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I don't understand this values vs preferred values thing. It sounds like "if I get a chance to go against my actual values in favor of some fictional values, I'll take it" which seems like a painful strategy. If you get to change your values in some direction permanently, it might work and I would understand why you'd want to change your cognition so that altruism felt better, to make your values more consistent.
This isn't really different than any other situation where people wish they had a different characteristic than they do. Sometimes such preferences are healthy and benign in the case of other mental states, e.g., preferring to acquire more accurate beliefs. I don't see any reason to think they can't be healthy and benign in the case of preferring to change one's preferences (e.g., to make them more form a more consistent system, or to subordinate them to reflective and long-term preferences).
As I noted to Chris above, consistency isn't necessarily the highest goal here. The best reason to change your values so that altruism feels better is because it enhances altruism, not because it enhances consistency.
I disagree. In most cases like this people wish they were more empathetic to their future selves, which isn't relevant in the case of tricking yourself to do radical altruism, if your future self won't value it more than your current self.
This argument depends entirely on how much you value altruism in the first place, which makes it not very appealing to me.
I don't see the relevance. In prudential cases (e.g., getting yourself to go on a diet), the goal isn't to feel more empathy toward your future self. The goal is to get healthy; feeling more empathy toward your future self may be a useful means to that end, but it's not the only possible one. Similarly, in moral cases (e.g., getting yourself to donate to GiveWell), the goal isn't to feel more empathy toward strangers. The goal is to help strangers suffer and die less.
Suppose you see a child drowning in your neighbor's pool, and you can save the child without incurring risk. But, a twist: You have a fear of water.
Kaj and I aren't saying: If you're completely indifferent to the suffering of others, then there exists an argument so powerful that it can physically compel you to save the child. If that's your precondition for an interesting or compelling moral argument, then you're bound to be disappointed.
Kaj and I are saying: If you care to some extent about the suffering of others, then it makes sense for you to wish that you weren't averse to water, because your preference not to be in the water is getting in the way of other preferences that you much more strongly prefer to hold. This is true even if you don't care at all about your aversion to bodies of water in other contexts (e.g., you aren't pining to join any swim teams). For the same reason, it can make sense to wish that you weren't selfish enough to squander money on bone marrow transplants for yourself, even though you are that selfish.
Sorry, I used empathy a bit loosely. Anyways, the goal is to generate utility for my future self. Empathy is one mechanism for that, and there are others. The only reason to lose weight and get healthy at least for me is that I know for sure my future self will appreciate that. Otherwise I would just binge to satisfy my current self.
What I'm saying is that if the child was random and I had a high risk of dying when trying to save them then there's no argument that would make me take that risk although I'm probably much more altruistic than average already. If I had an irrational aversion to water that actually reflected none of my values then of course I'd like to get rid of that.
It seems to me more like you're saying that if I have even an inkling of altruism in me then I should make it a core value that overrides everything else.
I really don't understand. Either you are that selfish, or you aren't. I'm that selfish, but also happily donate money. There's no argument that could change that. I think the human ability to change core values is very limited, much more limited than the human ability to lose weight.
No. There are also important things that my present self desires be true of my future self, to some extent independently of what my future self wants. For instance, I don't want to take a pill that will turn me into a murderer who loves that he's a murderer, even though if I took such a pill I'd be happy I did.
If your risk of dying is high enough, then you shouldn't try to save the child, since if you're sure to die the expected value may well be negative. Still, I don't see how this is relevant to any claim that anyone else on this thread (or in the OP) is making. 'My altruism is limited, and I'm perfectly OK with how limited it is and wouldn't take a pill to become more altruistic if one were freely available' is a coherent position, though it's not one I happen to find myself in.
Then you understand the thing you were confused about initially: "I don't understand this values vs preferred values thing." Whether you call hydrophobia a 'value' or not, it's clearly a preference; what Kaj and I are talking about is privileging some preferences over others, having meta-preferences, etc. This is pretty ordinary, I think.
