= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Morality is Awesome
(This is a semi-serious introduction to the metaethics sequence. You may find it useful, but don't take it too seriously.)
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned you into a whale. Is this awesome?
"Maybe? I guess it would be pretty cool to be a whale for a day. But only if I can turn back, and if I stay human inside and so on. Also, that's not a whale.
"Actually, a whale seems kind of specific, and I'd be suprised if that was the best thing the wizard can do. Can I have something else? Eternal happiness maybe?"
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned you into orgasmium, doomed to spend the rest of eternity experiencing pure happiness. Is this awesome?
...
"Kindof... That's pretty lame actually. On second thought I'd rather be the whale; at least that way I could explore the ocean for a while.
"Let's try again. Wizard: maximize awesomeness."
Meditate on this: A wizard has turned himself into a superintelligent god, and is squeezing as much awesomeness out of the universe as it could possibly support. This may include whales and starships and parties and jupiter brains and friendship, but only if they are awesome enough. Is this awesome?
...
"Well, yes, that is awesome."
What we just did there is called Applied Ethics. Applied ethics is about what is awesome and what is not. Parties with all your friends inside superintelligent starship-whales are awesome. ~666 children dying of hunger every hour is not.
(There is also normative ethics, which is about how to decide if something is awesome, and metaethics, which is about something or other that I can't quite figure out. I'll tell you right now that those terms are not on the exam.)
"Wait a minute!" you cry, "What is this awesomeness stuff? I thought ethics was about what is good and right."
I'm glad you asked. I think "awesomeness" is what we should be talking about when we talk about morality. Why do I think this?
-
"Awesome" is not a philosophical landmine. If someone encounters the word "right", all sorts of bad philosophy and connotations send them spinning off into the void. "Awesome", on the other hand, has no philosophical respectability, hence no philosophical baggage.
-
"Awesome" is vague enough to capture all your moral intuition by the well-known mechanisms behind fake utility functions, and meaningless enough that this is no problem. If you think "happiness" is the stuff, you might get confused and try to maximize actual happiness. If you think awesomeness is the stuff, it is much harder to screw it up.
-
If you do manage to actually implement "awesomeness" as a maximization criteria, the results will be actually good. That is, "awesome" already refers to the same things "good" is supposed to refer to.
-
"Awesome" does not refer to anything else. You think you can just redefine words, but you can't, and this causes all sorts of trouble for people who overload "happiness", "utility", etc.
-
You already know that you know how to compute "Awesomeness", and it doesn't feel like it has a mysterious essence that you need to study to discover. Instead it brings to mind concrete things like starship-whale math-parties and not-starving children, which is what we want anyways. You are already enabled to take joy in the merely awesome.
-
"Awesome" is implicitly consequentialist. "Is this awesome?" engages you to think of the value of a possible world, as opposed to "Is this right?" which engages to to think of virtues and rules. (Those things can be awesome sometimes, though.)
I find that the above is true about me, and is nearly all I need to know about morality. It handily inoculates against the usual confusions, and sets me in the right direction to make my life and the world more awesome. It may work for you too.
I would append the additional facts that if you wrote it out, the dynamic procedure to compute awesomeness would be hellishly complex, and that right now, it is only implicitly encoded in human brains, and no where else. Also, if the great procedure to compute awesomeness is not preserved, the future will not be awesome. Period.
Also, it's important to note that what you think of as awesome can be changed by considering things from different angles and being exposed to different arguments. That is, the procedure to compute awesomeness is dynamic and created already in motion.
If we still insist on being confused, or if we're just curious, or if we need to actually build a wizard to turn the universe into an awesome place (though we can leave that to the experts), then we can see the metaethics sequence for the full argument, details, and finer points. I think the best post (and the one to read if only one) is joy in the merely good.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (437)
Where did the idea come from that only consequentialists thought about consequences? If I'm a deontologist, and I think the rules include "Don't murder," I'm still allowed to notice that a common consequence of pointing a loaded gun at a person and pulling the trigger is "murder."
Don't consequentialists think that only consequences matter?
That's the idea.
EDIT:
If you follow this line of reasoning as far as it goes, I think you find that there isn't really any good reason to distinguish "I caused this" and "I failed to prevent this". In other words, as soon as you allow some consequentialism into your moral philosophy, it takes over the whole thing. I think...
There's something screwy going on in your reasoning. Imagine the following closing argument at a murder trial:
Edit 1/11: Because it isn't clear: No reasonable deontologist would find this reasoning persuasive. nyan is at risk of strawmanning the opposing position - see our further conversation below.
I think perhaps there's something screwy going on with that person's reasoning.
As a good consequentialist, I would not take such an argument seriously.
Neither should a good deontologist.
Ok, I wonder what we are even saying here.
I claim that consequentialism is correct because it tends to follow from some basic axioms like moral responsibility being contagious backwards through causality, which I accept.
I further claim that deontologists, if they accept such axioms (which you claim they do), degenerate into consequentialists given sufficient reflection. (To be precise, there exists some finite sequence of reflection such that a deontologist will become a consequentialist).
I will note that though consequentialism is a fine ideal theory, at some point you really do have to implement a procedure, which means in practice, all consequentialists will be deontologists. (Possibly following the degenerate rule "see the future and pick actions that maximize EU", though they will usually have other rules like "Don't kill anyone even if it's the right thing to do"). However, their deontological procedure will be ultimately justified by consequentialist reasoning.
What do you think of that?
Agreed. This is usually called “rule utilitarianism” – the idea that, in practice, it actually conserves utils to just make a set of basic rules and follow them, rather than recalculating from scratch the utility of any given action each time you make a decision. Like, “don’t murder” is a pretty safe one, because it seems like in the vast majority of situations taking a life will have a negative utility. However, its still worth distinguishing this sharply from deontology, because if you ever did calculate and find a situation in which your rule resulted in lesser utility – like pushing the fat man in front of the train – you’d break the rule. The rule is an efficiency-approximation rather than a fundamental posit.
The point of rule utilitarianism isn't only to save computational resources. It's also that in any particular concrete situation we're liable to have all sorts of non-moral motivations pulling at us, and those are liable to "leak" into whatever moral calculations we try to do and produce biased answers. Whereas if we work out ahead of time what our values are and turn them into sufficiently clear-cut rules (or procedures, or something), we don't have that option. Hence "don't kill anyone even if it's the right thing to do", as nyan_sandwich puts it -- I think quoting someone else, maybe EY.
(A tangential remark, which you should feel free to ignore: The above may make it sound as if rule utilitarianism is only appropriate for those whose goal is to prioritize morality above absolutely everything else, and therefore for scarcely anyone. I think this is wrong, for two reasons. Firstly, the values you encode into those clear-cut rules don't have to be only of the sort generally called "moral". You can build into them a strong preference for your own welfare over others', or whatever. Secondly, you always have the option of working out what your moral principles say you should do and then doing something else; but the rule-utilitarian approach makes it harder to do that while fooling yourself into thinking you aren't.)
My main objection is that this further claim wasn't really argued in the original point. It was simply assumed - and it's just too controversial a claim to assume. The net effect of your assumption was an inflationary use of the term - if consequentialist means what you said, all the interesting disputants in moral philosophy are consequentialists, whether they realize it or not.
It might be the case that your proposition is correct, and asserted non-consequentialists are just confused. I was objecting to assuming this when it was irrelevant to your broader point about the advantages of the label "awesome" in discussing moral reasoning. The overall point you were trying to make is equally insightful whether your further assertion is true or not.
While my personal values tend to align with the traditional consequentialism you affirm (e.g. denial of the doctrine of double effect), note that caring solely about "consequences" (states of the four-dimensional spacetime worm that is the universe) does not exclude caring about right or wrong actions. The "means" as well as the "ends" are part of the worldstates you have preferences over, though non-timeless talk of "consequences" obscures this. So you're far too quick to get the standard consequentialist norms out of your approach to morality.
Totally agree. When I figured this out, everything clicked into place.
I don't think I'm doing anything hasty. We should care about possible histories of the universe, and nothing else. This follows from basic moral facts that are hard to disagree with.
In a strict sense, we care enough about who does what and how that it can't be fully thrown out. In a more approximate sense, it gets utterly swamped by other concerns on the big questions (anything involving human life), so that you approach "classical" conseqentialism as your task becomes bigger.
Let's use examples to tease apart the difference.
A consequentialist says: "Death is bad. Person A could have donated their income and saved that child, but they didn't. The consequence was death. Person B killed a child with a gunshot. The consequence was death. These two situations are equivalent."
The deontologist says "It was not the duty of person A to save a stranger-child. However, it is the duty of every person not to murder children. Person B is worse than person A, because he did not do his duty."
The virtue ethicist says - "By his actions, we deduce that Person A is either unaware of the good he could have done, or or he lacks the willpower, or he lacks the goodness to save the child. We deduce that person B is dangerous, impulsive, and should be locked up."
