= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RobinZ comments on Morality as Parfitian-filtered Decision Theory? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (270)
Parenthood doesn't look like a Parfait's Hitchhiker* to me - are you mentioning it for some other reason?
* Err, Parfit's Hitchhiker. Thanks, Alicorn!
Edit: I have updated my position downthread.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/22/100322crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all
(Glad I kept this citation; knew at some point I would run into someone claiming parenthood is a joy. Wish I had the one that said parenthood was a net gain in happiness only years/decades later after the memories have been distorted enough.)
The basic idea about parents and hedonic psychology, as I understand it, is that your moment-to-moment happiness is not typically very high when you have kids, but your "tell me a story" medium/long term reflective happiness may be quite high.
Neither of those is privileged. Have you ever spent a day doing nothing but indulging yourself (watching movies, eating your favourite foods, relaxing)? If you're anything like me you find that even thought most moments during the day were pleasant, the overall experience of the day was nasty and depressing.
Basically, happiness is not an integral of moment-to-moment pleasure, so while it's naive to say parenting is an unqualified joy, it's not so bleak as to be only a good thing after the memories are distorted by time.
As a parent I can report that most days my day-wise maximum moment-to-moment happiness is due to some interaction with my child.
But then, my child is indisputably the most lovable child on the planet. </parental preening>
(welcome thread link not necessary)
Then let me just say, welcome!
I'm inclined to believe you, but note that what you said doesn't quite contradict the hypothesis, which is that if you were not a parent, your day-wise maximum (from any source) would probably be higher.
Also, beware of attributing more power to introspection than it deserves, especially when the waters are already muddied by the normativity of parents' love for their children. You say your happiest moments are with your child, but a graph of dopamine vs. time might (uninspiringly) show bigger spikes whenever you ate sugar. Or it might not. My point is that I'm not sure how much we should trust our own reflections on our happiness.
Fair point. So let me just state that as far as I can tell, the average of my DWMM2M happiness is higher than it was before my child was born, and I expect that in a counterfactual world where my spouse and I didn't want a child and consequently didn't have one, my DWMM2M happiness would not be as great as in this one. It's just that knowing what I know (including what I've learned from this site) and having been programmed by evolution to love a stupendous badass (and that stupendous badass having been equally programmed to love me back), I find that watching that s.b. unfold into a human before my eyes causes me happiness of a regularity and intensity that I personally have never experienced before.
I would mischievously point out things like the oxytocin released after childbirth ought to make us especially wary of bias when it comes to kids. After all, there is no area of our life that evolution could be more concerned about than the kids. (Even your life is worth less than a kid or two, arguably, from its POV.)
That oxytocin &c. causes us to bond with and become partial to our children does not make any causally subsequent happiness less real.
So, then, you would wirehead? It seems to me to be the same position.
I wouldn't: I have preferences about the way things actually are, not just how they appear to me or what I'm experiencing at any given moment.
So that use of oxytocin (and any other fun little biases and sticks and carrots built into us) is a 'noble lie', justified by its results?
In keeping with the Niven theme, so, then you would not object to being tasped by a third party solicitous of your happiness?
Hm... not obviously so. Any reductionist explanation of happiness from any source is going to end up mentioning hormones & chemicals in the brain, but it doesn't follow that wanting happiness (& hence wanting the attendant chemicals) = wanting to wirehead.
I struggle to articulate my objection to wireheading, but it has something to do with the shallowness of pleasure that is totally non-contingent on my actions and thoughts. It is definitely not about some false dichotomy between "natural" and "artificial" happiness; after all, Nature doesn't have a clue what the difference between them is (nor do I).
Certainly not, but we do need to understand utility functions and their modification; if we don't, then bad things might happen. For example (I steal this example from EY), a 'FAI' might decide to be Friendly by rewiring our brains to simply be really really happy no matter what, and paperclip the rest of the universe. To most people, this would be a bad outcome, and is an intuitive argument that there are good and bad kinds of happiness, and the distinctions probably have something to do with properties of the external world.
I'm not going to claim having children is "rational", but to judge it by the happiness of "caring for children" is about the same as to judge quality of food by enjoyment of doing the dishes. This is very one-dimensional.
Moreover I actually think it's foolish to use any kind of logical process (such as reading this study) to make decisions in this area except for extreme circumstances such as not having enough money or having genetic diseases.
The reason for my attitude is that I think besides the positive upsides to having kids (there are many, if you're lucky) there is a huge aspect of regret minimization involved; it seems to me Nature choose stick rather than a carrot here.
ETA: I should perhaps say short-term carrot and a long term stick
I wasn't proposing that parenthood is a joy - I may have misunderstood what SilasBarta meant by "utility function places positive weight".
"Utility function of agent A places positive weight on X" is equivalent to "A regards X as a terminal value".
Now I'm trying to figure out how a parfait could drive a car.
Deliciously.
From the Simpsons: "We would also have accepted 'snacktacularly'."
(For our non-native readers: snacktacular = snack + spectacular.)
Very well, thank you.
Now I want a parfait.
Natural selection is the Omega, and the mind propagated through generations by natural selection is the hitchhiker. The mind only gets to the "decide to pay"/"decide to care for children" if it had the right decision theory before the "rescue"/"copy to next generation".
Does it look similar now?
I see the parallelism. If you ask me, though, I would say that it's not a Parfitian filter, but a prototypical example of a filter to demonstrate that the idea of a filter is valid.
What's the difference?
Perhaps I am being obtuse. Let me try to articulate a third filter, and get your reasoning on whether it is Parfitian or not.
