endoself comments on Is Morality a Valid Preference? - Less Wrong

13 Post author: MinibearRex 21 February 2011 01:18AM

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Comment author: endoself 22 February 2011 01:46:38AM 2 points [-]

We defined a dust speck to have nonzero negative utility. If you don't think this describes reality, then you can substitute something else, like a stubbed toe.

As long as we can make a series of things, none of which is infinitely worse than the next, we can prove that nothing in the list is infinitely worse than any other. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n3/circular_altruism/u7x presents this well.

Comment author: [deleted] comment score below threshold [+] (7 children)

Comment author: FAWS 23 February 2011 02:06:58AM * 0 points [-]

So is a single millisecond of torture also infinitely worse than a dust speck and as well as infinitely worse than everything else that isn't infinitely worse than a dust speck itself, or is some time span of torture infinitely worse than a slightly shorter time span? If you postulate a discontinuity that discontinuity has to be somewhere.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 February 2011 04:08:19PM -1 points [-]

I guess this is what I get for replying to a torture post!

The point I was trying to make is mathematical: for sensible definitions of "finitely greater" the statement "if we have a sequence of objects, each of which is only finitely greater than its predecessor, then every object on the list is only finitely greater than eany earlier object" is true, but not relevant to the question of whether or not there exist infinitely large objects.

My goal was to flag up mathematical reasoning that doesn't hold water, which apparently I failed to do.

For completeness, I should also mention that the linked post does not make the same error.

Comment author: FAWS 24 February 2011 01:32:38AM 1 point [-]

The point I was trying to make is mathematical: for sensible definitions of "finitely greater" the statement "if we have a sequence of objects, each of which is only finitely greater than its predecessor, then every object on the list is only finitely greater than eany earlier object" is true, but not relevant to the question of whether or not there exist infinitely large objects.

But extremely relevant to the question whether or not there exist infinitely large objects on the list.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 February 2011 06:30:13PM 0 points [-]

Whether or not everybody has a list is precisely the question asked in the top post of this thread.

Comment author: FAWS 24 February 2011 07:20:45PM 0 points [-]

Not at all. People who treat some things as infinitely worse than others don't do so because they believe that a list that includes both somehow stops being a list, and the threat starter never implied anything in that direction. They just have inconsistent preferences (at least in the sense of being money-pumpable). Either that or they bite the bullet and admit that there is at least one particular item infinitely worse than the preceding for any such list. Denying that a list is a list is just nonsense.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 February 2011 09:23:14PM 0 points [-]

We are in violent agreement (but I'm coming off worse!).

rstarkov suggested that people may have "utility functions" that don't take real values.

Endoself's comment "showed" that this cannot be, starting from the assumption that everybody has a preference system that can be encoded as a real-valued utility function. This is nonsense.

My non-disagreement with you seems to have stemmed from me not wanting to be the first person to say "order-type", and us making different assumptions about how various poster's positions projected onto our own internal models of "lists" (whatever they were).

Comment author: FAWS 24 February 2011 11:02:10PM 0 points [-]

You shouldn't have used the worlds "not relevant", that implied the statement had no important implications for the problem at all, rather than proving the (very relevant since the topic is ulilitarism) hidden assumption wrong for that set of people (unless they bit the bullet).

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