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bentarm comments on The Least Convenient Possible World - Less Wrong
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There are real life examples where reality has turned out to be the "least convenient of possible worlds". I have spent many hours arguing with people who insist that there are no significant gender differences (beyond the obvious), and are convinced that to assert otherwise is morally reprehensible.
They have spent so long arguing that such differences do not exist, and this is the reason that sexism is wrong, that their morality just can't cope with a world in which this turns out not to be true. There are many similar politically charged issues - Pinker discusses quite a few in the Blank Slate - where people aren't wiling to listen to arguments about factual issues because they believe they have moral consequences.
The problem, of course - and I realise this is the main point of this post - is that if your morality is contingent on empirical issues where you might turn out to be wrong, you have to accept the consequences. If you believe that sexism is wrong because there are no heritable gender differences, you have to be willing to accept that if these differences do turn out to exist then you'll say sexism is ok.
This is probably a test you should apply to all of your moral beliefs - if it just so happens that I'm wrong about the factual issue on which I'm basing my belief is wrong, will really I be willing to change my mind?
That raises an interesting question: is it possible to base a moral code only on what's true in all possible worlds that contain me?
To do that would require that "all possible worlds that contain me" be a coherent concept. What does it mean, to identify as "me" some agent in a world very different from our own?
I think that it is not. All possible worlds include worlds where every tuesday the first person you meet in a crowded place just happens to attack you. That would lead to a personal moral code of stabbing the first person you meet on tuesday.
I think we can only have a moral code that works on most worlds at best
You could have a personal moral code of stabbing anyone who you're 90% certain would otherwise attack you. In a universe where the first person you meet on Tuesday always tries to kill you, you would quickly start stabbing them first. In other worlds, you would not.
That doesn't follow from your logic. There could be multiple functions of maximal expectd utility. Or more fundamentally, how you sum over possible words reflects your prior anthropic biases (which worlds you think are most likely), which is sadly a completely arbitrary choice.
I took "all possible worlds that contain me" to mean all worlds where history went the same until my birth. Any world where significant things went differently would have led a different sperm to create a different person than him. That is, they should be reasonably similar but can still include diverse outcomes from for example nuclear war where Pr0methean is living in post-apocalyptic fallout to a USSR-US alliance leading to a fascist authoritarian government in your country to choice.
I did in fact assume that worlds more similar to our current one would make up the majority [or at least the plurality] in that case. Was I wrong to assume that?
Edit: thinking about it now, the plurality was post-hoc rationalisation, so ignore it. On a side note, how do I do strikethrough text?
Retract -- circle with an line through it.
What do you mean by circle with a line through it? Is that some sort of code for what buttons to press?
There should be a button with that appearance in the lower right-hand corner of your comments, which brings up a tooltip labeled "retract" when you mouse over it. Using it will strikethrough the entire text of your post, which 'round these parts is shorthand for "I, the author, no longer endorse this comment". Using it for a second time will delete your post, unless there are responses to it.
There isn't any way to strikethrough portions of a post with LW's markup. Or at least I wasn't able to find one the last time I looked into this. The usual Markdown syntax is disabled here, probably to reserve the look for the retract option.
The causality is unlikely. There was never strikethrough syntax here and the retract option was not conceived until years after the creation of the forum (and syntax choices).
Ah, thank you. I hadn't noticed that