I think the crux of the divide is that virtue and deontological ethics are focused with evaluating whether an agent's actions were right or wrong, whereas consequentialist ethics is focused on creating the most favorable final outcome.
Personally, I use virtue ethics for evaluating whether my or another's action was right or wrong, and use consequentialism when deciding which action to take.
Only an extremely nearsighted consequentialist would say this. Whoever's saying this is ignoring lots of other consequences of Person A and Person B's behavior. First, Person A has to take an opportunity cost from donating their income to save children's lives. Person B doesn't take such an opportunity cost. Second, Person B pays substantial costs for killing children in some combination of possible jail time, lost status, lost allies, etc. Third, the fact that Person B decided to murder a child is strong evidence that Person B is dangerous, impulsive, and should be locked up in the sense that locking up Person B has the best consequences. Etc.
What's the difference?
Truth be told at the end of the day those three moral systems are identical, if examined thoroughly enough. This type of discussion is only meaningful if you don't think about it too hard...once the words get unpacked the whole thing dissolves.
But if we don't think too hard about it, there is a difference. Which moral philosophy someone subscribes to describes what their "first instinct" is when it comes to moral questions.
From wikipedia:
But - if the deontologist thinks hard enough, they will conclude that sometimes lying is okay if it fulfills your other duties. Maximizing duty fulfillment is equivalent to maximizing moral utility.
When a virtue ethicist is judging a person, they will take the intended consequences of an action into account. When a virtue ethicist is judging their own options, they are looking at the range of there own intended consequences...once again, maximizing moral utility.
And, as you just illustrated, the farsighted consequentialist will in fact take both intention and societal repercussions into account, mimicking the virtue and deontological ethicists, respectively.
It's only when the resources available for thinking are in short supply that these distinctions are meaningful...for these three moral approaches, the starting points of thought are different. It's a description of inner thought process. Conclusions of these different processes only converge after all variables are accounted for...and this doesn't always happen with humans.
So in answer to your question, when planning my own actions I first begin by taking possible consequences into account, whereas when judging others I begin by taking intentions into account, and asking what it says about that person's psychology. Given enough time and processing power, I could use any of these systems for these tasks and come to the same conclusions, but since I do not possess either, it does make a practical difference which strategy I use.
I... approve of this for nonexperts and nonAI purposes. This might actually be pretty cool.
I frankly hope it represents the future of LessWrong.
Rewrite for front page.
What does that mean? I can remove the thing about how it is for my meetup, I guess.
Fix spelling errors, I guess?
And focus on the "fun way to create a meta-understanding of how we think about what we want without all the baggage of words like 'morality'" aspect. Maybe I just mean "move to front page."
Thanks for the spelling error. I'll move to main.
happyness -> happiness
(The content of this article is awesome. Spelling mistakes are not awesome...?)
Interesting rephrasing of morality...but would it still hold if I asked you to taboo "awesome"?
No.
If I taboo "awesome" directly, I'd miss something. (complexity of value)
The point of taboo is usually to remove a problematic concept that has too much attached confusion, or to look inside a black box.
The point of saying "Awesome" is actually the opposite: it was deliberately chosen for it's lack of meaning (points 1 and 4), and to wrap up everything we know about morality (that we go insane if we look at at the wrong angle) into a convenient black box that we don't look inside, but works anyway (point 2,3,5).
But again,
In other words "taboo awesome" is a redirect to the metaethics sequence.
Heh, good point(s) there. I never thought removing meaning would actually make an argument clearer, but somehow it did.
This is interesting. Can we come up with a punchy name for good uses of "reverse tabooing"?
One reason I particularly like the choice of the word "awesome," which is closely related to and maybe just a rephrasing of your first point, is that it is much less likely to trigger redirects to cached thoughts that sound deep. Moreover, since "awesome" is not itself a word that sounds deep, talking about morality using the language of awesomeness inoculates against the trying-to-sound-deep failure mode.
How about "Plancheting"?
A 'planchet' is a blank coin, ready to be minted - which seems analogous to what's being done with these words (and has the delightful parallelization of metaphor with "coining a phrase").
The downside of this is that most people won't know what "planchet" means. The advantage of "taboo" is it's already intuitive what is meant when you here it.
That's a good point.
Isn't what "naming" means in the first place?
"Reverse tabooing" seems like a fine phrase. It's at least somewhat clear what it means, and it doesn't come pre-loaded with distracting connotations. I think it would be difficult to improve upon it.
Metaethics is about how to decide how to decide if something is awesome.
Metaethics is describing the properties of the kind of theory that is capable of deciding if something is awesome.
This is why I claim to not know what it is... Everybody gets confused.
Is morality objective? Is morality universal? --> Metaethics.
When is lying wrong? When is stealing wrong? --> Ethics.
Meta-ethics is usually the process of thinking about awesomeness while getting confused by the facts that words feel like they have have platonic essences, and that the architecture of the human goal system isn't obvious and intuitive (things feel like they can be innately motivating). Good meta-ethics could be called dissolving those confusions. [Meta-ethics is best not practiced unless you're confident you can get it right, since getting it wrong can lead you to absurd conclusions.]
I think "awesome" implies that something is extraordinary. I would hope you'd continue to enjoy parties with all your friends inside superintelligent starship-whales, but eventually you'd get used to them unless more awesomeness got added.
Whether everyone and every moment can be awesome-- by their standards, not ours-- is a worthwhile question. Even if the answer is 'no', how close can you get?
So "morality is awesome" implies that hedonic treadmills are part of morality, not problems? Not a big bullet to bite.
I'm not sure what you mean by hedonic treadmills not being a problem.
The article has caused me to realize that awesome has to be part of morality, but that too much of morality might be implicitly aimed at only achieving safety and comfort-- with a smaller contingent saying that nothing is important but awesomeness-- and that a well-conceived morality needs to have a good balance between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
I used to be someone who prioritized making the world as weird and interesting a place as possible. Then an incredibly important thing happened to me this year, at Burning Man:
Halfway through the week, a gigantic mechanical squid wandered by, spouting fire from its tentacles.
And I didn't care. Because Burning Man is just uniformly weird all over the place and I had already (in 2 days) hedonic treadmilled on things-in-the-reference-class-of-giant-mechanical-squid-that-shoot-fire-from-their-tentacles.
(I had spend the previous 12 years of my life wishing rather specifically for a gigantic mechanical squid to wander by randomly. I was really pissed off when I didn't care when it finally happened)
"Giant parties in space whales" isn't all that much different than "heaven involves lots of gold and niceness and nobody having to work ever again." I'm near-certain that the ideal world is mostly ordinary (probably whatever form of ordinary can be most cheaply maintained) with punctuated moments of awesome that you can notice and appreciate, and then reminisce about after you return to normalcy.
Some of those punctuations should certainly involve giant space-whale parties (and since giant space whale parties would probably blow my mind TOO much, you'd want fluctuations in what normalcy means, so you can have a period where normalcy is something closer to space whales, appreciating the space whales exactly enough when they arrive, but then have normalcy shift back to something simpler later on so you can also still appreciate the occasional space-sea-urchin as well.
Hm.
So, there was a time when being cold at night and in the winter was pretty much the standard human experience in the part of the world I live in. Then we developed various technologies for insulating and heating, and now I take for granted that I can lounge around comfortably in my underwear in my living room during a snowstorm.
If I lived during that earlier period, and I shared your reasoning here, it seems to me I would conclude that the ideal world involved being uncomfortably cold throughout most of the winter. We would heat the house for parties, perhaps, and that would make parties awesome, and we could reminisce about that comfortable warmth after the party was over and we'd gone back to shivering in the cold under blankets. That way we could appreciate the warmth properly.
Have I understood your reasoning correctly, or have I missed something important?
Hedonism is hard work. If you want to optimize your enjoyment of life, how hungry should you be before you eat?
Beats me.
If I actually wanted to answer this question, I would get into the habit of recording how much I'm enjoying my life along various dimensions I wanted to optimize my enjoyment of life along, then start varying how hungry I am before I eat and seeing how my enjoyment correlated with that over time.
Yes and no.
I deliberately wander around outside in the cold before I come in and drink hot chocolate. (In this case, strong cold is preferable, for somewhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours before additional cold stops making the experience nicer).
I don't deliberately keep my house freezing in the winter, but when I'm in control of the temperature (not often, with roommates), I don't turn the heat on until it's actually interfering with my ability to do work. I know people who keep it even colder and they learn to live with it. I'm not sure what's actually optimal - it may very from person to person, but overall you probably aren't actually benefiting yourself much if you keep your house in the 70s during winter
Part of the key is variation, though. I also deliberately went to a giant party in the desert. It turns out that it is really hard to have fun in the desert because learning to properly hydrate yourself is hard work. But this was an interesting experience of its own right and yes, it was extremely nice to shower when I got back.
