lessdazed comments on The 5-Second Level - Less Wrong

111 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 May 2011 04:51AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (310)

Sort By: Leading

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: lessdazed 09 May 2011 08:05:47PM 1 point [-]

Apologies for not being at all indignant, but can we generalize to say you have suggested that it could be good to limit something good because that it is a sufficient solution to a specific problem?

I'd appreciate it if someone can show how endorsements of locally bad, merely sufficient solutions are (or aren't) all implicitly arguments from ignorance, confessing to not knowing how to achieve the same results without the negative local consequences..

In other words, sure, limiting locally good thing X could be good on balance if doing so has generally positive consequences (like assassinating Hitler on certain dates), but that really depends on there not being something better on balance in general, of which an interesting case is a solution that has the same positive consequences but fewer negative ones.