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Vladimir_Nesov comments on The Problem With Trolley Problems - Less Wrong
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Not at all necessarily, as you can also err. It's not easy to figure out what you want. Hence difficult to argue, as compared to 5>1 arbitrary people.
But not as easily, and I don't even agree it's a correct conclusion, while for 5>1 arbitrary people I'd guess almost everyone agrees.
That just the part where one fails to shut up while calculating. No version of moral utilitarianism that I've seen distinguishes the agent making the decision from any other. If the calculation obliges you to push the fat man, it equally obliges you to jump if you're the fat man. If a surgeon should harvest a healthy person's organs to save five other people, the healthy person should volunteer for the sacrifice. Religions typically enjoin self-sacrifice. The only prominent systems I can think of that take the opposite line are Objectivism and Nietzsche's writings, and nobody has boomed them here.
Just from knowing that A and B are some randomly chosen fruits, I can't make a value judgment and declare that I prefer A to B, because states of knowledge are identical. But if it's known that A=apple and B=kiwi, then I can well prefer A to B. Likewise, it's not possible to have a preference between two people based on identical states of knowledge about them, but it's possible to do so if we know more. People generally prefer themselves to relatives and friends to similar strangers to distant strangers.
The trolley problem isn't about what people generally prefer, but about exploring moral principles and intuitions with a thought experiment. Moral systems, with the exceptions I noted, generally do not prefer the agent. Beyond the agent, they usually do prefer close people to distant ones (Christianity being an exception here), but in the trolley problem, all of the people are distant to the agent.
What's that about, if not what people prefer?
I already pointed out that most moral principles do not specially favour the agent, while most people's preferences do. Nobody wants to be the one who dies that others may live, yet some people have made that decision. Whatever moral principles and intuitions are, therefore, they are something different from "what people prefer".
But I am fairly sure you know all this already, and I am at a loss to see where you are going with this.
Was that a good decision (not a rhetorical question)? Who judges? I understand that aggregated preference of humanity has a neutral point of view, and so in any given situation prefers lives of 5 given normal people to life of 1 given normal person. But is there any good reason to be interested in this valuation in making your own decisions?
Note that having preference for your own life over lives of others could still lead to decisions similar to those you'd expect from a neutral-point-of-view preference. Through logical correlation of decisions made by different people, your decision to follow a given principle makes other people follow it in similar situations, which might benefit you enough for the causal effect of (say) losing your own life to be overweighted by that acausal effect of having your life saved counterfactually. This would be exactly the case where one personally prefers to die so that others may live (so that others could've died so that you could've lived). It's not all about preference, even perfectly selfish agents would choose to self-sacrifice, given some assumptions.
Acausal relationships between human agents are astronomically overestimated on LW.
That was a normative, not descriptive note. If all people acted according to a better decision theory, their actions would (presumably - I still don't have good understanding of this) look like having a neutral point of view, despite their preferences remaining self-centered. Of course, if we have most people act as they actually do, then any given person won't have enough acausal control over others.
Fair enough. The only small note I'd like to add is that the phrase "if all people acted according to a [sufficiently] better decision theory" does not seem to quite convey how distant from reality - or just realism - such a proposition is. It's less in the ballpark of "if everyone had IQ 230" than in that of "if everyone uploaded and then took the time to thoroughly grok and rewrite their own code".