It's probably valuable to vary having at least one element of you life be extremely "low quality" by modern western standards, most of the time.
(nods) I sympathize with that reasoning. Two things about it make me suspicious, though.
The first is that it seems to elide the difference between choosing to experience cold when doing so is nice, and not having such a choice. it seems to me that this difference is incredibly important.
The second is its calibration against "modern" standards.
I suspect that if I lived a hundred years ago I would similarly be sympathetic to the idea that it's valuable to have at least one element of my life be extremely low quality by "modern" standards, and if I'm alive a hundred years from now I will similarly be sympathetic to it.
Which leads me to suspect that what's going on here has more to do with variety being a valuable part of constructing an optimal environment than it does with ordinariness.
I think the important missing piece here is that different drivers of happiness have different degrees of hedonic adjustment. Intuitively, I would expect simpler, evolutionarily older needs (approximately those lower on Maslow's Pyramid to adjust less.
This would imply that things like adequate food and sleep (I would guess that many of us are lacking in the later), moderate temperatures, lack of sickness and injury, etc. should be maintained consistently, while things like mechanical squids should be more varied.
I'm not sure I understand what a "degree of hedonic adjustment" is, here. Also, I'm not sure how we got from talking about ideal worlds and awesomeness, to talking about happiness.
So, OK.... being a little more concrete: "food" is very low on Maslow's Pyramid, and "acceptance of facts" is very high. If I've understood you right, then in order to maximize happiness I should arrange my life so as to maintain a relatively consistent supply of food, but a highly variable supply of acceptance of facts.
Yes? No?
I came to a somewhat similar conclusion from watching movies with a lot of CGI. Even if the individual scenes are good, one after another gets dull. For that matter, Fantasia II didn't work very well-- for me, it was some sort of repetitive beauty overload.
Do you have a new priority, and if so, what is it?
I had other priorities at the time, they just shifted around a bit. Mostly focusing on effective altruism and humanist culture nowadays, with occasional random parties with Hide-and-seek-in-a-dark-apartment-building for novelty and fun.
I probably don't do nearly enough exciting things right now, though.
Odd. To me, getting completely used to the bizarre is one of the best part of living surrounded in awesomeness. Sure, breaking into a military base is kinda cool, but if you're really awesome you do it twice without breaking a sweat and it takes a drugged chase through a minefield to faze you.
I mean that once you get a magic pill that makes the thirtieth cake of a huge pile just as tasty as the first cake after three days of fasting, your reaction is to say "Boring!" and throw away the pill, not "Awesome.".
I had a similar realization, but from a different angle. We don't actually want to rid the world of clever supervillains, though it is preferable to letting supervillains do evil things. We want to maximize their cleverness-to-evil ratio. This is usually accomplished by making them fictional, but we can do better.
Except, you know, the original literal meaning. The one that is means "able to cause the experience of awe".
Things that cause awe may also be awesome/excellent/great/cool but it isn't the same thing.
Shhhhhh; that's a basilisk.
I'll leave it as is, and hope no one tries to maximize literal "awe-causingness". I think the explanation and implication is robust enough to prevent any funny business like that.
F'rinstance.
You nailed it. This post is exactly what is needed to cut away all the bullshit that gets thrown in to morality and ethics.
still, clarifying that you did not "mean" the dictionary definition of the word at the center of your piece would have been better. yes, it's obvious, but why leave easily closed holes open
Well... if you had replaced all instances of “awesome” in the post with “cool”, someone trying to maximize literally that would manipulate the climate so as to bring about a new ice age. :-)
Where I come from, it connotes "I'm an idiot". Exrpessing such a high degree of approbation about antyhing is seen as sign of mental feebleness.
Are you sure this is universally true, or just true of certain ways of such expression? I used to be fairly sparse in my praise but after practicing it I found that you can praise people both genuinely and in a high-status way. The best description I can come up with is that it involves expressing only gratitude/admiration without tinging it at all with jealousy/the desire to manipulate/insecurity; the problem with this description is that the jealousy/desire to manipulate/insecurity part is often largely subconscious, so the usefulness of this depends on how good one is at introspecting.
I didn't even say ti was universally true.
I meant universally true (across all ways of saying "awesome"), but restricted to where you come from.
Is it "awesome" to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of the women?
Is it "awesome" to be the one who gets crushed?
One could argue that that's context-sensitive, but I think the best answer to that is mu.
Maybe. (Though Conan would disagree. I'm sure we could have a nice discussion/battle about it.) I think the balance of awesomeness does come out against it. As awesome as it is to crush your enemies, I don't really like people getting hurt.
I notice that using "awesomeness" gives a different answer (more ambiguous) than "right" or "good" in this case. I think this is a win because the awesomeness criteria is forcing me to actually evaluate whether it is awesome, instead of just trying to signal.
No.
I would have said "hell yes!" to the first one. At least it's awesome for you... but not so much for the people you're crushing. As Mel Brooks said, it's good to be the king - having power is awesome, but being subject to someone else's power generally isn't.
Awesomeness for who?
I would suggest the heuristic that hedonism is about maximizing awesomeness for oneself, while morality is about maximizing everyone's awesomeness.
Given you have enemies you hate deeply enough? Yes.
Having such enemies in the first place? Definitely not.
There are entire cultural systems of tracking prestige based around having such enemies; the vestiges of them survive today as modern "macho" culture. Having enemies to crush mercilessly, and then doing so, is an excellent way to signal power to third parties.
Great! I really like this.
Metaethics is about coping with people disagreeing about what is and is not awesome.
It happens after all. Some people think that copying art so that more people can experience it is awesome. Others think that it's so non-awesome that preventing the first group from doing it is awesome. Yet another group is indifferent to copying, but thinks the prevention is so non-awesome that preventing that is awesome. (This was the least mind-killing example I could think of. Please don't derail the discussion arguing it. The point is that there are nontrivial numbers of human beings in all three camps.)
We also observe that the vast majority of humans agree on some questions of awesomeness. Being part of a loving family: awesome! Killing everyone you meet whose height in millimeters is a prime number: not awesome! Maybe this is just an aspect of being human: sharing so much dna and history. Or maybe all these people are independently rediscovering some fundamental truth that no one can quite put their finger on, in much the same way that cultures around the world invented arithmetic long before Peano.
What can you do when you meet someone who disagrees with you and a lot is at stake? Well, there's always force. Or if you have some ideas about awesomeness in common, you can argue based on those. Is there another option? In practice, people do change their idea of awesomeness after talking to other people.
The "people" who disagree don't have to be separate beings. They can be subminds within a single human. The situation is pretty much the same (except you can't really use force).
Metaethics is that art of trying to deal with this. It hasn't gotten very far.
This is a good summary of the metaethics problem.
I disagree with your conclusion. (It hasn't gotten very far). I think EY's metaethics sequence handles it quite nicely. Specifically joy in the merely good and the idea of morality as an abstract dynamic procedure encoded in human brains.
So is abortion right or wrong?
That's applied ethics, not metaethics.
(I think it's sad, but better than the alternatives.)
(Imagines going to the Cambridge Center for the Study of Awesome, located overlooking a gorgeous flowering canyon, inside a giant, dark castle in a remote area which you can only reach by piloting a mechanical T-Rex with rockets strapped to it. Inside, scientists with floor-length black leather lab coats are examining...)
I rest my case.
So "awesome" now means making reality closer to fiction? What happened to your old posts about joy in the merely real, dragons vs zebras, and so on?
I don't think that follows.
Rocket-boosted mechanical T-Rexes are possible; therefore, they are as "merely real" as anything else. The point of making life awesome is seeing the entire world as one vast game of Calvinball.
Think of the rocket-boosted mechanical T-Rex as a metaphor for indulging your inner child; you can replace it with anything you could imagine doing on a lark with infinite resources. The point of living in a Universe of Awesome is that you can wake up and say "dude, you know what would be awesome? A frikin metal T-Rex with rockets boosters!" And then you and your best friend spend 15 seconds air-guitaring before firing up the Maker and chunking out the parts and tools, then putting it together and flying it around. And then one of you turns to the other and says, "okay, that was awesome for like, five minutes. Now what?"
Actually that last description sounds like it would plateau really fast.
Fair enough, but I still think the "universe as a vast game of Calvinball" description still stands in principle. (Or if you want a less coloquial descriptor, check out Finite and Infinite Games ).
I frankly think the Cambridge Center for the study of Awesome would become run of the mill in a few months, and that's WITH the rest of the world being "ordinary" for comparison purposes.
Just because a literal flying t-rex gets old faster than they expected, doesn't mean you couldn't have a great deal of fun in a world like that.
Of course, presumably self imposed challenges (eg videogames that don't just let you win) would be fairly commonplace.
