [-]

It is not clear to me that that is a more "right" response than engaging with the problem as a pedagogic tool in a way that aligns with the expectations of the person who set it to me.

You called the trolly problem a pedagogic tool: what do you have in mind here specifically? What sort of work do you take the trolly problem to be doing?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 April 2012 03:41:10PM 2 points [-]

It clarifies the contrast between evaluating the rightness of an act in terms of the relative desirability of the likely states of the world after that act is performed or not performed, vs. evaluating the rightness of an act in other terms.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2012 05:39:11PM 1 point [-]

Okay, that sounds reasonable to me. But what do we mean by 'act' in this case? We could for instance imagine a trolly problem in which no one had the power to change the course of the train, and it just went down one track or the other on the basis of chance. We could still evaluate one outcome as better than the other (this must be the one man dying instead of five), but there's no action.

Are we making a moral judgement in that case? Or do we reason differently when an agent is involved?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 April 2012 07:03:57PM 0 points [-]

I don't know who "we" are.

What I say about your proposed scenario is that the hypothetical world in which five people die is worse than the hypothetical world in which one person dies, all else being equal. So, no, my reasoning doesn't change because there's an agent involved.

But someone who evaluates the standard trolley problem differently might come to different conclusions.

For example, I know any number of deontologists who argue that the correct answer in the standard trolley problem is to let the five people die, because killing someone is worse than letting five people die. I'm not exactly sure what they would say about your proposed scenario, but I assume they would say in that case, since there's no choice and therefore no "killing someone" involved, the world where five people die is worse.

Similarly, given someone like you who argues that the correct answer in the standard trolley problem is to "yell real loud or call the police or break the game somehow," I'm not sure what you would say about your own proposed scenario.

Comment author: siodine 20 April 2012 01:39:40PM 1 point [-]

It shows that someone is engaging with the problem as a serious moral one

I think it shows someone is trying to "solve" a hypothetical or be clever, because with a trivial amount of deliberation they would anticipate the interlocutors response and reform. Moreover, none of this engages the point of the exercise for which you're free to argue without being opaque. E.g., "okay, clearly the point of this trolley experiment is to see if my moral intuitions align with consequentialism or utilitarianism, I don't think this experiment does that because blah blah blah."

Moreover, moral reasoning is hypothetical if you're sufficiently reflective.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2012 01:56:51PM -1 points [-]

Moreover, moral reasoning is hypothetical if you're sufficiently reflective.

Well, in what kinds of things does moral reasoning conclude? I suppose I would say 'actions and evaluations' or something like that. Can you think of anything else?

Comment author: siodine 20 April 2012 02:09:41PM 0 points [-]

Moral reasoning should inform your moral intuitions--what you'll do in the absence of an opportunity to reflect. How do you prepare your moral intuitions for handling future scenarios?

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2012 03:18:59PM -1 points [-]

Well, regardless of whether we have time to reflect or not, I take it moral reasoning or moral intuitions conclude either in an action or in something like an evaluative judgement. This would distinguish such reasoning, I suppose, from theoretical reasoning which begins from and concludes in beliefs. Does that sound right to you?

Comment author: siodine 20 April 2012 03:21:40PM * 0 points [-]

An evaluative judgement is an action; you're fundamentally saying moral reasoning has consequences. I agree with that, of course. I don't think it disguishes it from theorical reasoning.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2012 03:36:42PM -1 points [-]

By 'action' I mean something someone might see you do, something undertaken intentionally with the aim of changing something around you. But when we ask someone to react to a trolly problem, we don't expect them to act as a result of their reasoning (since there's no actual trolly). We just want them to reply. So sometimes moral reasoning concludes merely in a judgement, and sometimes it concludes in an action (if we were actually in the trolly scenario, for example) that will, I suppose, also involve a judgement. Does all this seem reasonable to you?

continue this thread »

Comment author: TheOtherDave 20 April 2012 03:11:09PM 0 points [-]

Also...

Though my response was very much intended to be a joke.

Can you please clarify which of your comments in this thread you stand by, and which ones you don't stand by?

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2012 03:26:47PM 0 points [-]

I stand by everything I said about trolly problems. I don't think an eternity of torture is preferable to a dust speck in one's eye.

siodine comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong

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