What does that mean, exactly?

Kant's categorical imperative applies with equal force to AI.

That's it, I'm naming my first child Utility.

A more useful application of this might be to assign people temporary names during hypothetical role playing to influence how they behave or what lessons they take away. I see this as a subtler version of what happened in the Stanford prison experiment. It would certainly reinforce the process: making someone a guard is one thing, what if they were given the a badge labeled "Lt. Punisher"?

How about Gary Drescher?

Nicely done! Thanks for sharing.

Scholars estimate that the book of Job, probably the work of multiple authors, was composed some time between the seventh and fifth centuries B.C.E. When comparing didactic poetry, does the fact that the book of Job is so old have anything to do with the reverence or specialness which some modern readers attach to it? Furthermore, is Job really a fitting example of Sacred Truth rather than, say, "sacred perplexity"? Is advanced age in a wisdom narrative a necessary condition of Sacredness? Is there something special about "touching the old," harkening back to an Overcoming Bias post by that name?

"What I Learning Losing a Million Dollars" by Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan (1994)

Subject: Analysis of catastrophic trading mistakes woven through the autobiography of a highly confident commodities trader. He made $250k in one day. Thereafter he went on to take greater risks in commodities markets, counting his profits before they were realized. At one point he considered renting a Concord jet to celebrate his imagined gains. Over the course of several months, however, due to a combination of misfortune, hubris , denial, and creative rationalization, his entire position was wiped out and he lost over $1 million.

This is the only non-quack popular book of its kind I know of which deconstructs the psychological mistakes a trader can make. The book is self-published, and until recently, was out of print. Sadly, one of the authors, Mr. Paul, perished in the attacks on the WTC. Not widely known about, the book is fortunately avalable once again.

The lessons contained in it are related not just to trading, but to life in general. Honest and unflinching in its analysis of self-deception, overconfidence, and how to guard against them. This book is unique.

This post has generated a disproportionate number of comments. I think it illustrates the common struggles we all face in attempting to optimize our own behavior as well as that of others. At what point does other-optimizing become a case of trying to hard and lapsing into failure mode, a disutility loop if you will. The UC Berkeley writer Michael Pollan summed up his dietary advice in seven words: "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." Or how about renowned nutritionist Marion Nestle: "East less, move more." Of course, one of the joys of living is eating. Why not let the activity provide pleasure and utility? Is it the calories we are trying to conrol, or are we attempting to achieve mastery over some portion of our or other's behavior in order to comfort ourselves with an illusion of control? Is it what you're eating or is it what's eating you, to put it colloquially?

Pardon the reference to Shakespeare, but I was trying to come up with a non-contemporary, non-hypothetical, well-known example of the adaptiveness of being an underdog. In Henry V you have a narrative where the king uses consciousness of the numerical inferiority of his troops to assert, i.e., signal, superior valor. In the play, one of his officers surmises that their army is outnumbered by the French by 5 to one; another wishes out loud that another 10,000 could be added to their number. Henry dismisses this talk, declaring: "The fewer men, the greater share of honour. God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more."

Unlike the cave-men who joined Urk's faction, many of those who didn't shrink from batle in Henry's army would NOT have been wiped out. To the contrary, they would have succeeded disproportionately well in evolutionary terms. Might their tribal social emotions go some distance in suggesting why? Stripped of context, odds are merely quantitative, and necessarily leave out important information on qualitative dimensions, such as social emotions. Assume a supporter of Urk gets excited enough over the prospect of sharing the spoils of Zug and reputational rewards that would accrue to him. We might admit that it is not foreordained that Urk would lose the contest. Not only are supporters of the underdog not necessarily wiped out; when they win, as Shakespeare's Henry intuited, they stand to gain a greater share of the glory, and hence evolutionary fitness.

Eliezer wrote, "Really, I suspect that what's going on here has less to do with the motivating power of eternal damnation, and a lot more to do with the motivating power of physically meeting other people who share your cause."

I think this observation strikes very close to the heart of the matter. People will tell you they attend Catholic mass, for example, for any number of reasons, most of which are probably not available to introspection, but which actually relate to our functioning as social animals. People are motivated to meet other people, and church attendance is one of the few remaining outlets for this tendency. Whether the rationale for congregating is to uphold some deep cause is almost beside the point for the majority. Certainly there will be some for whom some cause is salient and pressing; they are the visible and the vocal, not the representative.

It is perhaps tempting to offer up Catholicism as a proxy for Christianity, and Christianity as a proxy for religion. Bear in mind, though, that Western and Eastern Christianity do not even agree on when to celebrate their holiest day, Easter. Then there are some rather yawning doctrinal disparities between Protestant sects and Roman Catholicism, and even then within itself. There is a growing movement among Catholics to have the mass recited to them in Latin. A prototypical rationalist might call this practice an example of willful obscurantism and worshipping ignorance, but that would be incorrect. It seems unlikely that the point is to comprehend the words of a dead language, but rather to use the setting as a means of priming a type of experience that William James was talking about.

In addition to Yvain's catalogue of Catholics being communal, hierarchical, and official, one could add socially reinforcing. If your co-religionist is giving 10% of his income to support church activities, and you know this is true (it's easy to find out), then there is social pressure not to be a slouch when it comes to tithing--a phenomenon of competition in terms of signaling commitment to cooperative behavior. Would rationalists would ever do that?