wiresnips comments on Rationality Quotes November 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: malcolmocean 02 November 2013 08:35PM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 November 2013 06:12:33AM 10 points [-]

Utilitarianism is not in our nature. Show me a man who would hold a child’s face in the fire to end malaria, and I will show you man who would hold a child’s face in the fire and entirely forget he was originally planning to end malaria.

James A. Donald

Comment author: wiresnips 03 November 2013 07:05:40PM 10 points [-]

Utilitarianism isn't a description of human moral processing, it's a proposal for how to improve it.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 04 November 2013 04:12:22AM 14 points [-]

One problem is that if we, say, start admiring people for acting in "more utilitarian" ways, what we may actually be selecting for is psychopathy.

Comment author: wiresnips 04 November 2013 06:15:33AM 7 points [-]

Agreed. Squicky dilemmas designed to showcase utilitarianism are not generally found in real life (as far as I know). And a human probably couldn't be trusted to make a sound judgement call even if one were found. Running on untrusted hardware and such.

Ah- and this is the point of the quote. Oh, I like that.

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