Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

lukeprog

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

When discussing the repugnanat conclusion, Eliezer commented:

I have advocated that "lives barely worth living" always be replaced with "lives barely worth celebrating" in every discussion of the 'Repugnant' Conclusion, to avoid equilibrating between "lives almost but not quite horrible enough to imply that a pre-existing person should commit suicide despite their intrinsic desire to live" versus "lives which we celebrate as good news upon learning about them, and hope to hear more such news in the future, but only to a very slight degree".

In a Big World, it's impossible to create anyone; all you can decide is where to allocate measure among experiences. My utilons for novelty are saturated by the size of reality, and that makes me an average utilitarian. As an average utilitarian, I do indeed accept that "mere addition", i.e., allocation of measure to experiences below-average for the global universe, is bad. If it were, unimaginably, to be demonstrated to me that Earth and its descendants were the only sentient beings in all of Tegmark levels I through IV, then I would embrace the actual creation of new experiences, and accept the Repugnant Conclusion without a qualm.

As I understand, a "Big World" is a world where every possible person exists in infinite copies. But how does this defeat total utilitarianism? These infinite copies of us exists too far away for us to interact with. If my actions cannot affect these people, why should I consider them when I face an ethical dilemma?

Nick Bostrom in Infinite Ethics terms this "the causal approach" to the problem of infinities, and comments:

An advocate for the causal approach might point out that, according to relativity theory, nobody can influence events outside their future light cone. Cosmology suggests that the number of value-bearing locations (such as lives, or seconds of consciousness etc.) in our future light cone is finite. Given our best current physics, therefore, the causal approach appears to avoid paralysis.
Not so fast. Basing our ethics on an empirical fact a

... (read more)

2pengvado14y

The domain of a utility function is possible states of the world. The whole world, not just the parts you can physically affect. Some utility functions (such as total utilitarianism) can be factored into an integral over spacetime (and over other stuff for Tegmark IV) of some locally-supported function, and some can't. If you have a non-factorable utility function, then even if the world is partitioned into non-interacting pieces x and y and you're in x, the value of y still affects ∂U/∂x, and is thus relevant to decisions.

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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