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Morendil comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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My intuitions of CEV are informed by the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance, which effectively asks: "What rules would you want to prevail if you didn't know in advance who you would turn out to be?"
Where CEV as I understand it adds more information - assumes our preferences are extrapolated as if we knew more, were more the kind of people we want to be - the Veil of Ignorance removes information: it strips people under a set of specific circumstances of the detailed information about what their preferences are, what their contignent histories brought them there, and so on. This includes things like what age you are, and even - conceivably - how many of you there are.
To this bunch of undifferentiated people you'd put the question, "All in favor of a 99% chance of dying horribly shortly after being born, in return for the 1% chance to partake in the crowning glory of babyeating cultural tradition, please raise your hands."
I expect that not dying horribly takes lexical precedence over any kind of cultural tradition, for any sentient being whose kin has evolved to sentience (it may not be that way for constructed minds). So I would expect the Babyeaters to choose against cultural tradition.
The obvious caveat is that my intuitions about CEV may be wrong, but lacking a formal explanation of CEV it's hard to check intuitions.
BEs aren't humans. They are Baby-Eating aliens
You're correct. I'm using the term "people" loosely. However, I wrote the grand-parent while fully informed of what the Babyeaters are. Did you mean to rebut something in particular in the above?
If we translate it to our cultural context, we will get something like "All in favor of 100% dying horribly of old age, in return for good lives of your babies, please rise your hands". They ARE aliens.
Well, we would say "no" to that, if we had the means to abolish old age. We'd want to have our cake and eat it too.
The text stipulates that it is within the BE's technological means to abolish the suffering of the babies, so I expect that they would choose to do so, behind the Veil.
Yes, but a surprisingly large number of humans seem to react in horror when you talk about getting rid of aging.
Who will ask them? FAI have no idea, that a) baby eating is bad, b) it should generalize moral values past BE to all conscious beings.
Even if FAI will ask that question and it turns out that majority of population don't want to do inherently good thing (it is for them), then FAI must undergo controlled shutdown.
EDIT: To disambiguate. I am talking about FAI, which is implemented by BEs.
As we should not allow FAI to generalize morals past conscious beings, just to be sure, that it will not take CEV of all bacterium, so BEs should not allow their FAI to generalize past BEs.
As we should built in automatic off switch into our FAI, to stop it if its goals is inherently wrong, so should BEs.
It doesn't seem from the story like the babies are gladly sacrificing for the tribe...