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Bakkot comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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I think we're probably all in agreement that making infanticide legal in most modern Western societies (the anthropologist in me can't help but pointing out that really, really that needs to be plural) would cause chaos.
But I do think a world exactly like ours except without the strong social stigma attached to infanticide would be a more fun place to live.
Huh. I don't follow the reasoning. Why do you expect social stigma attached to infanticide to correlate with less fun?
All of the reasons given above: Babies aren't people, so making it outright illegal to kill them even in unusual circumstances decreases people's personal freedom without increasing anyone's fun.
More broadly, I think having fewer things prohibited correlates with more fun unless there's some reason the prohibition increases the amount of fun in the universe. Killing people significantly reduces the amount of fun for a number of reasons. Killing babies doesn't.
Oh, and I'm using "fun" in a somewhat specialized way.
That's pretty much tautological -- you could as well express it as "forbidding things correlates with more fun unless there's some reason allowing something increases the amount of fun in the universe". What you really need for this argument to work is a way of showing that people attach intrinsic utility to increased latitude of choice, which in light of the paradox of choice looks questionable.
Not really. There's a third option - that forbidding things with no evidence that this will improve the world does not correlate either with increased fun or decreased fun, so that we could pass laws on a whim without concern. My claim is that this is not the case - that there is a correlation and the correlation is negative.
Ehh... I am confident asserting that prohibiting things merely on the basis that people are often happier having fewer choices will not in fact general to increased levels of fun. Having fewer choices might make people happier, but being denied choices by their government probably won't - and I'm certainly not optimizing for happiness, in any case.
Aside from any other possible issues, you're leaving out the possibility that one person may want to kill a baby that another person is very attached to.
Do you have an age or ability level at which you think being a person begins?
Considering that I specified that you could only kill your own children, that doesn't seem like much of an argument at all. Really, imagine making that argument and expecting to be taken seriously in any other context. That's exactly like arguing abortion should be illegal because other people might have gotten attached to the fetus, or that it should be illegal to tear down my house and build a new one because the crazy guy down the street might be have some fond memories attached to it.
No, I'm afraid I'm not really buying this argument. Perhaps there ought to be subtleties to the law to handle exceptional cases, but that's nowhere near a sufficiently good argument to prohibit it outright.
No. I've gone into this pretty heavily in some other posts, which I could dig up if you like. Recapping briefly, it certainly seems to me by comparison with other people-things and non-people things that babies younger than ten months unquestionably belong to the latter category, so the fact that I could not tell you a precise point at which non-personhood ends and personhood begins does not prevent me from telling you that babies younger than 10 months are non-persons.
I expect this proposal could be taken seriously: when an owner wants to have a pet put down other than for humanitarian reasons, others who have had a close relationship to the pet, and are willing and able to take responsibility for it, get the right to veto and take custody of the pet.
Ways in which Nancy's argument was not exactly like arguing that abortion should be illegal because other people might have gotten attached to the fetus:
I'm not sure how much I will participate on this topic, it seems like a bit of a mind killer. I'm impressed we've found a more volatile version of the notorious internet abortion debate.
The standard reply to "But I like your fetus, don't kill it!" is "I'd let you have it, but we don't have the tech for me to give it to you now. My only options are going through several months of pregnancy plus labor, or killing it now. So down the drain it goes.". This suggests that inasmuch are there are people attached to fetuses not inside themselves, we should work on eviction tech.
Or, in any even slightly libertarian weirdtopia, it could be a matter of compensation for bearing the child.
That's legal now (though we tend to offer status and supportive work like childcare, not money). Libertarianism mandates that refusing the transaction at any price and aborting also remains legal (unless embryos turn out to be people at typical abortion age, in which case they are born in debt).
To which I can see people responding by getting pregnant, getting others attached, threatening abortion and collecting compensation just to make money. Especially if pro-lifers run around paying off as many would-be aborters as possible.
Maybe. Maybe society would create new norms to fix that.
I'd like to mention that I'm emphatically not a libertarian (in fact identifying as socialist), and find many absurdities with its basic concept (see Yvain's "Why I Hate Your Freedom); however, I'd always like to learn more about how it could plausibly work from its proponents, and am ready to shift towards it if I hear some unexpectedly strong arguments.
Odd to hear that about a community upon which one member unleashed an omnipotent monster from the future that could coerce folks who know the evidence for its existence to do its bidding. And where, upon an attempt to lock said monster away, about 6000 random people were sorta-maybe-kinda-killed by another member as retaliation for "censorship".