I'm thinking of it more like Minecraft in real life. I want a castle with a secret staircase because it would be awesome. What I did was spend a day of awesomeness building it myself instead of downloading it and only having five minutes of awesomeness.
right, hence the phrases "chunking out the parts and tools" and "putting it together".
I find woodworking and carpentry fun. However, I buy my lumber at Home Depot, rather than hiking out to the woods and felling trees myself, then painstakingly hewing and sanding them into planks.
Part of making the world more awesome is automating things enough that when you have an insanely awesome idea for a project, your starting point is fun rather than tedious. Since this is different for different people, the best solution is to have a system that can do it all for you, but that lets you do as much for yourself as you want.
This idea is awesome.
Thank you. For a short summary of the whole situation, this is fantastically non-confused and seems like a good intuition pump.
I dunno, I feel like judgments of awesomeness are heavily path-dependent and vary a lot from person to person. I don't hold out a lot of hope for the project of Coherent Extrapolated Volition, but I hold out even less for Coherent Extrapolated Awesomeness. So the vision of the future is people pushing back and forth, the chuunibyous trying to fill the world with dark magic rituals and the postmodernists wincing at their unawesome sincerity and trying to paint everything with as many layers of awesome irony as they can.
Also, from a personal perspective, I rather like quiet comfort, although I cannot really say it's "awesome". You can say, it doesn't matter what I like, it only matters what's awesome, but to hell with your fascist notions.
This is the unextrapolated awesomeness. I think we would tend to agree on much more of what is awesome if we extrapolated.
This is a serious bug. Non-exciting and comfortable can be awesome, even though the word doesn't bring it to mind. Thanks.
Good post, but I can easily imagine awesome ways to starve hundreds of children.
"Awesome" to me means impressive and exciting in a pleasant manner. You seem to use it to mean desirable. If morality just means desirability, then there's no reasons to use the word morality. I think that for morality to have any use, it has to be a component of desirability, but not interchangeable with it.
You are right that it shouldn't directly be that which is desirable. I guess there is a bug in the OP explanation in that "awesome" does not automatically feel like it should be outside yourself.
The excitingness connotation is a bug.
There's a question in OkCupid that asks "In some sense, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?" which [I immediately answered no and rated everyone who said yes as completely undateable] I think falls into this same class of bug, but I can't quite put my finger on how to describe it.
In some sense, it probably would, it's just a sense that doesn't have any weight to speak of in deciding whether a nuclear war is a good idea. Even reliably settled arguments are not one-sided; there are usually considerations aligned against even the most obviously right decisions, and denying the existence or correctness of such considerations damages one's epistemic rationality.
I agree, but I'm really confused about the how the creators of that website intended for the question to help in deciding whether a user should date a certain individual. I wouldn't be able to tell if they answered "yes" because "Yay! Explosions!" and completely disregarded human deaths, or if they were saying "Indeed, there exists a sense in which nuclear war would create more excitement than a lack of one."
I feel like "excitement" carries a positive connotation, particularly in American culture, which makes me uneasy about any "yes" answers. :(
That's the point: you should (in particular) be comfortable with entertaining arguments for horrible things that carry positive connotations (just don't get carried away :-). The correctness of these arguments won't in general depend on whether their connotations align with those of the decisions reached upon considering all relevant arguments.
You're saying a lot of technically correct things that don't seem to be engaging what I'm saying. =/
Yes, I agree that there is some value in entertaining a "yes, during a nuclear war, there will be may be some more (positively) exciting things than in peacetime." This is something to take into account when deciding whether or not you should go to nuclear war.
Meanwhile, if you're trying to use the question to gauge the moral compass of the answering person, the "nuclear war is great and fun thing!" answer is not readily distinguishable from the "I am carefully entertaining the argument for a horrible thing" answer. Which is similar to the way "awesomeness" sometimes leads to ... awesome starvation schemes?
I think that using factual beliefs to signal something other than knowledge about the world is a bad idea. It encourages lying to yourself and others.
I think this is a stock trick personality tests use: give test-takers a question where the denotation & connotation conflict; see how each test-taker resolves the conflict; people who resolve it in the same way (i.e. give the same answer) are presumably more similar in personality/weltanschauung than people who resolve it differently.
This seemed obvious to me. The problem is the lack of "meta" options; where's the hidden checkbox for people who saw all six possible chains of reasoning, analyzed each of them, have probabilistic answers on four of those, along with an objection to the premises of the fifth and want to scream at the sixth for its stupidity? (bogus example)
Some of us don't like limiting ourselves to only one possible interpretation of a statement or question. Some of us consider at least four different interpretations by default as a matter of convenience, and only then afterwards settle on the one most likely to have been "intended" within context.
This behavior is the one I prefer, not the behavior of automatically resolving to one specific preferred interpretation without noticing the others. The particular example question, like so many others on that site, provides no means of distinguishing between these behaviors, other than a very time-consuming reading of all the comments (which also requires time investment from the question-answerer by writing a comment in explanation, but this in turn requires a specific response, which partly defeats the point of going meta).
Other websites sometimes sidestep the issue entirely by first testing for traits that have these effects and often outright rejecting those (potential members) that would "question" the questions, thereby pre-filtering members for compatibility with their testing methodologies.
Yep, that's the reasoning I followed in the earlier comment. A person who saw all six possible chains would decide the question wasn't useful and would refuse to answer it, hopefully. ^_^
Wouldn't the failure to acknowledge all the excitement nuclear war would cause be an example of the horns effect?
I can understand answering no for emotional or political reasons, but rating the epistemically correct answer as undateable? That's... a good reason for me to answer such questions honestly, actually.
So they have a mechanism for you to write an explanatory comment, right? But they don't allow you to filter on the existence of an explanatory comment, which would allow someone to explain their thought process -- which I think is really necessary because "exciting" does strongly connote "good idea" the way "awesome" does. In which case, I would expect a person trying to avoid the horns effect to just refuse to answer the question on the grounds that it's misleading as a moral compass gauge because answering "yes" might cause them to get filtered out because you can't condition on the existence of an explanation. So I expected most "yes" answers to be generally unaware people. I don't think that question was intended for rational arguments for or against nuclear war; I think it was intended for ... morality. I admit "completely undateable" is an exaggeration, but I think I decided engaging that question was a red flag for immaturity.
But that's why I'm really confused why that question was there in the first place because it doesn't distinguish those two groups of people -- the ones that are thinking really really carefully and the ones that aren't thinking at all. It's bad for morality!
Well, it might be exciting for people fighting it from within their anti-radiation shelters, but it'd be such a drag for people having their friends and family killed. The total excitingness I'm pretty sure would be negative.
That's why I thought it was a useless question. Because it's not asking for the overall total excitingness of nuclear war. It's asking if there exists a type of excitingness that nuclear war does have a net positive in. Which, probably yes, but it's so not very relevant to anything. =P
“There is nothing so exhilarating in all the world as being shot at with no result.”
Attributed, in various forms, to Winston Churchill. What war is, is intense. Soldiers who have seen combat duty often miss it in peacetime, or in civilian life. In Britain after the second World War, even many civilians found the peace a bit of a let down.
So yes, in a very ordinary sense, nuclear war would be exciting, especially if you survive it.
Imagine you have the superpower: Movie Hero. You are guaranteed to escape from all situations, however dire, and whatever extremity of privation and suffering you may have to go through (but you will have to go through it) in the process of clawing your way to the Happy Ending. You also get a chance to play a pivotal role in whatever world crisis forces itself on you. How would you then feel about seeing the world slide towards imminent nuclear war?
Pretty miserable.
Unfortunately, I think I would prefer not to go on dates with people who spend too much time imagining that they are Movie Heroes. A little bit is okay! =P
I dunno -- it has the very nice (IMO) side effect of automagically importing Fun Theory into ethics.
They would be awesome to you but awful to the children. Back to the problem of inter-personal utility comparisons...
I so wanted to come up with an objection or a counter-argument, after all, the whole premise is silly on the face of it. But instead I only recall an old commercial for something, which goes something like "Don't fight awesome. It will only make it awesomer!". Can't find a link, though.
Awesome and moral clearly have overlap. How much?
There's a humorous, satirical news story produced by The Onion, where the US Supreme Court rules that the death penalty is "totally badass". And it is, even though badass-ness is not a criteria to decide the death penalty's legality.
Similarly, awesomeness makes me think of vengeance. Though some vengeance is disproportionate with the initial offense, and thus not so awesome, vengeance seems on the whole to have that aura of glorious achievement that you'd find at the climax of an action / adventure film. And yet that doesn't really match my ideas of morality, though maybe I don't feel strongly positively enough for the restoration of justice.
The idea that vengeance is awesome but not moral might be an artifact of looking at it from the victor's side vs target's side. So maybe we should distinguish between awesome experiences and awesome futures / histories / worlds.
But those were just the first distinctions between morality and awesomeness I thought of while reading. I'm probably missing a lot of stuff, since morality and awesomeness are both big, complicated things. They're probably too big to think about all at once in detail, much less retrieve on a whim. Are there lists of of moral and/or awesome stuff we can look at to better define their overlap?
