= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
anonymous1 comments on Replaceability as a virtue - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (41)
I enjoyed reading your post, and I agree with what I think you are trying to say.
However, replaceability by itself is not a virtue. If only five people on Earth have a certain skill that is useful to humanity, and then ten more people learn the skill, those ten people have become less replaceable (while the original five have become more replaceable), but they are now able to do more good for humanity. So, I think a better moral of your post than "Make yourself replacable." is "Become stronger, but don't be so prideful as to withhold the same opportunity that was given to you from others." And perhaps this is reducible in some respects to "Cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma."
I'd learn a different lesson from your example: Make things in general replaceable. Yourself just happens to be the most common case where there is a selfish motivation to do otherwise.
For example, high quality reproductions of art are a very good thing.
Good correction, thanks. Of course we shouldn't simply maximize replaceability. After all, the most repleaceable person is also the most superfluous.
That's the lesson I got out of the post too, that to cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma is a good thing
I hope the lesson put conditions on that. If not the lesson is evil (ie. holding the belief would result in destroying everything humanity holds dear if given the right circumstances.)
Ok, I'll amend my previous statement to be more specific; in a prisoner's dilemma where cooperating means both entities get warm fuzzies, and in warm fuzzies I include all my preferences (so if cooperating would result in 100 people dying and me getting 100 $ I'd count that as a net loss), and defecting while the other cooperates gets me more warm fuzzies but not over a certain limit (as a rule of thumb, less than double what I'd get for cooperating, although of course this goes by a case by case basis) and with both people defecting we get less warm fuzzies, then I'd cooperate