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Sublimity vs. Youtube
The torture vs. dust specks quandary is a canonical one to LW. Off the top of my head, I can't remember anyone suggesting the reversal, one where the arguments taken by the hypothetical are positive and not negative. I'm curious about how it affects people's intuitions. I call it - as the title indicates - "Sublimity vs. Youtube1".
Suppose the impending existence of some person who is going to live to be fifty years old whatever you do2. She is liable to live a life that zeroes out on a utility scale: mediocre ups and less than shattering downs, overall an unremarkable span. But if you choose "sublimity", she's instead going to live a life that is truly sublime. She will have a warm and happy childhood enriched by loving relationships, full of learning and wonder and growth; she will mature into a merrily successful adult, pursuing meaningful projects and having varied, challenging fun. (For the sake of argument, suppose that the ripple effects of her sublime life as it affects others still lead to the math tallying up as +(1 sublime life), instead of +(1 sublime life)+(various lovely consequences).)
Or you can choose "Youtube", and 3^^^3 people who weren't doing much with some one-second period of their lives instead get to spend that second watching a brief, grainy, yet droll recording of a cat jumping into a box, which they find mildly entertaining.
Sublimity or Youtube?
1The choice in my variant scenario of "watching a Youtube video" rather than some small-but-romanticized pleasure ("having a butterfly land on your finger, then fly away", for instance) is deliberate. Dust specks are really tiny, and there's not much automatic tendency to emotionally inflate them. Hopefully Youtube videos are the reverse of that.
2I'm choosing to make it an alteration of a person who will exist either way to avoid questions about the utility of creating people, and for greater isomorphism with the "torture" option in the original.
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Comments (61)
Also, I'm trying to remember -- has anyone attempted to defend the claim that there is no such thing as 3^^^3 sufficiently-different humans?
The number of possible humans is probably plenty large enough for the purposes of the thought experiment.
That is the most important question regarding all those scope sensitivity thought experiments. What are the upper and lower bounds for scope sensitivity? Disregard the happiness of a galactic civilization if there is a tiny probability of making many more beings happy by trying to leave the universe? Don't marry your girlfriend because you make two other girls and your mother happy if you don't?
Something seems wrong with this line of reasoning.
What do you think is wrong?
To me it seems these are perfectly valid scenarios if you accept the premise that you are choosing based on a formally specified, well-behaving utility function. (Which is trivially untrue of humans, but there are reasons why we might want to emulate such behavior.)
If I knew I would be smarter than Yudkowsky, as he writes:
Something seems to be fundamentally wrong with using Bayes’ Theorem, the expected utility formula, and Solomonoff induction to determine how to choose given unbounded utility scenarios. If you just admit that it is wrong but less wrong, then I think it is valid to scrutinize your upper and lower bounds. Yudkowsky clearly sets some upper bound, but what is it and how does he determine it if not by 'gut feeling'? And if it all comes down to 'instinct' on when to disregard any expected utility, then how can one still refer to those heuristics as 'laws'?
I don't think that would be a good idea because you'd never stop and always hunt for an even larger payoff, irrespective of astronomically low probabilities. If that is stupid, then at what point does it become stupid? Why would I choose the present over the future ever? Yudkowsky seems to argue against discount rates:
Yet without discounting the inverse applies, that it is worth to torture a single person today to save many later. Can that be more right?
I think so, yes.
At least, if you gave me a button and convinced me that pressing it would save many people from suffering a century from now, but would allow one person to suffer today, and not-pressing it would save one person from suffering today, but allow many people to suffer a century from now, I would feel like I ought to press the button.
Would you not? Why not?
Yeah why not? Once when I asked if the SIAI would consider the possibility of paying AGI researchers not to do AGI research, or kill an AGI researcher who is just days away from launching an uFAI, Yudkowsky said something along the lines that it is OK to just downvote me to -10 rather -10000. Talk about taking ideas seriously?
