You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

eli_sennesh comments on Why didn't people (apparently?) understand the metaethics sequence? - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: ChrisHallquist 29 October 2013 11:04PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (229)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 November 2013 10:14:07AM 1 point [-]

Yes, that is generally considered the core open problem of ethics, once you get past things like "how do we define value" and blah blah blah like that. How do I weigh one person's utility against another person's? Unless it's been solved and nobody told me, that's a Big Question.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 November 2013 01:43:15PM *  2 points [-]

So...what's the point of CEV, hten?

Comment author: [deleted] 12 November 2013 07:28:13PM *  1 point [-]

It's a hell of a lot better than nothing, and it's entirely possible to solve those individual-weighting problems, possibly by looking at the social graph and at how humans affect each other. There ought to be some treatment of the issue that yields a reasonable collective outcome without totally suppressing or overriding individual volitions.

Certainly, the first thing that comes to mind is that some human interactions are positive sum, some negative sum, some zero-sum. If you configure collective volition to always prefer mutually positive-sum outcomes over zero-sum over negative, then it's possible to start looking for (or creating) situations where sinister choices don't have to be made.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 12 November 2013 09:28:55PM 0 points [-]

Who said the alternative is nothing? Theres any number of theories of morality, and a further number of theories of friendly .ai.