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RichardKennaway comments on Reference Frames for Expected Value - LessWrong
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Comments (24)
This looks like a tree-falls-in-forest-did-it-make-a-sound question. The expected value was negative, the outcome was positive, "good choice" can mean either assessment, distinguish them, mystery dissolved.
Expected value is subjectively objective. It depends on the knowledge one has, but what knowledge one has is also an objective fact about the world.
Is this Sartre's concept of free will as actions coming out of nowhere, free of all considerations of what would actually be a good idea, with suicide as the ultimate free act? Eliezer has provided the answer to the Problem of Free Will here.
Yes. "Good" can mean desirable outcomes, or responsible decision making. The first obviously matches consequentialism. It appears not to be obvious to Lesswrongians that the second matches deontology. When we judge whether someone behaved culpably or not, we want to know whether they applied the rules and heuristic appropriate to their reference class (doctor, CEO, ships captain...). The consequences of their decision may have landed them in a tribunal, but we don't hold people to blame for applying the rules and getting the wrong results.
Perhaps I have misunderstood consequentialism and deontology, but my impression was that (many forms of) consequentialism prefers that people optimize expected utility, while deontology does not (it would consider other things, like 'not lying', as considerably more important). My impression was that this was basically the main differentiating factor.
Agree about the tribunal situation. From a consequentialist viewpoint it would seem like we would want to judge people formally (in tribunals) according to how well they made an expected value decision, rather than on the outcome. For one, because otherwise we would have a lot more court cases (anything causally linked to a crime is responsible)
You need rules and heuristics to calculate expected value. How does that differ from deontology? The rules are not absolutes? But then it is still a compromise between D and C.
Freedom of a kind worth having would consist in being able to choose one's values, not in being able to go against them.