Dreaded_Anomaly comments on Three ways CFAR has changed my view of rationality - Less Wrong

102 Post author: Julia_Galef 10 September 2013 06:24PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (58)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 10 September 2013 10:16:28PM 27 points [-]

So you might reason, "I'm doing martial arts for the exercise and self-defense benefits... but I could purchase both of those things for less time investment by jogging to work and carrying Mace." If you listened to your emotional reaction to that proposal, however, you might notice you still feel sad about giving up martial arts even if you were getting the same amount of exercise and self-defense benefits somehow else.

Which probably means you've got other reasons for doing martial arts that you haven't yet explicitly acknowledged -- for example, maybe you just think it's cool. If so, that's important, and deserves a place in your decisionmaking. Listening for those emotional cues that your explicit reasoning has missed something is a crucial step

This is a great example of how human value is complicated. Optimizing for stated or obvious values can miss unstated or subtler values. Before we can figure out how to get what we want, we have to know what we want. I'm glad CFAR is taking this into account.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 11 September 2013 03:06:59PM 6 points [-]

I've been wondering whether utilitarians should be more explicit about what they're screening off. For example, trying to maximize QWALYs might mean doing less to support your own social network.