Schwartz is a psychologist who came up with 10 factors of culturally universal values. I'd say the factors of power, achievement, pleasure, excitement, self-direction, and tradition sound like things you'd find in awesome worlds, while pleasure, universalism, benevolence, conformity, and security sounds like things you find in worlds that are moral but not as awesome. Lovely and boring lives worth living. I included pleasure in both worlds, because that's a hard one to skip on in valuable futures. I wonder how good of a weirdtopia someone could write that didn't involve pleasure.
Anyway, that's less haphazard, but still crude analysis. I mean, some tradition looks like narrative myths and impressive ceremonies, which are awesome, and some tradition looks like shaming people for being sexually abused, which is not awesome. So "tradition" doesn't cut at the joints of awesome vs moral.
Is there a more fine grained list?
43 things is a popular website where people can list their goals, keep track of their progress, talk about why they failed, things like that. It's probably biased toward far-mode endorsements, and misses out on a lot of aesthetics which aren't neatly expressible as goal content, but it's still an interesting source of data on morality and awesomeness. The developers of 43 things have a blog, where they do shallow statistical analysis, like listing top habit goals, but the lists are very short and have a lot of overlap.
"A Hierarchical Taxonomy of Human Goals" (Chulef+ 2001) lists 138 unique goals derived from psychological literature and 30 goal clusters.
If you look through the list, you'll see a bunch of goals that start with "being". Being ambitious, responsible, respected, etc. Also some appearance ones like "looking fit". I think its fair to say that human goal content includes a fair bit of virtuousness, and that we could make a virtue theory of awesomeness just as much as a virtue theory of morality (though it might be too narrow a theory).
Sorting the big list turns out to be pretty hard, because the goals are a mix of awesomeness, boring morality, and other things. Like "Living close to family" initially sounds like a boring moral thing, but it sounds way cooler when they're riding mechanical rocket dinosaurs with you and helping you take down the Dark Evil's super weapon. Or even just "being a good parent". That doesn't sound as exciting as rocket dinosaurs, but neither can I quite bring myself to say that being a good parent is not totally awesome.
I did start sorting though. One thing that stood out is that awesome goals are more often about seeking and boring moral goals are more often about having. But that's going off what I had when I accidentally closed the document unsaved, so small sample bias. I think I might have drifted back toward thinking about awesome experiences instead of awesome futures too. Or even just features of a high status life. And status clearly isn't equivalent with morality. Oops.
In summary, I still really don't know whether awesome futures are the same as moral futures, or whether awesome moral futures are the same as valuable ones.
--
This comment is stupid. Morality is usually used to describe actions, not experiences or world states or histories. Calling awesomeness the same as morality is a type mismatch. Also I put universalism in the boring category, even though I had just said that justice-y vengeance is awesome. And I said goals on 43 things are biased to far mode, which they're not if you just look at them (neither are they near mode), and it doesn't matter either way because I didn't do anything with 43 things other than name drop it, like that stupid Onion sketch. And why did I bring up goal content at all? Goals are the products of valuation thought processes, not the constituents. We have psychology and neuroscience; we can just look at how awesomeness feelings work instead of imaging situations associated with goals and decided, "hrm, yes, trench coats definitely sound awesome, I wonder what that tells me about morality". And goals aren't all that interesting for characterizing human values that aren't moral ones, in that specific, social sense that Haidt talks about. Like I'm pretty sure not being horribly burned by fire is a common human value, and yet no one on 43 things wrote about it, and it's only weakly implicit in Schwartz' value taxonomy with the pleasure and security factors. And yet not burning people alive is probably a more important thing to ensure in the design of humanity's future than making sure people can stay with their families or have high self esteem or have math parties.
Heinlein's The Rolling Stones has a very elegant balance of home and adventure. The family lives in a space ship.
As badass as shooting a fish in a barrel. Which is to say, no, not really.
You know, I'm not sure that I'd rather be turned into a whale than orgasmium. In fact, I'm not really sure that I'd rather be an unmodified human than be turned into orgasmium, but I don't lean towards orgasmium as the most awesome thing I could possibly be.
I think I'd be sad to turn into orgasmium without having been a whale first. :(
I like the word awesome a lot, but as a particular useful word in English have noticed it becoming very overused of late.
Awesome decomposes to full of awe, or inspiring of awe. Wondersome, full of wonder or inspiring of wonder, seems like it would be similarly useful.
Can anyone coin relevant neologisms?
The canonical english word is "Wonderful", not "Wondersome".
Note that "Awful" is also a word.
Yes, as is "Wondrous". But "Wondersome" isn't, usually.
This may be a minor nit, but... is this forum collectively anti-orgasmium, now?
Because being orgasmium is by definition more pleasant than not being orgasmium. Refusing to become orgasmium is a hedonistic utilitarian mistake, full stop.[1] (Well, that's not actually true, since as a human you can make other people happier, and as orgasmium you presumably cannot. But it is at least on average a mistake to refuse to become orgasmium; I would argue that it is virtually always a mistake.)
[1] We're all hedonistic utilitarians, right?
... no?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lb/notforthesakeofhappinessalone/
Interesting stuff. Very interesting.
Do you buy it?
That article is arguing that it's all right to value things that aren't mental states over a net gain in mental utility.[1] If, for instance, you're given the choice between feeling like you've made lots of scientific discoveries and actually making just a few scientific discoveries, it's reasonable to prefer the latter.[2]
Well, that example doesn't sound all that ridiculous.
But the logic that Eliezer is using is exactly the same logic that drives somebody who's dying of a horrible disease to refuse antibiotics, because she wants to keep her body natural. And this choice is — well, it isn't wrong, choices can't be "wrong" — but it reflects a very fundamental sort of human bias. It's misguided.
And I think that Eliezer's argument is misguided, too. He can't stand the idea that scientific discovery is only an instrument to increase happiness, so he makes it a terminal value just because he can. This is less horrible than the hippie who thinks that maintaining her "naturalness" is more important than avoiding a painful death, but it's not much less dumb.
[1] Or a net gain in "happiness," if we don't mind using that word as a catchall for "whatever it is that makes good mental states good."
[2] In this discussion we are, of course, ignoring external effects altogether. And we're assuming that the person who gets to experience lots of scientific discoveries really is happier than the person who doesn't, otherwise there's nothing to debate. Let me note that in the real world, it is obviously possible to make yourself less happy by taking joy-inducing drugs — for instance if doing so devalues the rest of your life. This fact makes Eliezer's stance seem a lot more reasonable than it actually is.
I see absolutely no reason that people shouldn't be allowed to decide this. (Where I firmly draw the line is people making decisions for other people on this kind of basis.)
I'm not arguing that people shouldn't decide that. I'm not arguing any kind of "should."
I'm just saying, if you do decide that, you're kind of dumb. And by analogy Eliezer was being kind of dumb in his article.
Okay. What do you mean by "dumb"?
In this case: letting bias and/or intellectual laziness dominate your decision-making process.
So if I wanted to respond to the person dying of a horrible disease who is refusing antibiotics, I might say something like "you are confused about what you actually value and about the meaning of the word 'natural.' If you understood more about about science and medicine and successfully resolved the relevant confusions, you would no longer want to make this decision." (I might also say something like "however, I respect your right to determine what kind of substances enter your body.")
I suppose you want me to say that Eliezer is also confused about what he actually values, namely that he thinks he values science but he only values the ability of science to increase human happiness. (I don't think he's confused about the meaning of any of the relevant words.)
I disagree. One reason to value science, even from a purely hedonistic point of view, is that science corrects itself over time, and in particular gives you better ideas about how to be a hedonist over time. If you wanted to actually design a process that turned people into orgasmium, you'd have to science a lot, and at the end of all that sciencing there's no guarantee that the process you've come up with is hedonistically optimal. Maybe you could increase the capacity of the orgasmium to experience happiness further if you'd scienced more. Once you turn everyone into orgasmium, nobody's around to science anymore, so nobody's around to find better processes for turning people into orgasmium (or, science forbid, find better ethical arguments against hedonistic utilitarianism).
In short, the capacity for self-improvement is lost, and that would be terrible regardless of what direction you're trying to improve towards.
I surmise from your comments that you may not be aware that Eliezer's written quite a bit on this matter; http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Complexityofvalue is a good summary/index ( is one of my favorites). There's a lot of stuff in there that is relevant to your points.
However, you asked me what I think, so here it is...
The wording of your first post in this thread seems telling. You say that "Refusing to become orgasmium is a hedonistic utilitarian mistake, full stop."
Do you want to become orgasmium?
Perhaps you do. In that case, I direct the question to myself, and my answer is no: I don't want to become orgasmium.