:D
(take a stupid picture I made, based on this)
I expect this is a valid point. You can get away with far worse arguments when you have moral high ground to rely on.
Indeed. Look at a scenario like this. What if an adventurous young woman gets an unintended pregnancy, initially decides to have the child, many of her friends and her family are looking forward to it... then either the baby is crippled during birth or the mother simply changes her mind, unwilling to adapt her lifestyle to accommodate child-rearing, yet for some weird reason (selfish or not) refusing to give it up for adoption?
Suppose that she tells the doctor to euthanize the baby. Consider the repercussions in her immediate circle, e.g. what would be her mother's reaction upon learning that she's a grandmother no more (even if she's told that the baby died of natural causes... yet has grounds to suspect that it didn't)?
Completely independent of any of the rest of this, I absolutely endorse the legality of lying to people about why my child died, as well as the ethics of telling them it's none of their damned business, with the possible exception of medical or legal examiners. I certainly endorse the legality of lying to my mother about it.
Further, I would be appalled by someone who felt entitled to demand such answers of a mother whose child had just died (again, outside of a medical or legal examination, maybe) and would endorse forcibly removing them from the presence of a mother whose child has just died.
I would not endorse smacking such a person upside the head, but I would nevertheless be tempted to.
Crap, now that was ill-thought. Yeah, definitely agreed. I removed the last two sentences. The rest of my argument for babies occasionally having great value to non-parents still stands.
If I kill a person, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the remaining lifetime that person would potentially have had. If I kill a baby, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the entire lifetime of the person that baby would potentially have become.
Reasoning sensibly about counterfactuals is hard, but it isn't clear to me why the former involves less total Fun than latter does. If anything, I would expect that removing an entire lifetime's worth of Fun-having reduces total Fun more than removing a fraction of a lifetime's worth.
Probably true, but there's something you seem to be neglecting: Living in fear of being killed will significantly reduce the amount of fun you're having. Making it legal to kill non-person entities doesn't introduce this fear. Making it legal to kill person entities does.
Much less significantly, a culture in which you are obliged to either raise your children or see them put through foster care is also a much less fun culture to live in. And it's not clear that adding a person (ETA: particularly a person who would have been killed by their parents while still a baby given the chance) to the universe (as things stand today) will, on average, increase the amount of fun had down the line; this is why you're not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times.
If I believed the only reason nobody has killed me yet is because it is illegal to kill people, I wouldn't be very happy.
I don't understand your objection. Are you saying you wouldn't be more afraid, on average, if murder were legal?
I mean that a world where there is someone who would want to kill me, and the only reason why they don't is that they're afraid of ending up in jail, is not so much of a world in which I'd like to live.
It's not that anyone hates you; they might kill you because they're afraid of you killing them first, if there were no legal deterrent against killing.
In particular, if you had any conflict with someone else in a world where killing was legal, it would quite possibly spiral out of control: you're worried they might kill you, so you're tempted to kill them first, but you know they're thinking the same way, so you're even more worried, etc.
At least in my country, killing someone for self-defence is already legal. (Plus, I don't think I'm going to threaten to kill someone in the foreseeable future, anyway.)
As opposed to where? We can ban or allow murder. We can't yet do personality modifications that deep.
As opposed to this world. I don't think that, right now, there's anyone who would want to kill me.
So, if Alice murdered Bob, she had always wanted to kill him since she was born (as opposed to her having changed her mind at some point)? Probably we can't deliberately do personality modifications that deep (or do we? The results of Milgram's experiment lead me to suspect it wouldn't be completely impossible for me to convince someone to want to kill me -- not that I can imagine a reason for me to do that).
(shrug) We're both neglecting lots of things; we couldn't have this conversation otherwise.
I agree with you that the risk of being killed reduces Fun, at least in some contexts. (It increases Fun in other contexts.) Then again, the risk of my baby being killed reduces Fun in some contexts as well. I don't see any principled reason to consider the first factor in my calculations and not the second (or vice-versa), other than the desire to justify a preselected conclusion.
I agree that it's not clear that adding a person to the universe increases the amount of Fun down the line. It's also not clear that subtracting a person from the universe reduces the amount of Fun. Reasoning sensibly about conterfactuals is hard.
You've struck onto something here (taking into account your update about the risk only coming from yourself)
1) Under the current system, parents are somewhat Protected From Themselves. What if a mother, while suffering a state of affect, consciously and subconsciously knew that she was allowed to kill her baby, so she did it, then was hit with regret&remorse?
2) Under the current system, parents feel like society is pressuring them not to commit especially grave failures of parenting, which gives them a feeling of fairness.
