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Viliam_Bur comments on 'Effective Altruism' as utilitarian equivocation. - Less Wrong
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Comments (79)
If other people value tradition instead of helping other people, then the utilitarian thing to do is to get them to value helping other people more and tradition less. And on it goes, until you've tiled the universe with altruistic robots who only care about helping other altruistic robots (help other altrustic robots (help other altruistic robots (....(...(
Utilitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with value complexity.
Could you explain why exactly? To me it seems that if you value multiple things, let's call them A, B, C, you could construct a function such as F = min(A, B, C), which by its maximization supports all of these values.
In such situation, imagine that currently e.g. A = 10, B = 1000, C = 1500. Which could mean e.g. that we have a lot of good music, many good movies, but thousands of people are literally starving to death. In such situation, trying to increase the function F means fully focusing on increasing A and ignoring the values B and C (until A reaches them). In a short term, it may seem as not having complex values. But that's just a local situation.
Shortly: Even if you have complex value, you may find that in current situation the best way to increase total outcome is to focus on one of these values.
Near mode: Imagine that you live in a village with 1000 citizens, where half of them are starving to death, and the other half is watching movies. One person proposes a new food program. Another person proposes making another movie (of which you already have a few dozens). As a mayor, you choose to spend the tax money on the former. The latter guy accuses you of not understanding the complexity of values. Do you think the accusation is fair?
It sounds like you might be confusing utilitarianism with utility functions (a common mistake on LW). While utilitarianism always involves a utility function, not all utility functions are utilitarian.
Yes, that's always theoretically possible. In real life, however, humans are subject to value drift, and have to "practice" their values, lest they lose them.
That doesn't sound like the latter guy's true rejection. It sounds like he really means to accuse the mayor of undervaluing movies specifically. (After all, if the mayor had made the opposite choice, why couldn't the food program guy equally well accuse the mayor of not understanding the complexity of value?)