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Jabberslythe comments on CEV: a utilitarian critique - Less Wrong
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Comments (94)
This is a question about utilitarianism, not AI, but can anyone explain (or provide a link to an explanation) of why reducing the total suffering in the world is considered so important? I thought that we pretty much agreed that morality is based on moral intuitions and it seems pretty counterintuitive to value the states of mind of people too numerous to sympathize with as highly as people here do.
It seems to me that reducing suffering in a numbers game is the kind of thing you would say is your goal because it makes you sound like a good person, rather than something your conscience actually motivates you to do, but people here are usually pretty averse to conscious signaling, so I'm not sure that works as an explanation. I'm certain this has been covered elsewhere, but I haven't seen it.
You could reduce human suffering to 0 by reducing the number of humans to 0, so there's got to be another value greater than reducing suffering.
It seems plausible to me that suffering could serve some useful purpose & eliminating it (or seeking to eliminate it) might have horrific consequences.
Almost all hedonistic utilitarians are concerned with maximizing happiness as well as minimizing suffering, including Brian. The reason that he talks about suffering so much is because, it is most people rank a unit of suffering as, say a -3 experience and a unit of suffering as, say, a -1 experience. And he thinks that there is much more suffering than happiness in the world and that it easier to prevent it.
(Sorry if I got any of this wrong Brian)
Thanks, Jabberslythe! You got it mostly correct. :)
The one thing I would add is that I personally think people don't usually take suffering seriously enough -- at least not really severe suffering like torture or being eaten alive. Indeed, many people may never have experienced something that bad. So I put high importance on preventing experiences like these relative to other things.