orthonormal comments on Consequentialism Need Not Be Nearsighted - Less Wrong

53 Post author: orthonormal 02 September 2011 07:37AM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (118)
Tags: deontology consequentialism

Comments (118)

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

Comment author: Alicorn 31 August 2011 04:38:39AM *  6 points [-]

But what if the doctor is confident of keeping it a secret? Well, then causal decision theory would indeed tell her to harvest his organs, but TDT (and also UDT) would strongly advise her against it. Because if TDT endorsed the action, then other people would be able to deduce that TDT endorsed the action, and that (whether or not it had happened in any particular case) their lives would be in danger in any hospital run by a timeless decision theorist, and then we'd be in much the same boat. Therefore TDT calculates that the correct thing for TDT to output in order to maximize utility is "Don't kill the traveler," and thus the doctor doesn't kill the traveler.

If you make things more inconvenient, no one will ever suspect that the doctor runs TDT, either.

Comment author: orthonormal 31 August 2011 02:17:28PM *  2 points [-]

This least convenient world basically requires the doctor (or perhaps all doctors) to have a massive epistemic advantage over every other human being, such that the idea won't even cross any patient's mind.

In general, even if you're that much smarter than 99.9% of the world, you need to take into account that other people in the 0.1% can communicate their suspicions to everyone else.

Comment author: SilasBarta 31 August 2011 04:30:19PM *  3 points [-]

I don't think that follows. The LCPW can allow that people could imagine others being TDT agents, but that the scenario does not provide sufficient evidence that the doctor is killing patients. Furthermore, if only 0.1% of the population can detect the doctor's decision theory, it's unlikely that their arguments will be comprehensible to the rest of the population, at least at a cost low enough to have the purported "people stop going to doctors" effect.

Comment author: Strange7 01 September 2011 07:11:22AM 2 points [-]

Yeah, but at that point you're not really talking medical ethics, you're playing against the rest of the world in a game of "God dicks you over in mysterious ways."

Comment author: Kingreaper 01 September 2011 07:42:15AM *  -1 points [-]

If someone is known, by their friends and family, to be relatively aware when it comes to such issues; and warns said friends and family of this danger, they will not need to give a comprehensible argument.

Their statement is, in itself, evidence to those who trust them.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit