RichardKennaway comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong Discussion
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One can deal with any counterexample by declaring that it "doesn't count". That does not make it not count. Wireheads, by definition, experience huge utility. That is what the word means, in discussions of utilitarianism.
We might very well want to assign negative utility to the process whereby that happened, for the same reasons as for forcible wireheading.
That is just a way of not saying what you do. Do, you, in fact, do both, and how much of each?
The correct rational response is to resolve the contradiction, not to ignore it and utter platitudes about the truth lying between extremes. Dressing the latter up in rationalist jargon does not change that.
That's my point, you need to assign utility to processes rather than just outcomes.
I am in fact doing both, in this case mostly against utilitarianism.
There is a difference between assuming the truth lies between two extremes, and assigning significant probability (say ~50%) to each of the two extremes. I'm trying to do the latter.