Great rationality posts by LWers not posted to LW

lukeprog

An effective way to minimize suffering and death is to minimize things that can experience suffering and death. ie. Taking this ideal to the extreme kills everyone!

Um if you didn't happen to notice, killing everyone qualifies as "death" and is therefore out of bounds for reaching that particular ideal.

I used the wording "cause less" which means the people enacting the ideal would not be able to kill people in order to prevent people from dying.

The wording doesn't prevent that, but your elaboration here does. You've (roughly speaking) replaced a simple consequentlialist moral with a rather complex deontological one. The problems and potential failure modes change accordingly. Neither are an ideal against which I would gauge moral progress.

2wedrifid13y

Out of bounds? The ideal in question ("Causing less suffering and death is good") doesn't seem to have specified any bounds. That's precisely the problem with this and indeed most forms of naive idealism. If you go and actually implement the ideal and throw away the far more complex and pragmatic restraints humans actually operate under you end up with something horrible. While all else being equal causing less suffering and death is good, actually optimizing for less suffering and death is a lost purpose. Almost any optimizer with the goal "cause less suffering and death" that is capable of killing everyone (comparatively) painlesslessly will in fact choose to do so. (Because preventing death forever and is hard and not necessarily possible, depending on the details of physics.)

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Great rationality posts by LWers not posted to LW

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Great rationality posts by LWers not posted to LW

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