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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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Greetings, fellow thinkers! I'm a 19-year-old undergraduate student at Clemson University, majoring in mathematics (or, as Clemson (unjustifiably) calls it, Mathematical Sciences). I found this blog through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality about three weeks ago, and I spent those three weeks doing little else in my spare time but reading the Sequences (which I've now finished).
My parents emigrated from the Soviet Union (my father is from Kiev, my mother from Moscow) just months before my birth. They spoke very little English upon their arrival, so they only spoke Russian to me at home, and I picked up English in kindergarten; I consider both to be my native languages, but I'm somewhat more comfortable expressing myself in English. I studied French in high school, and consider myself "conversant", but definitely not fluent, although I intend to study abroad in a Francophone country and become fluent. This last semester I started studying Japanese, and I intend to become fluent in that as well.
My family is Jewish, but none of my relatives practice Judaism. My mother identifies herself as an agnostic, but is strongly opposed to the Abrahamic religions and their conception of God. My father identifies as an atheist. I have never believed in Santa Claus or God, and was very confused as a child about how other people could be so obviously wrong and not notice it. I've never been inclined towards mysticism, and I remember espousing Physicalist Reductionism (although I did not know those words) at an early age, maybe when I was around 9 year old.
I've always been very concerned with being rational, and especially with understanding and improving myself. I think I missed out on a lot of what Americans consider to be classic sci-fi (I didn't see Star Wars until I got to college, for example), but I grew up with a lot of good Russian sci-fi and Orson Scott Card.
I used to be quite a cynical misanthrope, but over the past few years I've grown to be much more open and friendly and optimistic. However, I've been an egoist for as long as I can remember, and I see no reason why this might change in the foreseeable future (this seems to be my primary point of departure from agreement with Eliezer). I sometimes go out of my way to help people (strangers as much as friends) because I enjoy helping people, but I have no illusions about whose benefit my actions are for.
I'm very glad to have found a place where smart people who like to think about things can interact and share their knowledge!
No offense intended, but: If you could take a pill that would prevent all pain from your conscience, and it could be absolutely guaranteed that no one would ever find out, how many twelve-year-olds would you kill for a dollar?
(Perhaps you meant to say that you were mostly egoist, or that your deliberatively espoused moral principles were egoistic?)
PS: Welcome to Less Wrong!
Eliezer, please don't think you can offend me by disagreeing with me or questioning my opinions - every disagreement (between rational people) is another precious opportunity for someone (hopefully me!) to get closer to Truth; if the person correcting me is someone I believe with high probability to be smarter than me, or to have thought through the issue at hand better than I have (and you fit those criteria!), this only raises the probability that it is I who stand to benefit from the disagreement.
I'm not certain this is a very good answer to your question, but 1) I would not take such a pill, because I enjoy empathy and don't think pain is always bad, 2) peoples' deaths negatively affect many people (both through the ontologically positive grief incurred by the loss and the through ontologically negative utility they would have produced), and that negative effect is very likely to make its way to me through the Web of human interaction, especially if the deceased are young and have not yet had much of a chance to spread utility through the Web, and 3) I would have to be quite efficient at killing 12-year-olds for it to be worth my time to do it for a dollar each (although of course this is tangential to your question, since the amount "a dollar" was arbitrary).
I should also point out that I have a strongly negative psychological reaction to violence. For example, I find the though of playing a first-person shooting game repugnant, because even pretending to shoot people makes me feel terrible. I just don't know what there is out there worse than human beings deliberately doing physical harm to one another. As a child, I felt little empathy for my fellow humans, but at some point, it was as if I was treated with Ludovico's Technique (à la A Clockwork Orange)... maybe some key mirror neurons in my prefrontal cortex just needed time to develop.
Thank you for taking time to make me think about this!
If your moral code penalizes things that make you feel bad, and doing X would make you feel bad, then is it fair to say that not doing X is part of your moral code?
I think the point Eliezer was getting at is that human morality is very complex, and statements like "I'm an egoist" sweep a lot of that under the rug. And to continue his example: what if the pill not only prevented all pain from your conscience, but also gave you enjoyment (in the form of seratonin or whatever) at least as good as what you get from empathy?
Statements like I'm an altruist do too. They are however less likley to be challenged.
How much do bullets cost again? :P
As few as possible to earn the dollar! Maxing out at however many I could do in approximately 10 seconds.