steven0461 comments on A Request for Open Problems - Less Wrong
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As I pointed out in that thread, their solution doesn't work. You would need to choose an aggregation mechanism to combine votes. Different mechanisms will cause different systematic outcomes. Notably, some mechanisms will result in always choosing actions from one category; some mechanisms will result in sampling from different categories proportionally to their votes (much as, eg., the American system always chooses the most popular candidate, resulting in a 2-party system equilibrium; many European systems allocate seats proportionally to votes, allowing equilibria with more than 2 parties.)
You need to choose which kind of outcome you prefer in order to choose your aggregation mechanism, in order to implement their solution. But if you could do that, you wouldn't need their solution in the first place!
I wonder if it would work to renormalize utility so that the total of everything that's "at stake" (in some sense that would need to be made more precise) is always worth the same?
Probably this gives too much weight to easy-to-achieve moralities, like the morality that says all that matters is whether you're happy tomorrow? It also doesn't accommodate non-consequentalist moralities.
But does it ever make sense to respond to new moral information by saying, "huh, I guess existence as a whole doesn't matter as much as I thought it did"? It seems counterintuitive somehow.
I can't follow your comment. I would need some inferential steps filled in, between the prior comment, and the first sentence of your comment, and between every sentence of your comment.