Decius comments on By Which It May Be Judged - LessWrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 December 2012 04:26AM

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Tags: seq_epistemology metaethics fairness

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Comment author: Decius 14 December 2012 11:48:54PM 0 points [-]

Yes. Suppressing knowledge of any kind is evil. It's not the only thing which is evil, and acts are not necessarily good because they also disseminate knowledge.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 December 2012 12:05:27AM 1 point [-]

It's not the only thing which is evil

This has interesting implications.

Other more evil things (like lots of people dieing) can sometimes be prevented by doing a less evil thing (like suppressing knowledge). For example, the code for an AI that would foom, but does not have friendliness guarantees, is a prime candidate for suppression.

So saying that something is evil is not the last word on whether or not it should be done, or how it's doers should be judged.

Comment author: Decius 15 December 2012 12:41:27AM 0 points [-]

Code, instructions, and many things that can be expressed as information are only incidentally knowledge. There's nothing evil about writing a program and then deleting it; there is something evil about passing a law which prohibits programming from being taught, because programmers might create an unfriendly AI.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 December 2012 04:21:47AM 1 point [-]

Code, instructions, and many things that can be expressed as information are only incidentally knowledge.

Well, the knowledge from the tree appears to also have been knowledge of this kind.

Comment author: Decius 16 December 2012 08:53:50PM 0 points [-]

I draw comparisons between the serpent offering the apple, the Titan Prometheus, and Odin sacrificing his eye. Do you think that the comparison of those knowledge myths is unfair?

Comment author: MugaSofer 15 December 2012 03:51:23PM 0 points [-]

Fair enough. Humans do appear to value truth.

Of course, if acts that conceal knowledge can be good because of other factors, then this:

I dunno, dude could have good reasons to want knowledge of good and evil staying hush-hush. (Forbidding knowledge in general would indeed be super evil.) For example: You have intuitions telling you to eat when you're hungry and give food to others when they're hungry. And then you learn that the first intuition benefits you but the second makes you a good person. At this point it gets tempting to say "Screw being a good person, I'm going to stuff my face while others starve", whereas before you automatically shared fairly. You could have chosen to do that before (don't get on my case about free will), but it would have felt as weird as deciding to starve just so others could have seconds. Whereas now you're tempted all the time, which is a major bummer on the not-sinning front. I'm making this up, but it's a reasonable possibility.

... is still valid.

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