MarsColony_in10years comments on Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps - Less Wrong

75 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 August 2008 01:00AM

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Comment author: MarsColony_in10years 18 August 2015 08:18:47PM 0 points [-]

I'm imagining a bunch of slime mold organisms arguing over what the morally correct structure is for their current environment. There would be little Effective Altruist slime-mold cells on the optimum locations, and lots of little cells ignoring the bigger picture and doing what would be optimum if the environment they could see was all that was morally relevant. Maybe there would even be recourse wars between different factions, each more concerned with optimizing their own local region but unable to see the big picture.

Also, maybe it would make more sense to have this parable at the beginning of the meta-ethics sequence instead of the end. It would raise a lot of questions (Is morality arbitrary? Isn't it just preference? etc) but I think those questions would make the answers make a lot more sense when we got to them.