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MugaSofer comments on Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and Meta-Charity - Less Wrong
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Comments (182)
In a triage situation? Yes.
Even if you're restricting your assertion to special cases, let's go with that.
Why should I overcome my "bias" and not save my own child, just because there is some other child with a better chance of being saved, but which I do not care about as much?
What makes that an "evil" bias, as opposed to an ubiquitous aspect of most parents' utility functions?
Assuming that saving my child would give me X utility and saving the other child would give his parents X utility, it's just a "shut up and multiply" kind of thing...
This assumption is excluded by Kawoomba's "but which I do not care about as much", so isn't directly relevant at this point (unless you are making a distinction between "caring" and "utility", which should be more explicit).
I guess I'm just not sure why Kawoomba's own utility gets special treatment over the other child's parents utility function. Then again, your reply and my own sentence just now have me slightly confused, so I may need to think on this a bit more.
Taboo "utility function", and "Kawoomba cares about Kawoomba's utility function" would resolve into the tautologous "Kawoomba is motivated by whatever it is that motivates Kawoomba". The subtler problem is that it's not a given that Kawoomba knows what motivates Kawoomba, so claims with certainty about what that is or isn't (including those made by Kawoomba) may be unfounded. To the extent "utility function" refers to idealized extrapolated volition, rather than present desires, people won't already have good understanding of even their own "utility function".
There is no idealized extrapolated volition that is based on my current volition that would prefer someone else's child over one of my own (CEV_me, not CEV_mankind). There are certainly inconsistencies in my non-idealized utility function, but that does not mean that every statement I make about my own utility function must be suspect, merely that such suspect/contradictory statements exist.
If you prefer vanilla over strawberry ice cream, there may be cases where that preference does not transfer to your extrapolated volition due to some other contradictory preferences. However, for comparisons with a significant delta involved, the initial result that determines your decision should be preserved. (It may however be different when extrapolating to a CEV for all humankind.)
Also, you used my name with a frequency of 7/84 in your last comment <3.
In general, unless something is well-understood, there is good reason to suspect an error. Human values is not something that's understood particularly well.
If you value e.g. your family extremely higher than a grain of salt, would you say that there is any chance of that not being reflected in your CEV?
Any "CEV" that doesn't conserve e.g. that particular relationship would be misnamed.
If you've found a way to aggregate utility across persons, I'd like to hear it.
Normally, we talk about trying to satisfy a particular utility function. If the parent values her child more than the neighbor's child, that is reflected in her utility function. What other standard are you trying to invoke?
Ah, this clears up things a bit for me, thank you.
Why would I need to aim to satisfy overall utility including others, as opposed to just that of my own family?
Is any such preference that chooses my own utility over that of others a bias, and not part of my utility function?
Is it an evil bias if I buy myself some tech toys as opposed to donating that amount to my preferred charity?
What reason do you have for aiming to satisfy you own utility function, or that of your family's?
I'm afraid this is a little too much lingo for me. Sorry.
You'd have to taboo "evil" before I can answer this question.
Um, it's my utility function, that which I aim to maximize and that which already incorporates my e.g. altruistic desires. Postulating "other preferences" that can overrule my utility function would be a contradiction in terms.
The other two questions were more aimed at MugaSofer, who was the one differentiating between preference as a "bias" and as part of your utility function, and who introduced the whole "evil" thing.
The nearest I can come to making sense of your claim is that it's some sort of imaginary Prisoner's Dilemma: you can cooperate by saving a random child instead of your own, and in symmetric cases other parents can cooperate by saving your child instead of theirs.
However, even if you are into counterfactual bargaining, I am pretty sure almost no other parent would cooperate here, which makes defecting a no-brainer.
I suppose to be fair I should imagine a world in which every parent is brainwashed into valuing other children's lives as much as their own (I am pretty sure it would take brainwashing). In this case (assuming you escaped the brainwashing so it's still a legitimate decision) saving the other child might be the right thing to do. At that point, though, you're arguably not optimizing for humans anymore.
My assertion is that all humans share utility - which is the standard assumption in ethics, and seems obviously true - and that parents are biased towards their children (for simple evopsych reasons,) leading them to choose their child when, objectively, their own ethics dictates they choose the other. The example given was that of a triage situation; you can only choose one, and need to decide who has he greater chance of survival.
