The train is currently rushing to kill the child, and you're not part of this situation. You, sitting in your car far away, see this happening. You now have the choice to drive up to the tracks and leave your car on the tracks. This will save the child but destroy your car.
I don't follow why leaving your car on the tracks prevents the child from being killed.
The same reason fat people can derail trolleys and businesspeople have lifeguard abilities, I'd imagine.
(No, this is not the "tu quoque!" moral equivalent of starting out by assigning probability 1 that Christ died for your sins.)
Can someone please explain this?
I understand many religious people claim to just 'have faith' in Christ, with absolute certainty. I think the standard argument would run "well, you say I shouldn't have faith in Christ, but you have faith in 'science' / 'non-neglible probability on induction and some single well ordered large ordinal' so you can't argue against faith".
What is Eliezer saying here?
Addendum: By which I mean, can someone give a clear explanation of why they are not the same?
-1!
OK, I take that back. The idea that a tortoise is faster than a runner is preposterous and counterintuitive.
Therefore humans can become Minds
Provided that knowledge is not infinite
But of course that is a preposterous idea too, so I take that one back too, I don’t want to provoke the anger of my anonymous friend and get another wedgie.
We encourage you to downvote any comment that you'd rather not see more of - please don't feel that this requires being able to give an elaborate justification. -LW Wiki Deletion Policy
Folks are encouraged to downvote liberally on LW, but the flip-side of that is that people will downvote where they might otherwise just move on for fear of offending someone or getting into an argument that doesn't interest them. You might want to be less sensitive if someone brings one of your posts to -1 - it's not really an act of aggression.
Note to self: it's much more difficult to have original thought than I think it is.
I sympathize. One of my professors jokes about having discovered a new optical illusion, then going to the literature and having the incredible good luck that for once nobody else discovered it first.
This all seems to have more to do with rule consequentialism than deontology. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and rule consequentialism has indeed been considered a halfway point between deontology and act consequentialism, but it's worth noting.
I think the extro/introvert split is unhelpful, people have preferences for and against different social activities. E.g. I can enjoy parties but not meetings, or prefer to read in silence but work as part of a group. The article is trying to take a few examples and extrapolate a much wider theory out of them.
Disliking meetings and reading in a crowded environment doesn't seem like much evidence that you're neither introverted nor extroverted (except that you're not one of Those Nasty Extraverts that keep supposedly fawning over meetings), which doesn't seem like much evidence that the introvert/extrovert split isn't helpful. I can't enjoy parties or meetings, prefer to read in silence and work alone.
In accordance with ancient tradition, I took the survey.
It's a bad argument against atheism. Atheists don't just disbelieve in any particular God, they disbelieve in all of them. Of course, if you redefine God to mean "potato", then atheists will believe in God. But that's a bad use of language, and the default assumption is to use the word in its normal context.
You persist in this, Chaosmosis, in assuming "against." What I presented was not an argument "against" atheism, per se, it was a question as to the nature of atheism. If "atheism" is disbelief in "God," then there must be some definition of "God," or it's totally meaningless.
I don't define God to be a thing. I equate God with Reality. What is that? I do not assume that I understand God. I did not invent this understanding, I found it. It's actually pretty standard Islam. God has many names, and one of them is al-Haqq. The Truth or the Reality. Because this is a reference to a singleness, I capitalize it, this is not a reference to the ordinary individual realities, the body of facts, all of which are conditional and relative.
I don't "believe" in this, I "trust" it, which is a better translation of the word in the Qur'an which is ordinarily translated as "believe." That is, there is an operating hypothesis here, on which I lean. It has effects. But it happens to be one which does not constrain my reasoning, that encourages it. But it is arbitrary, it's a choice.
I am responsible for it.
And you have your own choices to make.
In any case, "belief" is about an assumption of truth. "Trust" is only about a mind-state, in fact, or what I more routinely call a "condition of the heart."
If I unpacked "disbelieves in God" to "has not encountered a concept of God they both believed ("did not disbelieve", if you prefer) and did not consider a silly conception of God", would atheism still be meaningless? Would that be a horrible misconception of atheism?
Are you sure there's nothing bundled in with "God is Reality" beyond what you state? Let's say I said "God is Reality. Reality is not sapient and has never given explicit instructions on anything." Would you consider that consistent with your belief that God equals Reality?
I'm not trying for Socratic Method arguing here, I'm just not quite sure where you're coming from.
Eliezer_Yudkowsky (EY) said (above):
Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?" -- Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner
EY said (above):
Behaviorism was the doctrine that it was unscientific for a psychologist to ascribe emotions, beliefs, thoughts, to a human being.
This is the basic myth. Skinner fought very hard to demonstrate that this was a gross mischaracterization of behaviorism.
EY said (above):
But for the behaviorists to react to the sins of Freudian psychoanalysis and substance dualism, by saying that the subject matter of empathic inference did not exist... Which behaviorist? Where? When?
Added: I found it difficult to track down primary source material online, but behaviorism-as-denial-of-mental does not seem to be a straw depiction. I was able to track down at least one major behaviorist (J.B. Watson, founder of behaviorism) saying outright "There is no mind."
This should make plain why Watson was never behaviorist poster boy material. I wouldn't even call him a "major" behaviorist.
As a psychology student, I can say with some certainty that Watson is a behaviorist poster boy.
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In the above examples, there may well be more net harm than gain from staying in an unpleasant relationship or firing a problematic employee. It's pretty case-by-case in nature, and you're not required to ignore your own feelings entirely. If not, yes, utilitarianism would say you'd be "wrong" for indulging yourself at the expense of others.