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SilasBarta comments on Morality as Parfitian-filtered Decision Theory? - Less Wrong
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There wouldn't be much point to further constraining the set, considering that it's only the subjunctive action that matters, not the reasoning that leads up to it. As I said on my blog, it doesn't matter whether you would decide to pay because you:
So if I'm going to list all the theories that win on PH-like problems, it's going to be a long list, as it includes (per the Drescher quote) everyone that behaves as if they recognized the SAMEL, including people who simply feel "grateful".
To answer the question of "What did I say that's non-tautological?", it's that a decision theory that is optimal in a self-interested sense will not merely look at the future consequences (not necessarily a redundant term), but will weight the acausal consequences on par with them, bypassing the task of having to single out each intuition and elevate it to a terminal value.
Edit: And, to show how this acausal weighting coincides with what we call morality, explaining why we have the category in the first place.
And as I said to Perplexed, natural selection was our Omega.
Did you? I'm sorry I missed it. Could you explain it?
I can see how NS might be thought of as a powerful psychic capable of discerning our true natures. And I can see, maybe, how NS cannot itself easily be modeled as a rational decision maker making decisions to maximize its own utility. Hence we must treat it as as a fairly arbitrary agent with a known decision algorithm. Modeling NS as a variant of Omega is something I had never thought of doing before. Is there anything already written down justifying this viewpoint?
This was the point I made in the second section of the article.
I read the article again, but didn't see the point being made clearly at all.
Nevertheless, the point has been made right here, and I think it is an important point. I would urge anyone promoting decision theories of the UDT/TDT family to research the theory of kin selection in biological evolution - particularly the justification of "Hamilton's rule". Also, the difference between the biological ESS version of game theory and the usual "rational agent" approach.
I think that it should be possible to cleanly merge these Omega-inspired ideas into standard utility maximization theory by using a theoretical construct something like Hamilton's "inclusive fitness". "Inclusive utility". I like the sound of that.
I'm referring to the point I made here:
Do you think that did not make clear the similarity between Omega and natural selection?
No, it did not. I see it now, but I did not see it at first. I think I understand why it was initially obvious to you but not to me. It all goes back to a famous 1964 paper in evolutionary theory by William Hamilton. His theory of kin selection.
Since Darwin, it has been taken as axiomatic that parents will care for children. Of course, they do, says the Darwinian. Children are the only thing that does matter. All organisms are mortal, their only hope for genetic immortality is by way of descendents. The only reason the rabbit runs away from the fox is so it can have more children, sometime in the near future. So, as a Darwinian, I saw your attempt to justify parental care using Omega as just weird. We don't need to explain that. It is just axiomatic.
Then along came Hamilton with the idea that taking care of descendants (children and grandchildren) is not the whole story. Organisms are also selected to take care of siblings, and cousins and nephews and nieces. That insight definitely was not part of standard received Darwinism. But Hamilton had the math to prove it. And, as Trivers and others pointed out, even the traditional activities of taking care of direct descendants should probably be treated as just one simple case of Hamilton's more general theory.
Ok, that is the background. I hope it is now clear if I say that the reason I did not see parental care as an example of a "Parfitian filter" is exactly like the reason traditional Darwinists did not at first see parental care as just one more example supporting Hamilton's theory. They didn't get that point because they already understood parental care without having to consider this new idea.
Okay, thanks for explaining that. I didn't intend for that explanation of parental behavior to be novel (I even said it was uncontroversial), but rather, to show it as a realistic example of a Parfitian filter, which motivates the application to morality. In any case, I added a note explicitly showing the parallel between Omega and natural selection.