MugaSofer comments on Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge - Less Wrong

138 Post author: lukeprog 20 January 2011 08:44PM

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 03 January 2013 07:01:49PM 4 points [-]

Completely agreed, though I do often wonder whether following both of your advices (that is, conditioning myself to pick the highest-EV profile picture just because it "feels right" rather than deliberately doing so in order to signal some attribute I think will cause people to behave in some way I want them to) leaves me better or worse off than just following your advice. (In practice it's mostly moot, since I don't bother to do the work of fully conditioning myself, but I'm still curious.)

Tangentially, the idea that it's OK to do something which has a consequence as long as I'm ignorant of that consequence is one of the most pervasive and pernicious moralisms I know of.

Comment author: MugaSofer 04 January 2013 04:57:01PM -1 points [-]

Tangentially, the idea that it's OK to do something which has a consequence as long as I'm ignorant of that consequence is one of the most pervasive and pernicious moralisms I know of.

I think that's a virtue ethics thing, which is why it breaks when you try to use it consequentially.

Alternatively, " it's OK to do something which has a consequence as long as I'm ignorant of that consequence", but it's Bad to deliberately create such a situation.