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Vaniver comments on Reply to Holden on The Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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If you can come up with a good one, I'll switch. I'm having trouble finding something where the risk of collateral damage is obvious (and obviously undesirable) and there are other agents with incentives to undermine the goal.
Sorry — your response indicates exactly in which way I should have been more clear.
Using "teenage daughter having sex" to stand for something "obviously undesirable" assumes a lot about your audience. For one, it assumes that your audience does not contain any sexually-active teenage women; nor any sex-positive parents of teenage women; nor any sex-positive sex-educators or queer activists; nor anyone who has had positive (and thus not "obviously undesirable") experiences as (or with) a sexually active teenage woman. To any of the above folks, "teenage daughter having sex" communicates something not undesirable at all (assuming the sex is wanted, of course).
Going by cultural tropes, your choice of example gives the impression that your audience is made of middle-aged, middle-class, straight, socially conservative men — or at least, people who take the views of that sort of person to be normal, everyday, and unmarked. On LW, a lot of your audience doesn't fit those assumptions: 25% of us are under 21; 17% of us are non-heterosexual; 38% of us grew up with non-theistic family values; and between 13% and 40% of us are non-monogamous, according to the 2011 survey for instance).
To be clear, I'm not concerned that you're offending or hurting anyone with your example. Rather, if you're trying to make a point to a general audience, you might consider drawing on examples that don't assume so much.
As for alternatives: "Simply try to prevent your house from being robbed" perhaps? I suspect that a very small fraction of LWers are burglars or promoters of burglary.
I don't have the goal of preventing my teenage daughter from having sex (firstly because I have no daughter yet, and secondly because the kind of people who would have such a goal often have a similar goal about younger sisters, and I don't -- indeed, I sometimes introduce single males to her); but I had no problem with pretending I had that goal for the sake of argument. Hell, even if Vaniver had said "simply try to cause more paperclips to exist" I would have pretended I had that goal.
BTW, I don't think that is the real reason why people flinch at such examples. If Vaniver had said “try to win your next motorcycle race” -- a goal that probably even fewer people share -- would anyone have objected?
I agree. I find it annoying when people pretend otherwise.
Small correction: The term "obviously undesirable" referred to the potential collateral damage from trying to prevent the daughter from having sex, not to her having sex.
Oh. Well, that does make a little more sense.
I understand your perspective, and that's a large part of why I like it as an example. Is AGI something that's "obviously undesirable"?
Burglary is an integral part of my family heritage. That's how we earned our passage to Australia. Specifically, burgaling some items a copper kettle, getting a death sentence and having it commuted to life in the prison continent.
With those kind of circumstances in mind I say burglary is ethically acceptable when, say, your family is starving but usually far too risky to be practical or advisable.