thomblake comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong

80 Post author: Yvain 07 December 2012 09:04PM

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Comment author: TimS 30 November 2012 03:26:27PM 11 points [-]

I was also surprised that a plurality of people preferred dust specks to torture, given that it appears to be just a classic problem of scope insensitivity, which this site talks about repeatedly.

I was surprised as well, but I disagree that it is necessarily scope insensitivity - believing utility is continuously additive requires choosing torture. But some people take that as evidence that utility is not additive - more technically, evidence that utility is not the appropriate analysis of morality (aka picking deontology or virtue ethics or somesuch).

More specific analysis here and more generally here.

Comment author: thomblake 30 November 2012 04:09:53PM 6 points [-]

In support of this, 435 people chose specks, and 430 chose virtue ethics, deontology, or other.

Comment author: satt 01 December 2012 02:34:46PM *  3 points [-]

That's only weak evidence about the correlation between non-consequentialism and dust specking. If we had 670 consequentialists, 50 deontologists, 180 virtue ethicists, and 200 others, and 40% of each chose dust specks, we'd get numbers like yours even though there wouldn't be a correlation.

I did a crosstab, which should be more informative:

 | Torturevs.DustSpecks
----------------+------------------+------+---------+--------+------
MoralViews | don't understand | dust | torture | unsure | <NA>
----------------+------------------+------+---------+--------+------
consequential | 10 | 228 | 188 | 134 | 109
deontology | 1 | 24 | 3 | 8 | 6
other/none | 6 | 68 | 38 | 33 | 47
virtue | 1 | 75 | 12 | 28 | 36
<NA> | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 8

I get different totals for the number of speckers (397) and non-consequentialists (386), though. Maybe my copy of the data's messed up? (Gnumeric complains the XLS might be corrupt.)

Anyway, I do see a correlation between specks & moral paradigm. My dust speck percentages:

  • 41% for consequentialism (N = 560)
  • 67% for deontology (N = 36)
  • 47% for other/none (N = 145)
  • 65% for virtue ethics (N = 116)

leaving out people who didn't answer. Consequentialists chose dust specks at a lower rate than each other group (which chi-squared tests confirm is statistically significant). But 41% of our consequentialists did still choose dust specks.

[Edit: "indentation is preserved", my arse. I am not a Markdown fan.]

Comment author: BerryPick6 30 November 2012 04:12:07PM *  2 points [-]

I̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶w̶e̶'̶v̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶s̶w̶e̶r̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶n̶.̶

ETA: Really nice work from satt to prove I was jumping to conclusions here.

Comment author: WingedViper 01 December 2012 01:22:23PM 1 point [-]

Well, you cannot be totally sure. I for one would consider myself a consequentialist, but would still choose dust specks. Correlation doesn't imply causation!

Comment author: BerryPick6 01 December 2012 02:05:00PM -2 points [-]

Well, I guess there are various forms of Consequentialism which would lead one to choose dust specks. That would simply depend on what you're trying to maximize.

If you want to maximize things like pain, discomfort or the amount of dust in eyes, then yes, you would choose dustspecks.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to maximize the amount of, say, wellbeing, then the only choice available is torture.

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