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orthonormal comments on If You Were Brilliant When You Were Ten... - Less Wrong
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This is basically the EY/lukeprog school of thought on metaethics, isn't it? Your preferences, delicately extrapolated to better match the laws of logic, probability theory and (advanced) decision theory, are the ideal form of what reductionists mean when they talk about morality.
Now, not everyone on LW agrees with this contention, which is why ethics is a perennial topic of discussion here.
If so, I've overestimated EY's agreement with my take on it. I see both the preferences of extrapolated-me and actual-me as effects of partly common causes, some (my case) or all (his case) reflecting my good. What extrapolated-me seeks is not good because he seeks it, but because (for examples) it promotes deep personal relationships, or fun, or autonomy. These are the not-so-strange attractors (dumb question: does chaos theory literally apply here?) that explain the evolution of my values with increasing knowledge and experience.
I think I remember EY saying something along the same lines, so maybe we don't differ.
This sounds exactly like what EY believes. Even the language is similar, which is nontrivial due to the difficulty of expressing this idea clearly in standard English. Did you start believing this after reading the metaethics sequence?
No, but maybe we were inspired by some of the same sources. I think it was David Zimmerman's dissertation which got me started thinking along these lines.
Well, the concepts get messy, but I think we're speaking of the same thing. It's the bit of data in volition-space to which my current brain is a sort of pointer, but as it happens there are a lot of criteria that correspond to it; it's not a random point in volition-space, most other human brains point to fairly similar bits, etc.