As it happens, there exist certain patterns in nature which may be reliably counted upon to correlate with decision-theory-relevant properties. One example is the changing color of ripening fruit. Now, species with decision theories that attribute significance to these patterns will be more successful at propagating than those that do not, and therefore will be more widespread. This is a filter. Is it Parfitian?
No, because a self-interested agent could regard it as optimal to judge based on that pattern by only looking at causal benefits (CaMELs) to itself. In contrast, an agent could only regard it as optimal to care for offspring (to the extent we observe in parents) based on considering SAMELs, or having a utility function contorted to the point that its actions could more easily be explained by reference to SAMELs.
Let me try to work this out again, from scratch. A Parfit's hitchhiking involves the following steps in order:
Parenthood breaks this chain in two ways: first, the "Omega" in step 2 is not the "Omega" in step 4, and neither of these are the "Omega" in step 5; and second, step 1 never occurs. Remember, "natural selection" isn't an agent - it's a process, like supply and demand, that necessarily happens.
Consider, for contrast, division of labor. (Edit: The following scenario is malformed. See followup comment, below.) Let's say that we have Ag, the agent, and Om, the Omega, in the EEA. Om wants to hunt, but Om has children.
Here, all five steps occur in order, Om is Om throughout and Ag is Ag throughout, and both Om and Ag gain utility (meat, in this case) by the exchange.
Does that clarify our disagreement?
Somewhat, but I'm confused:
Taking your objections out of order:
First: yes, I have the scenario wrong - correct would be to switch Ag and Om, and have:
In this case, Om has already given Ag utility - the ability to hunt - on the expectation that Ag will give up utility - meat - at a later time. I will edit in a note indicating the erroneous formulation in the original comment.
Second: what we are comparing are cases where an agent gives no utility to cooperating with Omega, but uses a decision theory that does so because it boosts the agent's utility (e.g. the prototypical case) and cases where the agent gives positive utility to cooperating with Omega (e.g. if the agent and Omega were the same person and the net change is sufficiently positive). What we need to do to determine if the isomorphism with Parfit's hitchhiker is sufficient is to identify a case where the agent's actions will differ.
It seems to me that the latter case, the agent will give utility to Omega even if Omega never gives utility to the agent. Parfit's hitchhikers do not give money to Nomega, the predictor agent who wasn't at the scene and never gave them a ride - they only give money when the SAMEL is present. Therefore: if a parent is willing to make sacrifices when their parent didn't, the Parfit parallel is poor and Theory 2a is the better fit. Agreed?
I'm not sure I understand all the steps in your reasoning, but I think I can start by responding to your conclusion:
As best I can understand you, yes. If there's e.g. a species that does not care for its young, then one day, one of them does, that action would not be best explained by its recognition (or acting as it if had recognition) of a SAMEL (because there was no "AM") -- it would have to be chalked up to some random change in its psychology.
However -- and this is the important part -- by making that choice, and passing the genes partly responsible for that choice, into the next generation, it opens up the possibility of exploring a new part of the "organism design space": the part which which is improved my modifications predicated on some period of parent-child care [1].
If that change, and further moves into that attractor [2], improve fitness, then future generations will care for their children, with the same psychological impetus as the first one. They feel as if they just care about their children, not that they have to act on a SAMEL. However, 2b remains a superior explanation because it makes fewer assumptions (except for the organism to first have the mutation, which is part of the filter); 2b needn't assume that the welfare of the child is a terminal value.
And note that the combined phenomena do produce functional equivalence to recognition of a SAMEL. If the care-for-children mode enhances fitness, then it is correct to say, "If the organism in n-th generation after mutation did not regard it as optimal to care for the (n+1)th generation, it would not be here", and it is correct to say that that phenomenon is responsible for the organism's decision (such as it is a decision) to care for its offspring. Given these factors, an organism that chooses to care for its offspring is acting equivalently to one motivated by the SAMEL. Thus, 2b can account for the same behavior with fewer assumptions.
As for the EEA DoL arrangement (if the above remarks haven't screened off the point you were making with it): Om can still, er, withhold the children. But let's ignore that possibility on grounds of Least Convenient Possible World. Even so, there are still causal benefits to Ag keeping up its end -- the possibility of making future such arrangements. But let's assume that Ag can still come out ahead by stiffing Om.
In that case, yes, Ag would have to recognize SAMELs to justify paying Om. I'd go on to make the normal point about Ag having already cleaved itself off into the world where there are fewer Om offers if it doesn't see this SAMEL, but honestly, I forgot the point behind this scenario so I'll leave it at that.
(Bitter aside: I wish more of the discussion for my article was like this, rather than being 90% hogged by unrelated arguments about PCT.)
[1] Jaron Lanier refers to this replication mode as "neoteny", which I don't think is the right meaning of the term, but I thought I'd mention it because he discussed the importance of a childhood period in his manifesto that I just read.
[2] I maybe should have added in the article that the reasoning "caring for children = good for fitness" only applies to certain path-dependent domains of attraction in the design space, and doesn't hold for all organisms.
You should put that in the article. (True, it's a causal iteration rather than an acausal prediction. But it'll still make the article clearer.)
Thanks for the suggestion, I've added it.
Consider this situation: You are given the choice between personally receiving a small prize or giving your children a much larger prize. Whatever you choose, it is possible that your children will one day face a similar choice. Being your children, they resemble you in many ways and are more likely than not to choose similarly to you. Its not quite a Parfit's Hitchhiker even from your childrens' perspective - the consequences of their choice are in the past, not the future - but it's close, and the result is the same.
I see what you mean, but I think the parallel is pretty weak.