Robin Hanson recently proposed stores where banned products could be sold.  There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals.  But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of 5 children is going to go into these stores and buy a "Dr. Snakeoil's Sulfuric Acid Drink" for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television.

I was just making a simple factual observation.  Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation?

Some responses to Lotteries: A Waste of Hope chided me for daring to criticize others' decisions; if someone else chooses to buy lottery tickets, who am I to disagree?  This is a special case of a more general question:  What business is it of mine, if someone else chooses to believe what is pleasant rather than what is true?  Can't we each choose for ourselves whether to care about the truth?

An obvious snappy comeback is:  "Why do you care whether I care whether someone else cares about the truth?"  It is somewhat inconsistent for your utility function to contain a negative term for anyone else's utility function having a term for someone else's utility function.  But that is only a snappy comeback, not an answer.

So here then is my answer:  I believe that it is right and proper for me, as a human being, to have an interest in the future, and what human civilization becomes in the future.  One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth, which has strengthened slowly over the generations (for there was not always Science).  I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in this generation. That is a wish of mine, for the Future.  For we are all of us players upon that vast gameboard, whether we accept the responsibility or not.

And that makes your rationality my business.

My intended next OB post will, in passing, distinguish between moral judgments and factual beliefs.  Several times before, this has sparked a debate about the nature of morality.  (E.g., Believing in Todd.) Such debates often repeat themselves, reinvent the wheel each time, start all over from previous arguments.  To avoid this, I suggest consolidating the debate.  Whenever someone feels tempted to start a debate about the nature of morality in the comments thread of another post, the comment should be made to this post, instead, with an appropriate link to the article commented upon.  Otherwise it does tend to take over discussions like kudzu.  (This isn't the first blog/list where I've seen it happen.)

I'll start the ball rolling with ten points to ponder about the nature of morality...

A popular belief about "rationality" is that rationality opposes all emotion—that all our sadness and all our joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of being feelings.  Yet strangely enough, I can't find any theorem of probability theory which proves that I should appear ice-cold and expressionless.

So is rationality orthogonal to feeling?  No; our emotions arise from our models of reality.  If I believe that my dead brother has been discovered alive, I will be happy; if I wake up and realize it was a dream, I will be sad.  P. C. Hodgell said:  "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."  My dreaming self's happiness was opposed by truth.  My sadness on waking is rational; there is no truth which destroys it.

Followup to: Scope Insensitivity

"Whoever saves a single life, it is as if he had saved the whole world."

-- The Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:5

It's a beautiful thought, isn't it? Feel that warm glow.

I can testify that helping one person feels just as good as helping the whole world. Once upon a time, when I was burned out for the day and wasting time on the Internet - it's a bit complicated, but essentially, I managed to turn someone's whole life around by leaving an anonymous blog comment. I wasn't expecting it to have an effect that large, but it did. When I discovered what I had accomplished, it gave me a tremendous high. The euphoria lasted through that day and into the night, only wearing off somewhat the next morning. It felt just as good (this is the scary part) as the euphoria of a major scientific insight, which had previously been my best referent for what it might feel like to do drugs.

Saving one life probably does feel just as good as being the first person to realize what makes the stars shine. It probably does feel just as good as saving the entire world.

But if you ever have a choice, dear reader, between saving a single life and saving the whole world - then save the world. Please. Because beyond that warm glow is one heck of a gigantic difference.

(Posted last year, but bumped to the top for today.)

Today is September 26th, Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 26th, 1983.  Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world.

The story begins on September 1st, 1983, when Soviet jet interceptors shot down a Korean Air Lines civilian airliner after the aircraft crossed into Soviet airspace and then, for reasons still unknown, failed to respond to radio hails.  269 passengers and crew died, including US Congressman Lawrence McDonald.  Ronald Reagan called it "barbarism", "inhuman brutality", "a crime against humanity that must never be forgotten".  Note that this was already a very, very poor time for US/USSR relations.  Andropov, the ailing Soviet leader, was half-convinced the US was planning a first strike.  The KGB sent a flash message to its operatives warning them to prepare for possible nuclear war.

On September 26th, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was the officer on duty when the warning system reported a US missile launch.  Petrov kept calm, suspecting a computer error.

Then the system reported another US missile launch.

And another, and another, and another.

The remarkable observation that medical spending has zero net marginal effect is shocking, but not completely unprecedented.