Well, of course you should; when I say the word 'should', I'm building in my (conception of) morality, which is vaguely utilitarian and therefore is about maximizing, not satisficing, human well-being. For me to say that you should become more moral is like my saying that you shouldn't murder people. If you're inclined to murder people, then it's unlikely that my saying 'please don't do that, it would be a breach of your moral obligations' is going to have a large effect in dissuading you. Yet, all the same, it is bad to kill people, by the facts on the ground and the meaning of 'bad' (and of 'kill', and of 'to'...). And it's bad to strongly desire to kill people; and it's bad to be satisfied with a strong desire to kill people; etc. Acts and their consequences can be judged morally even when the actors don't themselves adhere to the moral system being used for judging.
People aren't any level of selfish consistently; they exhibit more selfishness in some situations than others. Kaj's argument is that if I prize being altruistic over being egoistic, then it's reasonable for me to put no effort into eliminating my aversion to cryonics, even though signing up for cryonics would exhibit no more egoism than the amount of egoism revealed in a lot of my other behaviors.
'You ate those seventeen pancakes, therefore you should eat this muffin' shouldn't hold sway as an argument against someone who wants to go on a diet. For the same reason, 'You would spend thousands of dollars on heart surgery if you needed it to live, therefore you should spend comparable amounts of money on cryonics to get a chance at continued life' shouldn't hold sway as an argument against someone who wants above all else to optimize for the happiness of the whole human species. (And who therefore wants to want to optimize for everyone's aggregate happiness.)
I'd love to see someone try to pick units with which to compare those two values. :)
You should be more careful when thinking of examples and judging people explicitly. A true utilitarian would probably not want to make EA look as bad as you just did there, and would also understand that allies are useful to have even if their values aren't in perfect alignment with yours. Because of that paragraph, it's pretty difficult for me to look at anything else you said rationally.
Here's some discussion by another person on why the social pressure applied by some EA people might be damaging to the movement.
I'm not trying to browbeat you into changing your values. (Your own self-descriptions make it sound like that would be a waste of time, and I'm really more into the Socratic approach than the Crusader approach.) I'm making two points about the structure of utilitarian reasoning:
'It's better for people to have preferences that cause them to do better things.' is nearly a tautology for consequentialists, because the goodness of things that aren't intrinsically good is always a function of their effects. It's not a bold or interesting claim; I could equally well have said 'it's good for polar bears to have preferences that cause them to do good things'. Ditto for Clippy. If any voluntary behavior can be good or bad, then the volitions causing such behavior can also be good or bad.
'Should' can't be relativized to the preferences of the person being morally judged, else you will be unable to express the idea that people are capable of voluntarily doing bad things.
Do you take something about 1 or 2 to be unduly aggressive or dismissive? Maybe it would help if you said more about what your own views on these questions are.
I'll also say (equally non-facetiously): I don't endorse making yourself miserable with guilt, forbidding yourself to go to weddings, or obsessing over the fact that you aren't exactly 100% the person you wish you were. Those aren't good for personal or altruistic goals. (And I think both of those matter, even if I think altruistic goals matter more.) I don't want to lie to you about my ideals in order to be compassionate and tolerant of the fact that no one, least of all myself, lives up to them.
It would rather defeat the purpose of even having ideals if expressing or thinking about them made people less likely to achieve them, so I do hope we can find ways to live with the fact that our everyday moral heuristics don't have to be (indeed, as a matter of psychological realism, cannot be) the same as our rock-bottom moral algorithm.
Consequentialism makes no sense without a system that judges which consequences are good. By the way, I don't understand why consequentialism and egoism would be mutually exclusive, which you seem to imply by conflating consequentialism and utilitarianism.
I don't think I voluntarily do bad things according to my values, ever. I also don't understand why other people would voluntarily do bad things according to their own values. My values change though, and I might think I did something bad in the past.
