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Adele_L comments on Open thread, August 5-11, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: David_Gerard 05 August 2013 06:50AM

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Comment author: Adele_L 07 August 2013 10:05:34PM 0 points [-]

You said this:

I'm utterly convinced that the happiness of some people ought to count negatively

In this context, 'people' typically refers to a being with moral weight. What we know about morality comes from our intuitions mostly, and we have an intuitive concept 'person' which counts in some way morally. (Not necessarily a human, sentient aliens probably count as 'people', perhaps even dolphins.) Defining an arbitrary being which does not correspond to this intuitive concept needs to be flagged as such, as a warning that our intuitions are not directly applicable here.

Anyway, I get that you are basically trying to make a utility function with revenge. This is certainly possible, but having negative utility functions is a particularly bad way to do it.

Comment author: Bayeslisk 07 August 2013 10:10:28PM 0 points [-]

I was putting an upper bound on (what I thought at the time as) how negative the utility vector dot product would have to be for me to actually desire them to be unhappy. As to the last part, I am reconsidering this as possibly generally inefficient.