wedrifid comments on Rationality quotes: October 2010 - Less Wrong
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Your point is valid.
Where it does make sense to call another's choice to wirehead a mistake (rather than just a difference in values) is when that person thinks that wireheading is what they want but they are actually mistaken about their own values or how to achieve them.
It is a little counterintuitive but even though values are entirely subjective people are actually not the absolute authority on what their subjective preferences are. Subjective preferences are objective facts in as much as they are represented by the physical state of the universe (particularly that part of the universe that is the person's head). People's beliefs about that part of the universe and the implications thereof can (and often are) wrong. This particularly applies to abstract concepts - we aren't very good at wiring up our abstract beliefs with rest of our desires.
Absolutely. In a way we owe this understanding to Freud, he popularized the notion that people do not know what they are really pursuing. Of course he thought they were pursuing sex with their mother...
Could we instead say "this understanding is predated by Freud's popularized notion..."? There is no debt if the concept is arrived at independently and this is a general philosophical point that is not limited to humans specifically while Freud's is proto-psychology.