Other people do bad things according to my values, but if their actions are truly voluntary and I can't point out a relevant contradiction in their thinking, saying they should do something else is useless, and working to restrict their behavior by other means would be more effective. Connotatively comparing them to murderers and completely ignoring that values have a spectrum would be one of the least effective strategies that come to mind.
No.
To me that seems like you're ignoring what's normally persuasive to people out of plain stubbornness. The reason I'm bringing this up is because I have altruistic goals too, and I find such talk damaging to them.
Having ideals is fine if you make it absolutely clear that's all that they are. If thinking about them in a certain way motivates you, then great, but if it just makes some people pissed off then it would make sense to be more careful about what you say. Consider also that some people might have laxer ideals than you do, and still do more good according to your values. Ideals don't make or break a good person.
I'm not conflating the two. There are non-utilitarian moral consequentialisms. I'm not sure egoism qualifies, since egoism (like paperclip maximization) might not bear a sufficient family resemblance to the things we call 'morality'. But that's just a terminological issue.
If an egoist did choose to adopt moral terminology like 'ought' and 'good', and to cash those terms out using egoism, then the egoist would agree with my claim ''It's better for people to have preferences that cause them to do better things.' But the egoist would mean by that 'It better fits the goals of my form of egoism for people to have preferences that cause them to do things that make me personally happy', whereas what I mean by the sentence is something more like 'It better fits the goals of my form of altruism for people to have preferences that cause them to do things that improve the psychological welfare and preference-satisfaction of all agents'.
Interesting! Then your usage of 'bad' is very unusual. (Or your preferences and general psychological makeup is very unusual.) Most people think themselves capable of making voluntary mistakes, acting against their own better judgment, regretting their decisions, making normative progress, etc.
Sorry, I don't think I was clear about why I drew this comparison. 'Murder' just means 'bad killing'. It's trivial to say that murder is bad. I was saying that it's nearly as trivial to say that preferences that lead to bad outcomes are bad. But it would be bizarre for anyone to suggest that every suboptimal decision is as bad as murder! I clearly should have been more careful in picking my comparison, but I just didn't think anyone would think I was honestly saying something almost unsurpassably silly.
What do you think is the best strategy for endorsing maximization as a good thing without seeming to endorse 'you should feel horribly guilty and hate yourself if you haven't 100% maximized your impact'? Or should we drop the idea that maximization is even a good thing?
I don't know what you mean by 'that's all they are'. Core preferences, ideals, values, goals... I'm using all these terms to pick out pretty much the same thing. I'm not using 'ideal' in any sense in which ideals are mere. They're an encoding of the most important things in human life, by reference to optima.
In Yvain's liking/wanting/endorsing categorization, "preferred values" corresponds to any values that I approve of. Another way of saying it would be that there are modules in my brain which execute one set of behaviors, whereas another set of modules would prefer to be engaging in some other set of behaviors. Not really different from any situation where you end up doing something that you think that you shouldn't.
If you approve of these values, why don't you practice them? It seems to me that approving of a value means you want others to practice it, regardless of whether you want it for yourself.
Did I say I don't? I'm not signed up for cryonics, for instance.
I mean valuing people equally.
Yes, that's what my above comment was a reference to. I do my best to practice it as well as I can.
It seems to me you're looking for temporal consistency. My problem understanding you stems from the fact that I don't expect my future self to wish I had been any more altruistic than I'm right now. I don't think being conflicted makes much sense without considering temporal differences in preference, and I think Yvain's descriptions fit this picture.
I guess you could frame it as a temporal inconsistency as well, since it does often led to regret afterwards, but it's more a "I'm doing this thing even though I know it's wrong" thing: not a conflict between one's current and future self, but rather a conflict between the good of myself and the good of others.
Interesting. I wonder if we have some fundamental difference in perceived identity at play here. It makes no sense to me to have a narrative where I do things I don't actually want to do.