That having been established, what could it mean to say that my judgment is a "mistake"? That seems to be a category error. One can't be mistaken in wanting something. One can be mistaken about wanting something ("I thought I wanted X, but upon reflection and consideration of my mental state, it turns out I actually don't want X"), or one can be mistaken about some property of the thing in question, which affects the preference ("I thought I wanted X, but then I found out more about X, and now I don't want X"); but if you're aware of all relevant facts about the way the world is, and you're not mistaken about what your own mental states are, and you still want something... labeling that a "mistake" seems simply meaningless.
On to your analogy:
If someone wants to "keep her body natural", then conditional on that even being a coherent desire[1], what's wrong with it? If it harms other people somehow, then that's a problem... otherwise, I see no issue. I don't think it makes this person "kind of dumb" unless you mean that she's actually got other values that are being harmed by this value, or is being irrational in some other ways; but values in and of themselves cannot be irrational.
This construal is incorrect. Say rather: Eliezer does not agree that scientific discovery is only an instrument to increase happiness. Eliezer isn't making scientific discovery a terminal value, it is a terminal value for him. Terminal values are given.
Why are we doing that...? If it's only about happiness, then external effects should be irrelevant. You shouldn't need to ignore them; they shouldn't affect your point.
[1]Coherence matters: the difference between your hypothetical hippie and Eliezer the potential-scientific-discoverer is that the hippie, upon reflection, would realize (or so we would like to hope) that "natural" is not a very meaningful category, that her body is almost certainly already "not natural" in at least some important sense, and that "keeping her body natural" is just not a state of affairs that can be described in any consistent and intuitively correct way, much less one that can be implemented. That, if anything, is what makes her preference "dumb". There's no analogous failures of reasoning behind Eliezer's preference to actually discover things instead of just pretend-discovering, or my preference to not become orgasmium.
I have never used the word "mistake" by itself. I did say that refusing to become orgasmium is a hedonistic utilitarian mistake, which is mathematically true, unless you disagree with me on the definition of "hedonistic utilitarian mistake" (= an action which demonstrably results in less hedonic utility than some other action) or of "orgasmium" (= a state of maximum personal hedonic utility).[1]
I point this out because I think you are quite right: it doesn't make sense to tell somebody that they are mistaken in "wanting" something.
Indeed, I never argued that the dying hippie was mistaken. In fact I made exactly the same point that you're making, when I said:
What I said was that she is misguided.
The argument I was trying to make was, look, this hippie is using some suspect reasoning to make her decisions, and Eliezer's reasoning looks a lot like her's, so we should doubt Eliezer's conclusions. There are two perfectly reasonable ways to refute this argument: you can (1) deny that the hippie's reasoning is suspect, or (2) deny that Eliezer's reasoning is similar to hers.
These are both perfectly fine things to do, since I never elaborated on either point. (You seem to be trying option 1.) My comment can only possibly convince people who feel instinctively that both of these points are true.
All that said, I think that I am meaningfully right — in the sense that, if we debated this forever, we would both end up much closer to my (current) view than to your (current) view. Maybe I'll write an article about this stuff and see if I can make my case more strongly.
[1] Please note that I am ignoring the external effects of becoming orgasmium. If we take those into account, my statement stops being mathematically true.
I don't think those are the only two ways to refute the argument. I can think of at least two more:
(3) Deny the third step of the argument's structure — the "so we should doubt Eliezer's conclusions" part. Analogical reasoning applied to surface features of arguments is not reliable. There's really no substitute for actually examining an argument.
(4) Disagree that construing the hippie's position as constituting any sort of "reasoning" that may or may not be "suspect" is a meaningful description of what's going on in your hypothetical (or at least, the interesting aspect of what's going on, the part we're concerned with). The point I was making is this: what's relevant in that scenario is that the hippie has "keeping her body natural" as a terminal value. If that's a coherent value, then the rest of the reasoning ("and therefore I shouldn't take this pill") is trivial and of no interest to us. Now it may not be a coherent value, as I said; but if it is — well, arguing with terminal values is not a matter of poking holes in someone's logic. Terminal values are given.
As for your other points:
It's true, you didn't say "mistake" on its own. What I am wondering is this: ok, refusing to become orgasmium fails to satisfy the mathematical requirements of hedonistic utilitarianism.
But why should anyone care about that?
I don't mean this as a general, out-of-hand dismissal; I am asking, specifically, why such a requirement would override a person's desires:
Person A: If you become orgasmium, you would feel more pleasure than you otherwise would.
Person B: But I don't want to become orgasmium.
Person A: But if you want to feel as much pleasure as possible, then you should become orgasmium!
Person B: But... I don't want to become orgasmium.
I see Person B's position as being the final word on the matter (especially if, as you say, we're ignoring external consequences). Person A may be entirely right — but so what? Why should that affect Person B's judgments? Why should the mathematical requirements behind Person A's framework have any relevance to Person B's decisions? In other words, why should we be hedonistic utilitarians, if we don't want to be?
(If we imagine the above argument continuing, it would develop that Person B doesn't want to feel as much pleasure as possible; or, at the least, wants other things too, and even the pleasure thing he wants only given certain conditions; in other words, we'd arrive at conclusions along the lines outlined in the "Complexity of value" wiki entry.)
(As an aside, I'm still not sure why you're ignoring external effects in your arguments.)
The difficulty here, of course, is that Person B is using a cached heuristic that outputs "no" for "become orgasmium"; and we cannot be certain that this heuristic is correct in this case. Just as Person A is using the (almost certainly flawed) heuristic "feel as much pleasure as possible", which outputs "yes" for "become orgasmium".
Why do you think so?
What do you mean by "correct"?
Edit: I think it would be useful for any participants in discussions like this to read Eliezer's Three Worlds Collide. Not as fictional evidence, but as an examination of the issues, which I think it does quite well. A relevant quote, from chapter 4, "Interlude with the Confessor":
Humans are not perfect reasoners.
[Edited for clarity.]
I give a decent probability to the optimal order of things containing absolutely zero pleasure. I assign a lower, but still significant, probability to it containing an infinite amount of pain in any given subjective interval.
If I become orgasmium, then I would cease to exist, and the orgasmium, which is not me in any meaningful sense, will have more pleasure than I otherwise would have. But I don't care about the pleasure of this orgasmium, and certainly would not pay my existence for it.
You can argue that having values other than hedonistic utility is mistaken in certain cases. But that doesn't imply that it's mistaken in all cases.
No thanks. Awesomeness is more complex than can be achieved with wireheading.
I can't bring myself to see the creation of an awesomeness pill as the one problem of such huge complexity that even a superintelligent agent can't solve it.
I have no doubt that you could make a pill that would convince someone that they were living an awesome life, complete with hallucinations of rocket-powered tyrannosaurs, and black leather lab coats.
The trouble is that merely hallucinating those things, or merely feeling awesome is not enough.
The average optimizer probably has no code for experiencing utility, it only feels the utility of actions under consideration. The concept of valuing (or even having) internal experience is particular to humans, and is in fact only one of the many things that we care about. Is there a good argument for why internal experience ought to be the only thing we care about? Why should we forget all the other things that we like and focus solely on internal experience (and possibly altruism)?
Can't I simulate everything I care about? And if I can, why would I care about what is going on outside of the simulation, any more than I care now about a hypothetical asteroid on which the "true" purpose of the universe is written? Hell, if I can delete the fact from my memory that my utility function is being deceived, I'd gladly do so - yes, it will bring some momentous negative utility, but it would be a teensy bit greatly offset by the gains, especially stretched over a huge amount of time.
Now that I think about it...if, without an awesomeness pill, my decision would be to go and do battle in an eternal Valhalla where I polish my skills and have fun, and an awesomeness pill brings me that, except maybe better in some way I wouldn't normally have thought of...what is exactly the problem here? The image of a brain with the utility slider moved to the max is disturbing, but I myself can avoid caring about that particular asteroid. An image of an universe tiled with brains storing infinite integers is disturbing; one of an universe tiled with humans riding rocket-powered tyrannosaurs is great - and yet, they're one and the same; we just can't intuitively penetrate the black box that is the brain storing the integer. I'd gladly tile the universe with awesome.
If I could take an awesomeness pill and be whisked off somewhere where my body would be taken care of indefinitely, leaving everything else as it is, maybe I would decline; probably I won't. Luckily, once awesomeness pills become available, there probably won't be starving children, so that point seems moot.
[PS.] In any case, if my space fleet flies by some billboard saying that all this is an illusion, I'd probably smirk, I'd maybe blow it up with my rainbow lasers, and I'd definitely feel bad about all those other fellas whose space fleets are a bit less awesome and significantly more energy-consuming than mine (provided our AI is still limited by, at the very least, entropy; meaning limited in its ability to tile the world to infinity; if it can create the same amount of real giant robots as it can create awesome pills, it doesn't matter which option is taken), all just because they're bothered by silly billboards like this. If I'm allowed to have that knowledge and the resulting negative utility, that is.
