Comment on The Psychological Diversity of Mankind

Mon, 10 May 2010 07:32:57 GMT

I don't think this statement is logically consistent. Unless you're restrained by some outside force, if you don't do something, that means you didn't want to do it.

It's not always that simple. It would be inconsistent if our actions could be reduced to a simple utility function and we consistently used the word (and emotion) "want" to refer to actions that maximize that utility function, but neither of those are the case, because we're not intelligently-designed optimization processes. Our brains don't act under a single unified goal system, and very often the part of us that says it wants to do x, or the part that believes it wants to do x, or the part that would be happy if it could do x, or the part that feels bad if it doesn't do x — any of the parts where it feels like "wanting" rather than "doing" — isn't always the part that makes the decision. (In fact, in a direct causal sense, I'd say it's not the part that makes the decision, period. Sometimes it just seems like they're the same when they're properly synchronized.) Neither is the part that makes moral judgments on one's own actions and on other's actions, and so on.

Have you read any of the discussions of akrasia here? That's essentially shorthand for what we're talking about here (wanting to do something but not doing it), and if you are willing to discuss it on human terms — in terms of what humans actually mean when they say "want" rather than what a single-minded decision-theoretic reasoner would mean by it* — then such discussions can be quite fruitful, and not logically inconsistent or meaningless at all.

* If such an agent would say it at all, that is. It could be taken as a mistranslation, in the same sense that Eliezer says translating any of the Babyeaters' words about their own decisions as "right" would be a mistranslation. If a perfect decision-theoretic agent's utility function specifies some action, then by definition, it will automatically pursue that; there's no room for any "wanting" there, just deciding and doing. Indeed, the very fact that we have different words for "want" and "pursue" reflects the reality that we can and very frequently do one but not the other.

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