steven0461 comments on Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 16 January 2012 12:56AM

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Comment author: steven0461 22 January 2012 12:14:39AM *  0 points [-]

considering there are few better alternatives if any, and that Norway has such a small population that it wouldn't amount to more than 5 or 6

Now I'm really curious what calculation would lead you to that number.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 January 2012 12:22:34AM *  1 point [-]

I know very little of the political situation in Norway but it is plausible that a better supreme court or batch of ministers could do a better job to the point of saving more lives than would be lost by such action (one has to factor in not just their lives but the cost of greater security measures such acts would produce if they where detected).

Yay I made the CIA watch list!

Comment author: steven0461 22 January 2012 12:46:35AM 0 points [-]

Oh I see, I thought you had some sort of general formula for weighing (naive) consequentialism and deontology. If I had known there were going to be creepy specifics, I wouldn't have asked.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 January 2012 07:57:03AM *  2 points [-]

I assumed 5 or 6 seemed a creepily specific number and thus you wanted specifics. Note that as I said this was pure uninformed speculation. Norway is a partcularly well governed country, and overall specific people tend to in well governed Western states to matter much less here than say in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. However even a marginally better job at governing or crafting laws creates averts a lol of dusts specks.

I usually apply pure consequentalism measuring happy healthy years of life as a first estimate. When actually contemplating real actions to support I go by vritue ethics, since some costs are hard to capture in utilitarian thinking. Following virtue ethics I wouldn't ever support an attempt to assassinate someone unless they where directly responsible for a massive amount of death, as in signing death warrants or conducting killings or hiring thugs. Perhaps controversially I wouldn't put torturing people a ok reason to assassinate since that seems really hard to establish because of propaganda, misninformation, a more convoluted paper trail, ect.