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shaih comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong
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I do not ask it because I wanted to stop the discussion by asking a hard question. I ask it because I aspire to do research into physics and will someday need an answer to it. As such I have been very curious about different arguments to this question. By no means did I mean by asking this question that there are things that should not be research simply how to go about finding them?
Remove any confusions you might have about metaethics, figure out what it is you value, estimate what kind of impact the research you want to do will have with respect to what you value, estimate what kind of impact the other things you could do will have with respect to what you value, pick the thing that is more valuable.
Trying to retroactively judge previous research this way is difficult because the relevant quantity you want to estimate is not the observed net value of a given piece of research (which is hard enough to estimate) but the expected net value at the time the decision was being made to do the research. I think the expected value of research into nuclear physics in the past was highly negative because of how much it increased the probability of nuclear war, but I'm not a domain expert and can't give hard numbers to back up this assertion.
I'm reading through all of the sequences (slowly, it takes a while to truly understand and I started in 2012) and by coincidence I happen to be at the beginning of metaethics currently. Until I finish I won't argue any further on this subject due to being confused. Thanks for help