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Creutzer comments on The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities - Less Wrong
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Comments (124)
I liked this post. The white room doesn't really seem to work so well as an intuition pump, but it's good that someone has brought up the idea of using surreal utilities.
Since they lead to these tears, within which tradeoff happens normally, but across which you don't trade, it would be interesting to see if we actually find that. We might want to trade n lives for n+1 lives, but what other sacred values do humans have, and how do they behave?
Religion seems to be one, if the Crusades are any indication. Legal liberty, equality... basically anything that someone's sacrificed their life for, that's not itself a means to save lives, is a sacred value by definition.
I feel that sacrificing your own life doesn't really count. If anything, it has to be something that you kill or sacrifice someone else's life for; but the other person's life has to count as a sacred value. It's not clear that outgroup people's lives count as sacred. On the other hand, maybe sending people to war counts as trading the sacred value of life - for what exactly, though?
Legal liberty and equality are a bit hard to actually trade; to the extent that equality is traded, though, it is very routinely exchanged for what one should think are lowest-tier goods, no?
On the other hand, I'm not sure were this leaves. Maybe this mess is just the usual humans not having a proper utility function and has nothing to do with tiers of increasing sacredness in particular.