bramflakes comments on Open thread, Oct. 27 - Nov. 2, 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: MrMind 27 October 2014 08:58AM

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Comment author: bramflakes 27 October 2014 07:53:59PM 16 points [-]

My thoughts on the following are rather disorganized and I've been meaning to collate them into a post for quite some time but here goes:

Discussions of morality and ethics in the LW-sphere overwhelmingly tend to short-circuit to naive harm-based consequentialist morality. When pressed I think most will state a far-mode meta-ethical version that acknowledges other facets of human morality (disgust, purity, fairness etc) that would get wrapped up into a standardized utilon currency (I believe CEV is meant to do this?) but when it comes to actual policy (EA) there is too much focus on optimizing what we can measure (lives saved in africa) instead of what would actually satisfy people. The drunken moral philosopher looking under the lamppost for his keys because that's where the light is. I also think there's a more-or-less unstated assumption that considerations other than Harm are low-status.

Comment author: Larks 28 October 2014 02:04:36AM 2 points [-]

Do you have any thoughts on how to do EA on the other aspects of morality? I think about this a fair bit, but run into the same problem you mentioned. I have had a few ideas but do not wish to prime you. Feel free to PM me.

Comment author: Azathoth123 28 October 2014 04:00:06AM 3 points [-]

Ah, yes. The standard problem with measurement based incentives: you start optimizing for what's easy to measure.