= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
twanvl comments on The Up-Goer Five Game: Explaining hard ideas with simple words - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (82)
That is not what utilitarianism means. It means doing something is good if what happens is good, and doing something is bad if what happens is bad. It doesn't say which things are good and bad.
[this post is not in Up-Goer-5-ese]
The name for the type of moral theory in which
is "consequentialism." Utilitarianism is a kind of consequentialism.
You are right, I was getting confused by the name. And the wikipedia article is pretty bad in that it doesn't give a proper concise definition, at least none that I can find. SEP is better.
It still looks like you need some consequentialism in the explanation, though.
I have yet to find a topic, such that, if both Wikipedia and SEP have an article about it, the Wikipedia version is better.
Any topic for which Wikipedia and SEP don't both have articles suffices :-). I think you mean: "I have yet to find a topic on which both Wikipedia and SEP have articles, and for which the Wikipedia article is better." With which I strongly agree. SEP is really excellent.
You're not using English "if".
I'm using one variety of "if", used in some particular contexts when writing in English. I was doing so only for amusement -- of course I don't imagine that anyone has trouble understanding Jayson_Virissimo's meaning -- and from the downvotes it looks as if most readers found it less amusing than I hoped. Can't win 'em all.
But it's no more "not English" than many uses of, e.g., the following words on LW: "friendly", "taboo", "simple", "agency", "green". ("Friendly" as in "Friendly AI", which means something much more specific than ordinary-English "friendly"; "taboo" as in the technique of explaining a term without using that term or other closely-related ones; "simple" in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, according to which e.g. a "many-worlds" universe is simpler than a collapsing-wave-function one despite being in some sense much bigger and fuller of strange things; "agency" meaning the quality of acting on one's own initiative even when there are daunting obstacles; "green" as the conventional name for a political/tribal group, typically opposed to "blue".)