Never mind the above, I can't tell you why it would be wrong but I have a feeling that it is. It would lead to all kinds of bad behavior based on probabilities and expected utility calculations. I don't feel like taking that route right now...
Can I conclude that you would give in to a Pascal's Mugging scenario? If not, where do you draw the line and why? If an important part of your calculation, the part that sets the upper and lower bounds, is necessarily based on 'instinct' then why don't you disregard those calculations completely and do what you feel is right and don't harm anyone?
To answer your questions: No, I don't think you can fairly conclude that I'm subject to Pascal's Mugging, and I draw the line based on what calculations I can do and what calculations I can't do.
That is, my inability to come up with reliable estimates of the probability that Pascal's Mugger really can (and will) kill 3^^^3 people is not a good reason for me to disregard my ability to come up with reliable estimates of the probability that dropping poison in a well will kill people; I can reasonably refuse to do the latter (regardless of what I feel) on the grounds that I don't choose to kill people, regardless of what I say or don't say about Pascal's Mugging.
And if there's a connection between any of this and the initial question I asked, I don't see it.
There seems to be a persistent meme to the effect that initiating harm to prevent others from future harm is never okay, or at best is a dirty business (that is, immoral in its entirety, rather than containing negatively moral components which are overwhelmed by the positively moral ones) that ought only be performed if we're pretty sure no options exist that don't involve hurting people.
From most consequentialist perspectives this is trivially false, of course; it'd probably be simplest to interpret the impulse as straight-up negative utilitarianism, but I don't think that flies when you look at the socially accepted responses to other moral dilemmas. Instead, I think we're looking at a deontological adaptation to the dilemma posed by power corrupting; despite its falsity, the meme could easily end up being adaptive in an environment which otherwise rewarded self-deception in order to knock off your political and social rivals.
In Tolkien: Author of the Century, Shippey says that Acton seems to have been the first to say that power corrupts. We're very used to the idea, but it isn't a human universal.
True enough; but I suspect a lot of that comes from the patterns of behavior we'd now label "corruption" being taken for granted by a lot of pre-Enlightenment thinkers.
I haven't read enough pre-Enlightenment political theory to claim a universal, but the familial model of power (with the leader as a father and subordinates as children; sometimes augmented with an executive officer figure as mother) seems to have been fairly ubiquitous. Seems to me that a lot of actions we'd view as blatant abuse of power might under this model be accepted as the rights of leadership, so long as noblesse oblige is upheld.
Sure, agreed; that's one reason I couched the example in terms of preventing harm and allowing harm, rather than causing harm. The cost-benefit equation stays the same, but it doesn't trip quite so many deontological alarms.
Hmm this is the first time I read up on what 'deontological' actually means. I actually think that there is something wrong with the whole business of probability/utility calculations. For a long time I know about this kind of problems but only a few days ago I came across the official terminology here. I didn't know about Pascal's Mugging or discount rates etc., and I was deeply surprised that the problem is unsolved and widely ignored. As I wrote in another comment I don't see how those methods are still refereed to as 'laws' here when you have to cherry pick what result to ignore.
I'm afraid I'm not following you here... that is, I'm not sure what 'laws' you are talking about, what it is I have to cherry-pick, what one has to do with the other, what either of them have to do with Pascal's Mugging or discount rates, or in what sense either of those are unsolved problems.
Sorry.
The problem is that I am Omega and that I predict that iff you punch Yudkowsky in the face then as a result 3^^^^3 beings will be maximally happy for 1 day.
Surely cat-jumps-in-box-video equivalents can be devised for a wide array of aliens.
Or even 3^^^3 sufficiently-different sentient beings. The first claim actually seems obviously true, and the second does not seem obviously false.
Agreed. Most of the aliens we're talking about have brains larger than our galaxy, and I don't know how I feel about the moral significance of their experience.
But do they have to be different? If 3^^^3 people existed, would you flip a switch that kills most of them for not being sufficiently-different?
I would, at least, if there's a benefit to the ones who were.