[PPS.] I can't imagine how an awesomeness pill would max my sliders for self-improvement, accomplishment, etc without actually giving me the illusion of doing those things. As in, I can imagine feeling intense pleasure; I can't imagine feeling intense achievement separated from actually flying - or imagining that I'm flying - a spaceship - it wouldn't feel as fulfilling, and it makes no sense that an awesomeness pill would separate them if it's possible not to. It probably wouldn't have me go through the roundabout process of doing all the stuff, and it probably would max my sliders even if I can't imagine it, to an effect much different from the roundabout way, and by definition superior. As long as it doesn't modify my utility function (as long as I value flying space ships), I don't mind.
This is a key assumption. Sure, if I assume that the universe is such that no choice I make affects the chances that a child I care about will starve -- and, more generally, if I assume that no choice I make affects the chances that people will gain good stuff or bad stuff -- then sure, why not wirehead? It's not like there's anything useful I could be doing instead.
But some people would, in that scenario, object to the state of the world. Some people actually want to be able to affect the total amount of good and bad stuff that people get.
And, sure, the rest of us could get together and lie to them (e.g., by creating a simulation in which they believe that's the case), though it's not entirely clear why we ought to. We could also alter them (e.g., by removing their desire to actually do good) but it's not clear why we ought to do that, either.
Do you mean to distinguish this from believing that you have flown a spaceship?
Don't we have to do it (lying to people) because we value other people being happy? I'd rather trick them (or rather, let the AI do so without my knowledge) than have them spend a lot of time angsting about not being able to help anyone because everyone was already helped. (If there are people who can use your help, I'm not about to wirehead you though)
Yes. Thinking about simulating achievement got me confused about it. I can imagine intense pleasure or pain. I can't imagine intense achievement; if I just got the surge of warmth I normally get, it would feel wrong, removed from flying a spaceship. Yet, that doesnt mean that I don't have an achievement slider to max; it just means I can't imagine what maxing it indefinitely would feel like. Maxing the slider leading to hallucinations about performing activities related to achievement seems too roundabout - really, that's the only thing I can say; it feels like it won't work that way. Can the pill satisfy terminal values without making me think I satisfied them? I think this question shows that the sentence before it is just me being confused. Yet I can't imagine how an awesomeness pill would feel, hence I can't dispel this annoying confusion.
[EDIT] Maybe a pill that simply maxes the sliders would make me feel achievement, but without flying a spaceship, hence making it incomplete, hence forcing the AI to include a spaceship hallucinator. I think I am/was making it needlessly complicated. In any case, the general idea is that if we are all opposed to just feeling intense pleasure without all the other stuff we value, then a pill that gives us only intense pleasure is flawed and would not even be given as an option.
Regarding the first bit... well, we have a few basic choices: - Change the world so that reality makes them happy
- Change them so that reality makes them happy
- Lie to them about reality, so that they're happy
- Accept that they aren't happy
If I'm understanding your scenario properly, we don't want to do the first because it leaves more people worse off, and we don't want to do the last because it leaves us worse off. (Why our valuing other people being happy should be more important than their valuing actually helping people, I don't know, but I'll accept that it is.)
But why, on your view, ought we lie to them, rather than change them?
I attach negative utility to getting my utility function changed - I wouldn't change myself to maximize paperclips. I also attach negative utility to getting my memory modified - I don't like the normal decay that is happening even now, but far worse is getting a large swath of my memory wiped. I also dislike being fed negative information, but that is by far the least negative of the three, provided no negative consequences arise from the false belief. Hence, I'd prefer being fed negative information to having my memory modified to being made to stop caring about other people altogether. There is an especially big gap between the last one and the former two.
Thanks for summarizing my argument. I guess I need to work on expressing myself so I don't force other people to work through my roundaboutness :)
Fair enough. If you have any insight into why your preferences rank in this way, I'd be interested, but I accept that they are what they are.
However, I'm now confused about your claim.
Are you saying that we ought to treat other people in accordance with your preferences of how to be treated (e.g., lied to in the present rather than having their values changed or their memories altered)? Or are you just talking about how you'd like us to treat you? Or are you assuming that other people have the same preferences you do?
I don't understand this. If your utility function is being deceived, then you don't value the true state of affairs, right? Unless you value "my future self feeling utility" as a terminal value, and this outweighs the value of everything else ...
No, this is more about deleting a tiny discomfort - say, the fact that I know that all of it is an illusion; I attach a big value to my memory and especially disagree with sweeping changes to it, but I'll rely on the pill and thereby the AI to make the decision what shouldn't be deleted because doing so would interfere with the fulfillment of my terminal values and what can be deleted because it brings negative utility that isn't necessary.
Intellectually, I wouldn't care whether I'm the only drugged brain in a world where everyone is flying real spaceships. I probably can't fully deal with the intuition telling me I'm drugged though. It's not highly important - just a passing discomfort when I think about the particular topic (passing and tiny, unless there are starving children). Whether its worth keeping around so I can feel in control and totally not drugged and imprisoned...I guess that's reliant on the circumstances.
I'm anti-orgasmium, but not necessarily anti-experience-machine. I'm approximately a median-preference utilitarian. (This is more descriptive than normative)
No. Most of us are preferentists or similar. Some of us are not consequentialists at all.
For as long as I've been here, which admittedly isn't all that long.
Here's your problem.
Awesome summary, thanks!
I wish! Both metaethics and normative ethics are still mysterious and confusing to me (despite having read Eliezer's sequence). Here's a sample of problems I'm faced with, none of which seem to be helped by replacing the word "right" with "awesome": 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. I'm concerned this post might make a lot of people feel more clarity than they actually possess, and more importantly and unfortunately from my perspective, less inclined to look into the problems that continue to puzzle me.
I'd just like to say that although I don't have anything to add, there are all excellent questions and I don't think people are considering questions like these enough. (Didn't feel like an upvote was sufficient endorsement for everything in that comment!)
Not necessarily. If I tell a story of how I went white water rafting, and the person I'm talking to tells me that what I did was "awesome," is he or she really thinking of the consequences of my white water rafting? Probably not. Instead, he or she probably thought very little before declaring the white water rafting awesome. That's an inherent problem to using awesome with morality. Awesome is usually used without thought. If you determine morality based on awesomeness, then you are moralizing without thinking at all, which can often be a problem.
To say that something's 'consequentialist' doesn't have to mean that it's literally forward-looking about each item under consideration. Like any other ethical theory, consequentialism can look back at an event and determine whether it was good/awesome. If you going white-water rafting was a good/awesome consequence, then your decision to go white-water rafting and the conditions of the universe that let you do so were good/awesome.
That misses my point. When people say awesome, they don't think back at the consequences or look forward for consequences. People say awesome without thinking about it AT ALL.
OK, let's say you're right, and people say "awesome" without thinking at all. I imagine Nyan_Sandwich would view that as a feature of the word, rather than as a bug. The point of using "awesome" in moral discourse is precisely to bypass conscious thought (which a quick review of formal philosophy suggests is highly misleading) and access common-sense intuitions.
I think it's fair to be concerned that people are mistaken about what is awesome, in the sense that (a) they can't accurately predict ex ante what states of the world they will wind up approving of, or in the sense that (b) what you think is awesome significantly diverges from what I (and perhaps from what a supermajority of people) think is awesome, or in the sense that (c) it shouldn't matter what people approve of, because the 'right' think to do is something else entirely that doesn't depend on what people approve of.
But merely to point out that saying "awesome" involves no conscious thought is not a very strong objection. Why should we always have to use conscious thought when we make moral judgments?
Morality needs a concept of awfulness as well as awesomeness. In the depths of hell, good things are not an option and therefore not a consideration, but there are still choices to be made.
Gloomiest sentence of 2013 so far. Upvoted.
"Least not-awesome choice" is isomorphic to "most awesome choice".
Curiously, I like everything about your comment but this, it's central point. Indeed, a concept of negative utility is probably useful; but this is not why.
[META] Why is this so heavily upvoted? Does that indicate actual value to LW, or just a majority of lurking septemberites captivated by cute pixel art?
It was just hacked out in a couple of hours to organize my thoughts for the meetup. It has little justification for anything, very little coherent overarching structure, and it's not even really serious. It's only 90% true, with many bugs. Very much a worse-is-better sort of post.
Now it's promoted with 50-something upvotes. I notice that I would not predict this, and feel the need to update.
What should I (we) learn from this?
Am I underestimating the value of a given post-idea? (i.e. should we all err on the side of writing more?)
Are structure, seriousness, watertightness and such are trumped by fun and clarity? Is it safe to run with this? This could save a lot of work.
Are people just really interested in morality, or re-framing of problems, or well-linked integration posts?
My own guess, based on nothing much other than a hunch: Morality as Awesomeness sounds simple and easy to do. It also sounds fun and light, unlike many of the other Ethical posts on LW. People have responded positively to this change of pace.