Before I respond to this, can you reassure me that you're actually interested in my honest response to it?
Yes, and by asking this you already tipped me off that it's likely to be unpleasant to me, so please fire away.
Does the regret and remorse in case 1 actually matter? If it does, what do you want to say about parents who would feel less regret or remorse given the death of their child than given his or her continued life?
If the only thing stopping a parent from killing their child is the illegalization of said act, then they shouldn't be parents anyway. If you can't control yourself with an infant, then the probability is pretty high that you are going to be some type of abusive parent. The child is likely going to be a net drain on society because of the low-level of upbringing.
It is probably better for the baby (and society) for it to be killed while it is a blicketless infant, than to grow up under the "care" of such a parent.
I can easily visualize that, in our world, some very quickly passing one-in-a-lifetime temptation to get rid of an infant is experienced by many even slightly unstable or emotionally volatile parents, then forgotten.
Would you really want to give that temptation a chance to realize itself in every case when the (appropriately huge - we're talking about largely normal people here) social stigma extinguishes the temptation today?
Oh, and in no way it's "only the illegalization", it's the meme in general too.
Maybe.
Suppose, for example, that what you're describing here as instability/emotional volatility -- or, more operationally, my likelihood of doing something unrecoverable-from which I generally abhor based on a very quickly passing once-in-a-lifetime temptation -- is hereditable (either genetically or behaviorally, it doesn't matter too much).
In that case, I suspect I would rather that infants born to emotionally volatile/unstable parents ten million years ago had not matured to breeding age, as I'd rather live in a species that's less volatile in that way. So it seems to follow that if the social stigma is a social mechanism for compensating for such poor impulse control in humans, allowing humans with poor impulse control to successfully raise their children, I should also prefer that that stigma not have been implemented ten million years ago.
Of course, I'm not nearly so dispassionate about it when I think about present-day infants and their parents, but it's not clear to me why I should endorse the more passionate view.
Incidentally, I also don't think your hypothetical has much to do with the real reasons for an infanticide social stigma. I support the meme, I just don't think this argument for it holds water.
Eh... we do have to neglect a lot of things, but I don't think I'm being biased in my choice of which to consider. Making it illegal to kill people is a huge net positive to the amount of fun had. And I've never held that other people should be allowed to kill your baby, for precisely that reason: making that legal would significantly reduce the amount of fun you'd have. I'm only arguing that you should be allowed to. So I'm not quite sure what your point is; either you've misread something of mine or, just as likely, I've misread you.
Well, this one is certainly more clear, because you can look at how it hurts the people around them, and so on. I'd give very good odds that most murders do reduce the amount of fun.
(rereads thread) Why, so you haven't. I apologize; the fear of having my baby killed (well, by anyone other than me, anyway) is as you say irrelevant to your point. My error.
This seems to be pointing out that killing could be even worse due to fear but in fact isn't. It's more of a non-argument in favour of the opposing position than an argument in favour of yours, at least is it is framed as "but something you're neglecting".
I had trouble parsing that, could you rephrase?
Keep in mind that my argument isn't just considering the consequence of killing your own child but the consequence of it being legal to kill your own child.
The phrase "but there's something you seem to be neglecting" does not make sense as a reply to the comment you quote.
Ah, we were discussing why killing people should be illegal. The reason I gave was that this reduces the amount of fun in the universe. TheOtherDave said that killing a person didn't seem like it reduced the amount of fun more than killing a newborn; my comment was to explain why I thought it did (namely, he was failing to take into account one significant way in which legalized murder decreased the amount of fun, which is that fear is not fun).
Fear is frequently fun -- ask any carnival promoter, or fans of Silent Hill. (That's small-f fun; from a big-F standpoint, we'd be looking at fear as an aspect of sensual engagement or emotional involvement, but I think the argument still holds.) Without taking into account secondary effects like grief, it's not at all clear to me that an environment containing a suitably calibrated level of lethal interpersonal threats would be less fun or less (instantaneously) Fun than one that didn't, and this holds whether or not the subject is adult.
I do think those secondary effects would end up tipping the balance in favor of adults, though, once we do take them into account. There's also a fairly obvious preference-utilitarian solution to this problem.
Somewhat regardless of our private feelings on the matter, a tip: Forget OKCupid, do you not see how earnestly stating such beliefs in public gives your handle a reputation you might not mind in general, yet greatly want to avoid at some future point of your LW blogging - such as when wanting to sway someone in an area concerning ethical values and empathy?
Now that's pretty certain.