You can also do Sublimity vs Dust Specks or Torture Vs. YouTube (though when we discussed the latter I think it was phrased as Torture Vs. Cookies)
I don't get it. Aren't these just good thing vs. bad thing?
Presumably you can choose whether to take both or neither.
It doesn't seem to affect my intuitions at all: my intuition in both cases is to ignore the "3^^^3 people" case and go for sublimity/lack-of-torture.
It also doesn't seem to affect my ability to do the math.
That said, there's also a status-quo bias in effect here: I feel a stronger impulse to "restore the default" by protecting someone from being tortured than I do to "improve on the default" by giving them sublimity. If I and my peers were ourselves living a sublime life, I presumably wouldn't feel that way.
Perhaps the question could be worded as:
A young girl is going to grow up and have an amazingly sublime life. You have the opportunity to cause her to instead lead a mediocre life, which will include a moment when she records her cat doing something similar, uploads it to youtube, and provides a bajillion people who would otherwise be having a boring afternoon with a few seconds of mildly funny youtube content.
Perhaps.
And, yes, if I phrase the question in such a way that emphasizes my ability to remove sublimity rather than my ability to grant it, then my intuitions shift around (among the reasons I don't trust my intuitions here, since I see no reason to endorse giving different answers depending on how I phrase the question).
The additional causal link between her mediocre life and the youtube content doesn't seem to affect my intuitions at all, though.
The causal link wasn't really meant to change anything, it just made the question more sensical. Why would affecting one person's sublimity create a brief youtube moment? Because she didn't have many friends so she bought a cat!
I'm not sure the Youtube example is a good thing, and if not a good thing it is certainly a bad thing. It could very well be worse than a dust speck in the eye.
How about a single, wafer-thin mint?
It's only wafer-thin.
Actually, thinking about this possibility it seems by far the most likely that it depends strongly on the specific of the person watching it, some like this kind of thing and others don't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx5Tqs10bDg
yea, this looks the same, and the answer is still that 3^^^3 is so large the question dosn't even seem interesting.
I have the same question as I have about the torture vs. dust speck question:
Is there an obvious reason why the utility to me of N people watching youtube has to be a function of N that increases without bound? (I grant, for the sake of argument, that it is an increasing function.)
Is there a slam dunk argument for why I can't consider 3^^^3 people watching youtube to be only a tiny sliver-of-utility better than 3^^3 people watching youtube? And why can't the sum of such slivers converge to a finite value as the number of "^"s goes to infinity?
Is such a utility function contrary to some obvious utility-function desideratum? Or is it just contrary to what many people here arrive at using intuition+reflection?
ETA: [Forgot the punchline.] And if the utility of arbitrarily many youtube video-watchers is bounded, is there an obvious reason why it can't be less than one sublime life?
Between your positive vs. positive and original negative vs. negative, there is also a positive vs. negative variant by cousin_it: Torturing people for fun.
What exactly are we trying to learn from this thought experiment that we cannot already learn from the torture/dust-speck experiment?
"I can't remember anyone suggesting the reversal, one where the arguments taken by the hypothetical are positive and not negative. I'm curious about how it affects people's intuitions."
Also, people find torture tasteless and offensive so this version helps with that.
I'm tempted to reply that I find dull videos of a cat jumping into a box tasteless, but I understand your point. :D
Can you clarify how you think this maps to the original torture vs dust specks? I personally see two ways to be consistent:
A) Qualitative Interpretation - both torture and sublimity cause strong reactions (both in the recipient and in the reader), while both dust specks and YouTube cause almost no reaction, so it is consistent to pick dust specks & sublimity to maximize good.
B) Quantitative Interpretation - both dust specks and YouTube destroy/create the most utilons, incomparably more so in the aggregate than the torture/sublimity option. So it is consistent to pick torture & youtube to maximize good.
Is the exercise to see if anyone would pick torture & sublimity (or dust specks & youtube) to find inconsistencies in thinking?
