Eugine_Nier comments on By Which It May Be Judged - Less Wrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 04:26AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 07:17:10PM 17 points [-]

I don't see how these two frameworks are appealing to different terminal values - they seem to be arguments about which policies maximize consequential lives-saved over time, or maximize QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years) over time. This seem like a surprisingly neat and lovely illustration of "disagreeing moral axioms" that turn out to be about instrumental policies without much in the way of differing terminal values, hence a dispute of fact with a true-or-false answer under a correspondence theory of truth for physical-universe hypotheses.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 December 2012 01:39:36PM 2 points [-]

ISTM he's not quite sure whether one QALY thirty years from now should be worth as much as one QALY now.

Comment author: AlanCrowe 13 December 2012 07:56:53PM 0 points [-]

I think that is it, I'm trying to do utilitarianism. I've got some notion q of quality and quantity of life. It varies through time. How do I assess a long term policy, with short term sacrifices for better output in the long run? I integrate over time with a suitable weighting such as

What is the significance of the time constant ? I see it as mainly a humility factor, because I cannot actually see into the future and know how things will turn out in the long run. Accordingly I give reduced weight to the future, much beyond , for better or worse, because I do not trust my assessment of either.

But is that an adequate response to human fallibility? My intuition is that one has to back it up with an extra rule: if my moral calculations suggest culling humans, its time to give up, go back to painting kitsch water colours and leave politics to the sane. That's my interpretation of dspeyer's phrase "my moral intuition is throwing error codes." Now I have two rules, so Sod's Law tells me that some day they are going to conflict.

Eliever's post made an ontological claim, that a universe with only two kinds of things, physics and logic, has room for morality. It strikes me that I've made no dent in that claim. All I've managed to argue is that it all adds up to normality: we cannot see the future, so we do not know what to do for the best. Panic and tragic blunders ensue, as usual.