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PhilGoetz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3 - Less Wrong
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How did you choose your prior for anything done by magic to be done correctly? :)
Ending up happy doesn't feel like a good goal. Maybe I'm being irrational. But it reminds me of the characters in Brave New World who said, "It's Good to be a Gamma!"
But it really is best (sub-Gamma) to be Gamma. The people in Brave New World really are happy and content.
Yes, I know. That's why I said what I said. (E.g., your observation is taking the dialogue back one step, not forward.)
Erm. Not really. It really is best (sub-Gamma) to be Gamma. It is not best to be Gamma. We don't want to self modify to be super-happies, even knowing that we will reflectively endorse the change having become super-happies. The people in Brave New World are honest about their class being correct in a way that normal people aren't being honest when they say it's best to go to their school or root for their sports team or like their sort of art. That's what I'm pointing out - the next step is to realize that the reply to a Gamma telling us it's best to be them is "so what?". We don't have Gamma values so the fact they're human shaped shouldn't inform out values.
The original context was Oscar saying that the sorting hat will make people happy. I commented that maybe happiness isn't the right goal - not a very helpful comment, frankly; Oscar's comment was a fine contribution, whereas mine is tangential, nit-picking, and sounds like a criticism.
If being happy were your only goal, you might very well say, "Make me a Gamma!" "We don't want to self modify to be super-happies" implies that being happy is not our only goal, which is the point I was (pedantically) making. So I think you're agreeing with me more than you're disagreeing with me. You're bringing in more subtleties to the issue.
I believe Lucas was trying for the "morality as a 2-place function" notation as in this post, but using different notation made this more confusing.