Your moral philosophy in so far as it affects your actions is by definition already part of your utility function.
It makes no sense to say "my utility function dictates I want to do X, but because my own ethics says otherwise, I should do otherwise", it's a contradictio in terminis.
We should be very careful with ethical assumptions that seem "obviously true". Especially when they are not (true as in "common", it wouldn't make sense otherwise) - parents choosing their own child over other children is an example of following a different ethical compass, one valuing their own children over others. You can neither claim that those parents are confused about their own utility function, nor that they are "wrong". Your proposed "obviously true" ethical assumption is also based on "evopsych". You're trying to elevate an extreme altruist approach above others and calling it obviously true. For you, maybe, for the vast majority of e.g. parents? Not so much.
There is no epistemological truth in terminal values.
No.
Humans regularly act against their own ethics, whether due to misinformation or bias, akrasia, or cached thoughts about morality.
... are you seriously suggesting that, say, racists, are right about what they want? How then do they change when confronted with evidence that other races are, well, people? Perhaps I have misunderstood your point.
It seems obviously true that the moralities people implement are often internally inconsistent. It also seems obviously true that people can talk about imperatives they feel derive from one horn or the other of an inconsistent moral system, without either lying or being wrong as such.
The inconsistency might resolve itself with new information, but it's going to inform any statements we make about the moral system it exists in until that information arrives.
I would advise you to read "cached thoughts" and then answer my question:
I am saying that the statement "a racist wants that which he/she wants" is tautologically true. There is no objective "right" or "wrong" when comparing utility functions, there is just "this utility function values X and Y, this other utility function values X and Z, they are compatible in respect to X, they are incompatible in respect to Y".
Certainly what we value changes all the time. But that's just change, it's not becoming "less wrong" or "wronger". Instead, it may be "more (/less) compatible with commonly shared elements of western utility functions" (which still fluctuate across time and culture, and species).
Except that humans share a utility function, which doesn't change. You can persuade someone that murder is good, but you do it by persuading them that it leads to outcomes they already considered "good" and they were mistaken about the downsides of, well, killing people. Cached thoughts can result in actions that, objectively, are wrong. They are not wrong because this is some essential property of these actions, morality is in our minds, but we can still meaningfully say "this is wrong" just was we can say "this is a chair" or "there are five apples". Eliezer's latest sequence touches on this kind of meaningfulness. Other standard stuff worth reading in this context is "The Psychological Unity of Humankind" and "Coherent Extrapolated Volition"; and, well, the Metaethics Sequence.
Humans trivially don't share a utility function, since they have differing preferences over world-states. I'm even pretty sure that individual people don't have anything that we could call a reliable utility function, since we don't have the cognitive juice to evaluate world-states in their totality and even tractable subsets of the world end up getting evaluated differently based on all sorts of random crap including, but not limited to, presentation order and how recently you've eaten.
CEV attempts to resolve people's conflicting preferences by doing away with several human cognitive limitations, requiring reflective consistency, and applying resolution steps based on projected social interactions (at least, that's how I'm reading "grew up farther together"), but these requirements (especially the latter) are underspecified in its present form. Even if they weren't, CEV in its present form does not, nor does it try to, demonstrate that the entirety of the human moral landscape in fact coheres.
Humans trivially do share a utility function, since they change their beliefs consistently in response to argument. Of course, as with all other knowledge, self-knowledge and moral reasoning are hampered by biases, cached thoughts, and simple stupidity.
CEV, and for that matter The Psychological Unity of Humankind, are relevant without being themselves arguments. Have you, in fact, read the metaethics sequence? I ask for information as to how best to proceed.
...no offense, but I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Non-pathological human ethics may or may not ultimately run off some consistent set of intrinsic affective associations. (Whether or not it does more or less reduces to the question of whether CEV is complete, which as I've said is currently unknown.) Even if true, this doesn't imply a shared utility function within any useful domain.
Utility (in its simplest form) is nothing more or less than a preference ordering over some set of possible states, a utility function is one that maps those states to their preference ordering for a given agent, and in between those states and our hypothetical intrinsic associations there's layers upon layers of bias and acculturation, probably enough to be effectively unique to the individual. I've be very surprised if we could find two people with exactly the same preferences over fully specified future states, though we'd probably find large chunks that looked quite similar.
Yes.