Open Thread, January 1-15, 2013

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

I'm not sure that there is community consensus that "human beings currently living" is the right reference class. Eliezer suggests that he thinks the right reference class is all of humanity ever in this post.

If one assumes some kind of moral progress constraint and unpredictable future values, CEV(living humans) seems like our future descendents would hate it. Certainly, modern Westerners probably would hate CEV(Europeans-alive-in-1300). But I'm a moral anti-realist, so I don't believe there are constraints that cause moral progress - and don't expect CEV(all-humans-ever) to output a morality.

2MichaelAnissimov13y

Part of the point of CEV is to make the extrapolation process good enough that future beings X won't hate the extrapolation of arbitrary past group Y. The extrapolation should be effective and broad enough that extrapolating from humans in different parts of history would not appreciably change the outcome. My guess would be that the extrapolation process itself would provide most of the content, the starting reference class being a minor variable.

6A1987dM13y

Some people would disagree.