NancyLebovitz comments on Protected From Myself - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 October 2008 12:09AM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 October 2008 07:34:45AM 6 points [-]

The universe isn't set up to reward virtue.

I believe that ethics are an effort to improve the odds of good outcomes. So it's not that the universe is set up to reward ethics, it's that ethics are set up to follow the universe.

The challenge is that what we're taught is good is a mixture of generally useful rules, rules which are more useful to the people in charge than to the people who aren't, and mere mistakes.