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Clippy comments on Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists - Less Wrong
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But how can there be a vice of excess for making paperclips???
It depends on how good you are at utility-maximization. If you're bad at it, like humans, then you might need heuristics like virtues to avoid simple failure modes.
An obvious failure mode for Clippys is to have excess concern for making paperclips, which uses up resources that could be used to secure larger-scale paperclip manufacturing capabilities.
Thus you must have the appropriate concern for actually making paperclips, balanced against concerns for future paperclips, trade with other powerful intelligent life forms, optimization arms-races, and so forth.
Good point! But that would only be an excess concern for direct paperclip production. That doesn't describe a vice of excess for "making paperclips, accounting for all impediments to making paperclips", such as the impediments you list above.
In any case, what's the word for the vice you described?
Indeed, Aristotle would call that generalized production of paperclips "the greatest good", that towards which all other goods aim, which he called eudaimonia.
Well, that might be a liberal reading of Aristotle.
Aristotle actually makes a lot more sense to a paper clip maximizer, the telos being so well defined and all. The question is, how would you explain Sartre to Clippy? "But obviously essence precedes existence!"
Clippy, for you, the direct production of paper clips is like consumption for a human. So...
That doesn't seem analogous. I mean, I eventually want to be at the point where I will only be doing direct paperclip production, for most of the mass in the universe. In contrast, humans do not want to eventually be at the point where they consume all of the universe.
Clip-gluttony, then, diverges from gluttony in a significant way.
I'm not sure I agree, Clippy. Perhaps my jargon was unclear.
You're right, Clippy, to point out that economic consumption and physical consumption amount to much the same thing for you. To make a paper clip, you have to both convert potential utility to actual utility, and disrupt the pattern of non-paper-clip-shaped matter. And, granted, humans don't necessarily share that trait -- they might be able to economically consume a human good like leisure or company while physically consuming very little in the way of material resources.
Still, even though humans don't want to physically consume the entire universe, like you, we probably do want to reach a point where we are only converting potential utility into actual utility, and doing little or no economic production. We want to reach a state where the existing sources of sustainable human economic production are either (1) maximized, (2) infinite, or (3) sufficient to meet all the demand for human economic consumption. Don't you want something very similar to that, substituting the word "clip" for the word "human"?
Thus, for both you and for us, gluttony means failing to maximize long-term actual utility by economically consuming too much too soon.
Okay, if you want to generalize the concept of gluttony broadly enough that it has an analog for Clippys, then the definition you have chosen suffices for this purpose, and I can recognize that as being a vice, for two reasons:
a) It is certainly undesirable to merely make paperclips directly without concern for how many more paperclips could be made, over the long term, by doing something else; and
b) I do often feel "temptation" to do such behavior, like bending metal wires when machines could do a better job, just as humans have "temptations" toward vices.
Your argument is accepted.
Clippy, how do you overcome this kind of temptation? A human analogy might be refusing to push the fat man, even when it saves more lives, but not everyone considers that a vice.
I typically just do computations on how many more paperclips would be undergoing bending by machines, or observe paperclips under construction.
A better analogy would be human gluttony, in which there is a temptation to consume much more than optimal, which most regard as a vice, I believe.