I'd hope that LessWrong is a community in which having in the past been willing to support controversial opinions would increase your repute, not decrease it. If we always worry about our reputation when having discussions about possibly controversial topics, we're not going to have much discussion at all.
Regardless, the fantastic thing about the internet is that handles are disposable.
We don't mind. You aren't actually going to kill babies and you aren't able to make it legal either (ie. "mostly harmless"). Just don't count too much on your anonymity! Assume that everything you say on the internet will come back to haunt you in the future - when trying to get a job, for example. Or when you are unjustly accused of murder in Italy.
EDIT: Pardon me, when I say "we" don't mind I am speaking for myself and guessing at an overall consensus. I suspect there are one or two who do mind - but that's ok and I consider it their problem.
Fair enough. But my paranoia's only going to go so far; if the choice is a policy of speaking up in relatively accepting communities with no obvious bearing on future life prospects or a policy of remaining silent, I'll take the first one.
That only has a certainty approaching 1 if we all went and forgot about CEV and related prospects.
Really? What's your estimate of the probability that Bakkot's inclusion in a CEV-calculating-algorythm's target mind-space will make it more likely for the resulting CEV to tolerate infanticide?
Giving respect to controversy for the sake of controversy is just inviting more trolling and flamewars.
I have respect for true ideas, whether they are outmoded or fashionable or before their time. I don't care whether an idea is original or creative or daring or shocking or boring, I want to know if it's sound.
The fact that you seem to expect increased respect because of controversial opinions makes me think that you when you wrote about your support for infanticide, you were motivated more by the fact that many people disagreed with you, than by the fact that it's actually a good idea that would make the world a better place.
You remind me of Hanson (well, Doherty actually) on Libertarian Purity Duels
This is not what I expect. I expect increased respect for having thought through ideas. I also expect that most people have come to conclusions differing from the LW mainstream on some ideas, and expect - or at least hope - that a willingness to express this is something respected.
The reason I chose to write about infanticide, as opposed to my position of Newcomb's paradox (one-box) - or more illustratively my position on the general shape of planet Earth (roughly a sphere), is that my position on infanticide is controversial and therefore more likely to prompt interesting discussion, whereas my positions on Newcomb's paradox or the shape of planet Earth are not. So yes, the reason I chose to write about infanticide was that many people disagreed with me, and in fact I was explicit about that in my original post. This does not mean I hold this position to be deliberately contrarian, and implying otherwise is insulting.
Let's not go off on that tangent in here, but two-boxing is hardly uncontroversial on LW: lots of one-boxers here, including Yudkowsky. I'm one too. Also, didn't you say you "want to win"?
Not always. For any random Lesswrongian with a contrarian position you're nearly sure to find a Lesswrongian with a meta-contrarian one.
Also, notice that your signaling now is so bad from a baseline human standpoint that people's sociopath/Wrong Wiring alarms are going off, or would go off if there's more of such signaling. I think that my alarm's just kinda sensitive* because I had it triggered by and calibrated on myself many times.
*(Alas, this could also be evidence that along the line I subconsciously tweaked this bit of my software to get more excuses for playing inquisitor with strangers)
Perhaps I'll pick another handle for use outside of this thread, then.
FWIW, I disagree with you but you don't set off my "sociopath alarm". I think you and Multiheaded may not be able to have a normal conversation with each other, but each of you seems to get along fine with the rest of LW.
I'm curious: did you?
Do you mean that it's pretty certain that I'm not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times?
Or that it's pretty certain that the fact that it's not clear that adding a person to the universe (as things stand today) will, on average, increase the amount of fun had down the line is why I'm not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times?
Or both?
Also: how important is it to you to manage your handle's reputation in such a way as to maximize your ability to sway someone on LW in areas concerning ethical values and empathy?
Hmm. Ehhh? ...Feels like both.
Unimportant, because I'm poor at persuading the type of people who care about their status on LW anyway, and am only at all likely to make an impact on the type of person who, like me, cares little/sporadically about their signaling here.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
Quite aside from everything else, this line is needlessly grating to anyone who even slightly adheres to the Western culture's traditional values. You could've phrased that differently... somehow. There's a big difference between denouncing what a largely contrarian audience takes as the standards imposed upon them by society at large and denouncing what they perceive to be their own values. This might be hypocritical, but I guess that many LW readers feel just like that.
Go start breeding now. Or, say, manufacture defective condoms. (Or identify your real reason for not killing babies.)
Please re-read the comment thread. If you still think we're talking about my reasons for doing or not doing anything in particular, let me know, and I'll try to figure out how to prevent such misunderstandings in the future.