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Alsadius comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 - Less Wrong
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Honestly, that comes across as a flaw in Eliezer's worldview more so than Harry's. I've seen him make the same argument in his own name, and it's pretty transparently false(cf. anyone committing suicide, ever). Being forced to die is evil and ought to be opposed, but I have a feeling that literal immortality would appeal to many fewer people than might be expected.
Please distinguish behavior from preference. See for example this post: Urges vs. Goals: The analogy to anticipation and belief.
Are you actually trying to suggest that literally nobody who has ever committed suicide has genuinely wanted to not be alive? I mean sure, there's the "cry for help" gone wrong, and similar, but there's also the ones who actually want to die.
True, suicide by mistake is probably rare, but I don’t think that’s what Vladimir meant.
If I’m tortured and I can’t find a way of making it stop, I might “want to die”. But that’s not because I don’t want to live, it’s because I don’t want to live in torture.
I don’t really have much knowledge of the subject, but my impression was that most suicides are of the “I can’t live like this anymore” kind, not “dying would be kinda cool”, albeit with the “like this”=“torture” being a YMMV issue in many cases.
I’m not saying there aren’t other possibilities, just that simply pointing to suicides without more careful analysis is not clear proof of Harry’s induction being wrong.
Harry's induction is only correct if either wanting to live one more day implies wanting to live two more days as a mathematical law(which is not true) and that it's impossible to change your mind partway through a two-day period(which is also not true), or if he knows what he will desire at every possible future date. Since neither of those conditions holds, mathematical induction fails.
I'm drawing attention to the reasoning steps, not the conclusion. My point is that it's generally incorrect that people's behavior contrary to some goal implies that goal not being held, that it's only weak evidence.
Killing yourself is weak evidence of wanting to be dead? Pray tell, what would strong evidence be? Killing yourself twice?
Strangely, yes. The trouble is, for a human it's not that simple, there are many senses of having a goal that may well disagree with each other. The post I linked distinguished "urges" (more immediate tendencies that control one's behavior) and abstract goals, but urges could be further subdivided into wants and likes, what one tends to seek vs. what one enjoys having been done, and the structure of abstract goals is potentially much more complicated. Any single reading, however dramatic, doesn't reveal the details of this picture.
I say again, you seem to have ruled out any possibility of strong evidence being presented for the thesis. What's an observation that you would consider strong evidence, if actual suicide is weak? And if there isn't one, then why should I assume that you're arguing in good faith?
You perceive this as an argument, but I have no interest in arguing about anything in particular, except to point out that technical inaccuracy about the meaning of "wanting" in your original comment (which you should judge on object level, based on what you conclude from reading the linked posts, if you choose to do so, not from how you perceive the context of me linking to those posts). That is all I meant to do, but arguing about what I meant to do is similarly beside the point, so I'm bowing out.
The point is, I can conceive of no stronger evidence that a person wants to die than to observe that they committed suicide. Mocking the strongest evidence available for being weak is nonsensical.
(I don't think that a single action, however dramatic or final, is the strongest available evidence about goals. This comment is then a second out-of-context technical remark that shouldn't be taken as a relevant argument in the preceding context.)
Please see Katja's post Estimation is the best we have. The strongest available evidence may well be weak, which doesn't mean that you don't go with the strongest available evidence, but going with it also doesn't make it strong.