This feels like negative utility compared to the normal course of existence. I think that many people (extrapolating from myself, with a qualitative discount) would rather be doing other things with that one-second interval of their lives than watching such a YouTube video, so that course of action actually has a cost if whatever else they would have been doing right then would have been more fun.
I also notice that if I'm feeling somewhat euphoric at the time, such a video might cause my mood to drop significantly, thus creating a rather large negative deltafun compared to, say, just thinking.
Whether the Youtube video is going to be plus or minus fun is going to depend on the context, so, uh, the answer is going to depend on psychology and lots of general information about how different people live. However, I would pick Sublimity because of the potential for non-negligable deltafuns occurring --- for the same reason, I would pick ~Sublimity (as in, take no action) over Youtube.
I don't think it's actually possible for sustained sublimity to be as good as sustained torture is bad. Even if that was somehow compensated for I'd still choose Youtube, just like I would choose the torture/avoiding the dust specs (in both cases because otherwise I would either be inconsistent or feel I was making silly excuses).
I choose the youtube video of a cat jumping into a box.
Care to elaborate on why?
Because I am on the utilitarian ethics bandwagon?
I think that (3^^^3(change in happiness when watching kitten * 1 s)) > (1(average change in happiness in awesome life * 3.15*10^9 s))
(assuming subject lives 100 years = 3.15 * 10^9 seconds). In fact, I think that change in happiness from seeing a kitten /second is probably comparable to the average change in happiness of a sublime life /second, so I could take the video even for around 3.15*10^9 viewers. (But would be tempted to do more research first) With 3^^^3 viewers, its not much of a decision.
Eliezer's solution to Torture vs. Dust relied on the assumptions that dust is at least somewhat bad and torture is clearly bad, and the reasoning that 3^^^3 is so big that if we choose to consider some aggregation of the dust speck negative utilities, 3^^^3 will outweigh any reasonable discounting of aggregation.
Now, I read in the OP that the Youtube existence is assumed to be zero value. I could go on actually imagining it and trying to assign some value to it on a gut level. However, people differ in their notions of "zero value", "a tiny bit good" and "a tiny bit bad" scenarios, unlike in the case of torture, which is unanimously believed very bad, and probably also unlike in the case of Sublimity.
I think a great part of the debate on Torture vs. Dust stemmed from uncertain value calculus of utilities very close to zero. The way Sublimity vs. Youtube is presented, I think it is going to head in the same direction. However, if I blank out the specifics, mentioning only that the first type of existence is value-zero and the second is definitely good, the problem gets reduced to 3^^^3*0 < any positive number.
Nevertheless it may not be a bad thing to debate and communicate our notions of close-to-zero value scenarios.
I actually find this reasonably instructive as to my own values. I will pick dust specks every time, but am inclined towards you tube here. I think its because my utility function for pain isn't an average, but maybe something like a maximin, but I'm actually more content with averaging out happiness..
Uh, sorry to create a confusing thread there! Just an error... I've edited now...
What do you mean "but"? Youtube is what you would expect a torture-chooser to choose.
Youtube is the large-scale, small-effect answer, while Sublimity is the small-scale, large-effect answer. Similarly, specks is the large-scale, small-effect answer, while torture is the small-scale, large-effect answer. Thus, I don't find the meaning of your comment to be obvious -- to estimate it, I would be forced to reconstruct a large-enough chain of reasoning that I would likely misunderstand something. Could you explain?
Edit: Request retracted -- I understand it now.
Because one is good but the other is bad! So the 3^^^3 of a small bad thing is much worse than the one-person big bad thing, and 3^^^3 of a small good thing is much better than the one-person big good thing.
I think Bongo read "pick torture" as choose torture over the dust specks, i. e. prioritize avoiding the dust specks over avoiding the torture. Which is actually the most straightforward reading of just those two words if you ignore the rest of thakil's post.
Yep.
Mmkay, that makes sense.