JoachimSchipper comments on Can't Unbirth a Child - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 December 2008 05:00PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 15 December 2011 12:43:57PM *  4 points [-]

You can't unbirth a child.

The revealed human preferences speak otherwise. Subsets of humans have decided that you can't do that, but I'm not at all certain they really are something humans would converge to if they where wiser, smarter and less crazy.

But I think I agree with the basic premise, we don't know, so lets not do something that might leave a bad taste in our mouths for eternity. To rephrase that:

I understood this blog post as: Trillions of cheesecake lovers, we care about change the utility pay off we can get in our universe. Us denying them their desire for cheesecakes probably brings us considerable disutilitiy. Which means the most rational thing to do at that point is probably to tile a fraction (perhaps the vast majority of the universe) with cheesecake since that is the highest pay-off available. If we never created Cheesake lovers we cared about the pay-offs available to us would be probably larger.

Note: Can someone please tell me if I'm getting this right?

Comment author: JoachimSchipper 15 December 2011 04:36:01PM 4 points [-]

I think that's mostly correct, but Eliezer means something stronger than "considerable disutility" when he says "right" (e.g. self-modifying to like killing people and then killing people is not right; The meaning of right.)