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Rain comments on Open Thread: April 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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Help me, LessWrong. I want to build a case for
These phrasings should mean the exact same thing. Correct me if they don't.
Elaboration: Most people readily agree that most information is good most of the time. I want to see if I can go all the way and build a convincing argument that all information is good all of the time, or as close to it as I can get. That misuse of information is problem about the misuser and not the information ("guns don't kill people"). Specific cases include: endangered species (DNA is best stored in living organisms), viruses (all three kinds), forbidden books, child pornography and other shocking information, free speech, Archive.org, The Rosetta Project, research on race.
Please post arguments and counterarguments in their own comments and separately from general discussion comments.
I very much doubt that we have enough understanding of human values / preferences / utility functions to say that anything makes the list, in any capacity, without exception.
In this case, I think that information is useful as an instrumental value, but not as a terminal value in and of itself. It may lie on the path to terminal values in enough instances (the vast majority), and be such a major part of realizing those values, that a resource-constrained reasoning agent might treat it like a terminal value, just to save effort.
I look at it like a genie bottle: nearly anything you want could be satisfied with it, or would be made much easier with its use, but the genie isn't what you really want.
Well, all agents are resource-constrained. But I get what you mean.