Say I attach my identity to my whole body. There will be no conflict here since whatever I do is result of a resolved conflict hidden in the body and therefore I must want to do whatever I'm doing.
Say I attach my identity to my brain. My brain can want things that my body cannot do, but whatever the brain tells the body to do, will be a result of a resolved conflict hidden inside the brain and I will tell my body to do whatever I want my body to do. Whatever conflict of preferences arises will be a confusion of identity between the brain and the body.
Say I attach my identity to a part of my brain, to this consciousness thing that seems to be in charge of some executive functions, probably residing in the frontal cortex. Whatever this part of the brain tells the rest of the brain will be a result of a resolved conflict hidden inside this part of the brain and again whatever I tell the rest of my brain to do will necessarily have to be what I want to tell it to do, but I can't expect the rest of my brain to do something it cannot do. Whatever conflict arises will be a confusion of identity between this part and the rest of the brain.
I can think of several reasons why I'd want to assume a conflicted identity and almost all of them involve signalling and social convenience.
I think the difference here is that, from the inside, it often doesn't feel like my actions were the result of a resolved conflict. Well, in a sense they were, since otherwise I'd have been paralyzed with inaction. But when I'm considering some decision that I'm conflicted over, it very literally feels like there's an actual struggle between different parts of my brain, and when I do reach a decision, the struggle usually isn't resolved in the sense of one part making a decisive argument and the other part acknowledging that they were wrong. (Though that does happen sometimes.)
Rather it feels like one part managed to get the upper hand and could temporarily force the other part into accepting the decision that was made, but the conflict isn't really resolved in any sense - if the circumstances were to change and I'd have to make the same decision again, the loser of this "round" might still end up winning the next one. Or the winner might get me started on the action but the loser might then make a comeback and block the action after all.
That's also why it doesn't seem right to talk about this as a conflict between current and future selves. That would seem to imply that I wanted thing X at time T, and some other thing Y at T+1. If you equated "wanting" with "the desire of the brain-faction that happens to be the strongest at the time when one's brain is sampled", then you could kind of frame it like a temporal conflict... but it feels like that description is losing information, since actually what happens is that I want both X and Y at both times: it's just the relative strength of those wants that varies.
Ok. To me it most often feels like I'm observing that some parts of my brain struggle and that I'm there to tip the scales, so to speak. This doesn't necessarily lead to a desirable outcome if my influence isn't strong enough. I can't say I feel conflicted about in what direction to tip the scales, but I assume this is just because I'm identifying with a part of my brain that can't monitor its inner conflicts. I might have identified with several conflicting parts of my brain at once in the past, but don't remember what it felt like, nor would I be able to tell you how this transformation might have happened.
This sounds like tipping the scales. Are you indentifying with several conflicting processes or are you just expressing yourself in a socially convenient manner? If you're X that's trying to make process A win process B in your brain and process B wins in a way that leads to undesirable action, does it make any sense to say that you did something you didn't want to do?
Your description of tipping the scale sounds about right, but I think that it only covers two of the three kinds of scenarios that I experience:
I now realize that I hadn't previously clearly made the distinction between those different scenarios, and may have been conflating them to some extent. I'll have to rethink what I've said here in light of that.
I think that I identify with each brain-faction that has managed to "install" "its" preferences in the scale-tipping system at some point. So if there is any short-term impulse that all the factions think should be overriden given the chance, then I don't identify with that short-term impulse, but since e.g. both the negative utilitarian and deontological factions manage to take control at times, I identify with both to some extent.
It means different "modules" of your mind have different values, and on reflection you favor one module over the other.
Part of why this still sounds problematic is that we have a hard time unravelling the "superego" (the metaphorical mental module responsible for enforcing nonselfish/pro-social values) from full and complete moral cognition. Thus, many people believe they believe they should be selfless to the point of self-sacrificing, even though, if you cloned them and actually made the clone that selfless, they would not endorse the clone as being a superior version of themselves.