I think
a community in which people have a good idea but err on the side of not writing it up will tend toward a community in which people err on the of side of not bothering to flesh out their ideas?
fun and clarity are good starting points for structure, seriousness and watertightness? Picking out the bugs feels like a useful exercise for me, having just read the bit of the sequence talking about the impact of language.
I thought it was fun and clear and I liked the cute whale, but also it made me think. ^_^
I DUNT KNOW LETS TRY
It's not necessarily that a highly upvoted post is deemed better on average, each individual still only casts one vote. The trichotomy of "downvote / no vote / upvote" doesn't provide nuanced feedback, and while you'd think it all equals out with a large number of votes, that's not so because of a) modifying visibility by means secondary to the content of the post, b) capturing readers' interest early to get them to vote in the first place and c) various distributions of opinions about your post all projecting onto potentially the same voting score (e.g. strong likes + strong dislikes equalling the score of general indifference), all three of which can occur independently of the post's real content.
The visibility was increased with the promotion of your post. While you did need initial upvotes to support that promotion, once achieved there's no stopping the chain reaction: People want to check out that highly rated top post, they expect to see good content and often automatically steelman / gloss over your weaker points. Then there's a kind of implied peer pressure similar to Ash's conformity experiments; you see a highly upvoted post, then monkey see monkey do kicks in, at least skewing your heuristics.
Lastly people you keep invested until the end of your post are more likely to upvote than downvote, and your pixel art does a good job of capturing attention, the opening scene of a movie is crucial. The lower the entry barrier into a post, the more people will tag along. A lesson well internalized by television. Compare the vote counts of some AIXI related posts and yours.
You are also called nyan_sandwich, have a good reputation on this site (AFAICT), yet provide us with some guilty pleasures (of an easy-to-parse comfort-food-for-thought post, talk about nomen est omen, nom nom). In short, you covered all your populist bases. They are all belong to you.
I thought the question was "Does this post have value?" or "Can you quantify the extent to which these here upvotes correlate with value?" and not "How did I get upvotes?"
Pointing out how the genesis of the upvotes is based on mechanisms only weakly related to the content value seems pertinent to answering the two questions in the quote.
It's definitely pertinent, but it seems a bit one-sided? As an upvoter, I was trying really hard confess my love for whale and quantify it alongside my appreciation for fun and clarity. So I'm concerned that the above reads more like "it was probably all nyans and noms" as opposed to "nyans and noms were a factor."
The whale, the fun and the clarity (and the wardrobe, too) all belong on the same side of "structure, seriousness, watertightness" versus "fun and clarity" as per the dichotomy in my initial comment's quote. It would be weird if content hadn't been a factor, albeit one that's been swallowed whole by a vile white whale.
I must confess I don't understand half of what you guys are referring to.
You're not missing much, it's just some throwaway references that aren't central to the point.
"The whale, the fun and the clarity" has the same structure as the movie "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and also starts with an animal.
Swallowed whole by the whale was supposed to say that the content factor was secondary to the "whale factor". The "swallowed" also allures to the whole Jonah story (who lived in a whale's stomach), the whole / [wh]ile / whale was just infantile switching out of vowels, since interestingly all have a Hamming distance of just 1 (you only need to swap one letter).
Your name contains a food item, and you provide guilty comfort food for thought with your post, so "nomen est omen" applies, i.e. your name is a sign of your purpose. The "nom nom" I just appended because it keeps with the food theme, and also because interestingly the "nom nom" is a partial anagram of "nomen est omen".
Yea ... not exactly essential to my arguments. Which in a way does support my points! :)
So it had nothing to do with Moby Dick?
No, of course not!
I don't think it was promoted until it had >30, so maybe that helped a bit, but I have another visibility explanation:
I tend to stick around in my posts and obsessively reply to every comment and cherish every upvote, which means it gets a lot of visibility in the "recent comments" section. My posts tend to have lots of comments, and I think it's largely me trying to get the last word on everything. (until I get swamped and give up)
It is kind of odd that unpromoted posts in main have strictly less visibility than posts in discussion...
This is a good explanation. I get it now I think. Now the question is if we should be doing more of that?
EDIT: also, what does this mean:
Basically, name causes behavior, as far as I can tell. Your nickname is indeed very aptronymical (?) to providing a quick and easy lunch for the hungry mind in a humorous or good-feeling manner.
My impression of this post (which may not be evident from my comments) went something like this:
1) Hah. That's a really funny opening.
2) Oh, this is really interesting and potentially useful, AND really funny, which is a really good combination for articles one the internet.
3) How would I apply this idea to my life?
4) *think about it a bit, and read some comments, think some more *
5) Wait a second, this idea actually isn't nearly as useful as it seemed at first.
5a) To the extent that it's true, it's only the first thesis statement of a lengthy examination of the actual issue
5b) The rest of the sequence this would need to herald to be truly useful is not guaranteed to be nearly as fun
5c) Upon reflection, while "awesome" does capture elements of "good" that would be obscured by "good's" baggage, "awesome" also fails to capture some of the intended value.
5d) This post is still useful, but not nearly as useful as my initial positive reaction indicates
5e) I am now dramatically more interested in the subject of how interesting this post seemed vs how interesting it actually was and what this says about the internet and people and ideas, then about the content of the article.
Yep. It's intended as an introduction to the long and not-very-exciting metaethics sequence.
Yeah, it tends to melt down under examination. (because "awesome" is a fake utility function, as per point 2). The point was not to give a bulletproof morality procedure, but to just reframe the issue in a way that bypasses the usual confusion and cached thoughts.
So I wouldn't expect it to be useful to people who have their metaethical shit together (which you seem to, judging by the content of your rituals). It was explicitly aimed at people in my meetup who were confused and intimidated by the seeming mysteriousness of morality.
Yes the implications of this are very interesting.
As one of the upvoters, here is my thought process, as far as I recall it:
WTF?!! What does it even mean?
Wait, this kind of makes sense intuitively.
Hey, every example I can try actually works. I wonder why.
OK, so the OP suggests awesomeness as an overriding single intuitive terminal value. What does he mean by "intuitive"?
It seems clear from the comments that any attempt to unpack "awesome" eventually fails on some example, while the general concept of perceived awesomeness doesn't.
He must be onto something.
Oh, and his approach is clearly awesome, so the post is self-consistent.
Gotta upvote!
Drat, I wish I made it to the meetup where he presented it!
Totally. Hence the link to fake utility functions. I could have made this clearer; you're not really supposed to unpack it, just use it as a rough pointer to your built-in moral intuitions. "oh that's all there is to it".
Don't worry. I basically just went over this post, then went over "joy in the merely good". We also discussed a bit, but the shield against useless philosophy provided by using "awesome" instead of "good" only lasted so long...
That said, it would have been nice to have you and your ideas there.
Because you make few assertions of substance, there is a lot of empty space (where people, depending on their mood, may insert either unrealistically charitable or unrealistically uncharitable reconstructions of reasoning) and not a lot of specific content for anyone to disagree with. In contrast, if I make 10 very concrete and substantive suggestions in a post, and most people like 9 of them but hate the 10th, that could make them very reluctant to upvote the post as a whole, lest their vote be taken as a blanket endorsement for every claim.
Because the post is vague and humorous, people leave it feeling vaguely happy and not in a mood to pick it apart. Expressing this vague happiness as an upvote reifies it and makes it more intense. People like 'liking' things they like.
The post is actually useful, as a way of popularizing some deeper and more substantive meta-ethical and practical points. Some LessWrongers may be tired of endlessly arguing over which theory is most ideal, and instead hunger for better popularizations and summaries of the extant philosophical progress we've already made, so that we can start peddling those views to the masses. They may view your post as an important step in that Voltairean process, even if it doesn't advance the distinct project of constructing the substance-for-future-popularization in the first place.
Meta-ethics is hard. There are very few easy answers, and there's a lot of disagreement. Uncertainty and disagreement, and in general lack of closure, create a lot of unpleasant dissonance. Your article helps us pretend that we can ignore those problems, which alleviates the dissonance and makes us feel better. This would help explain why applause-lighting posts in areas like meta-ethics or the hard problem of consciousness see better results than applause-lighting posts in areas where substantive progress is easier.
The post invites people to oversimplify their utility calculations via the simple dichotomy 'is it awesome, or isn't it?'. Whether or not your post is useful, informative, insightful ,etc., it is quite clearly 'awesome,' as the word is ordinarily used. So your post encourages people to simplify their evaluation procedure in a way that favors the post itself.
I upvoted it because I loved what you did. (I did feel it was, er... awesome, but before reading that comment I couldn't have put it down in words.)
For me, high (insight + fun) per (time + effort).
I have typically been awful at predicting which parts of HPMOR people would most enjoy. I suggest relaxing and enjoying the hedons.