According to Spiegel in "Too Much of a Good Thing: Choking on Aid Money in Africa", the Washington Center for Global Development calculated that it would require $3,521 of marginal development aid invested, per person, in order to increase per capita yearly income by $3.65 (one penny per day).

The Kenyan economist James Shikwati is even more pessimistic in "For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid!":  The net effect of Western aid to Africa is actively destructive (even when it isn't stolen to prop up corrupt regimes), a chaotic flux of money and goods that destroys local industry.

What does aid to Africa have in common with healthcare spending? Besides, of course, that it's heartbreaking to just say no -

"What's the worst that can happen?" goes the optimistic saying.  It's probably a bad question to ask anyone with a creative imagination.  Let's consider the problem on an individual level: it's not really the worst that can happen, but would nonetheless be fairly bad, if you were horribly tortured for a number of years.  This is one of the worse things that can realistically happen to one person in today's world.

What's the least bad, bad thing that can happen?  Well, suppose a dust speck floated into your eye and irritated it just a little, for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make you notice before you blink and wipe away the dust speck.

For our next ingredient, we need a large number.  Let's use 3^^^3, written in Knuth's up-arrow notation:

• 3^3 = 27.
• 3^^3 = (3^(3^3)) = 3^27 = 7625597484987.
• 3^^^3 = (3^^(3^^3)) = 3^^7625597484987 = (3^(3^(3^(... 7625597484987 times ...)))).

3^^^3 is an exponential tower of 3s which is 7,625,597,484,987 layers tall.  You start with 1; raise 3 to the power of 1 to get 3; raise 3 to the power of 3 to get 27; raise 3 to the power of 27 to get 7625597484987; raise 3 to the power of 7625597484987 to get a number much larger than the number of atoms in the universe, but which could still be written down in base 10, on 100 square kilometers of paper; then raise 3 to that power; and continue until you've exponentiated 7625597484987 times.  That's 3^^^3.  It's the smallest simple inconceivably huge number I know.

Now here's the moral dilemma.  If neither event is going to happen to you personally, but you still had to choose one or the other:

Would you prefer that one person be horribly tortured for fifty years without hope or rest, or that 3^^^3 people get dust specks in their eyes?

I think the answer is obvious.  How about you?

Followup to:  Fake Selfishness

God, say the religious fundamentalists, is the source of all morality; there can be no morality without a Judge who rewards and punishes.  If we did not fear hell and yearn for heaven, then what would stop people from murdering each other left and right?

Suppose Omega makes a credible threat that if you ever step inside a bathroom between 7AM and 10AM in the morning, he'll kill you. Would you be panicked by the prospect of Omega withdrawing his threat?  Would you cower in existential terror and cry:  "If Omega withdraws his threat, then what's to keep me from going to the bathroom?"  No; you'd probably be quite relieved at your increased opportunity to, ahem, relieve yourself.

Which is to say:  The very fact that a religious person would be afraid of God withdrawing Its threat to punish them for committing murder, shows that they have a revulsion of murder which is independent of whether God punishes murder or not.  If they had no sense that murder was wrong independently of divine retribution, the prospect of God not punishing murder would be no more existentially horrifying than the prospect of God not punishing sneezing.

On a purely instinctive level, any human planner behaves as if they distinguish between means and ends.  Want chocolate?  There's chocolate at the Publix supermarket.  You can get to the supermarket if you drive one mile south on Washington Ave.  You can drive if you get into the car.  You can get into the car if you open the door.  You can open the door if you have your car keys.  So you put your car keys into your pocket, and get ready to leave the house...

...when suddenly the word comes on the radio that an earthquake has destroyed all the chocolate at the local Publix.  Well, there's no point in driving to the Publix if there's no chocolate there, and no point in getting into the car if you're not driving anywhere, and no point in having car keys in your pocket if you're not driving.  So you take the car keys out of your pocket, and call the local pizza service and have them deliver a chocolate pizza.  Mm, delicious.

I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves.  People usually don't drive to the supermarket if they know the chocolate is gone.  But I've also noticed that when people begin explicitly talking about goal systems instead of just wanting things, mentioning "goals" instead of using them, they oft become confused.  Humans are experts at planning, not experts on planning, or there'd be a lot more AI developers in the world.

In particularly, I've noticed people get confused when - in abstract philosophical discussions rather than everyday life - they consider the distinction between means and ends; more formally, between "instrumental values" and "terminal values".

(Another long post needed as a reference.)