Related to: Counterfactual Mugging, The Least Convenient Possible World

MBlume said:

What would you do in situation X?" and "What would you like to pre-commit to doing, should you ever encounter situation X?" should, to a rational agent, be one and the same question.

Applied to Vladimir Nesov's counterfactual mugging, the reasoning is then:

Precommitting to paying $100 to Omega has expected utility of $4950.p(Omega appears). Not precommitting has strictly less utility; therefore I should precommit to paying. Therefore I should, in fact, pay $100 in the event (Omega appears, coin is tails).

To combat the argument that it is more likely that one is insane than that Omega has appeared, Eliezer said:

So imagine yourself in the most inconvenient possible world where Omega is a known feature of the environment and has long been seen to follow through on promises of this type; it does not particularly occur to you or anyone that believing this fact makes you insane.

My first reaction was that it is simply not rational to give $100 away when nothing can possibly happen in consequence. I still believe that, with a small modification: I believe, with moderately high probability, that it will not be instrumentally rational for my future self to do so. Read on for the explanation.

Followup to So You Say You're an Altruist:

Today Dambisa Moyo's book "Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa" was released.

From the book's website:

In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse.

In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth.

In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined—and millions continue to suffer. Provocatively drawing a sharp contrast between African countries that have rejected the aid route and prospered and others that have become aid-dependent and seen poverty increase, Moyo illuminates the way in which overreliance on aid has trapped developing nations in a vicious circle of aid dependency, corruption, market distortion, and further poverty, leaving them with nothing but the “need” for more aid.

From the Global Investor Bookshop:

Dead Aid analyses the history of economic development over the last fifty years and shows how Aid crowds out financial and social capital and directly causes corruption; the countries that have caught up did so despite rather than because of Aid. There is, however, an alternative. Extreme poverty is not inevitable. Dambisa Moyo also shows how, with improved access to capital and markets and with the right policies, even the poorest nations could be allowed to prosper. If we really do want to help, we have to do more than just appease our consciences, hoping for the best, expecting the worst. We need first to understand the problem.

In the comments on Soulless Morality, a few people mentioned contributing to humanity's knowledge as an ultimate value.  I used to place a high value on this myself.

Now, though, I doubt whether making scientific advances would give me satisfaction on my deathbed.  All you can do in science is discover something before someone else discovers it.  (It's a lot like the race to the north pole, which struck me as stupid when I was a child; yet I never transferred that judgement to scientific races.)  The short-term effects of your discovering something sooner might be good, and might not.  The long-term effects are likely to be to bring about apocalypse a little sooner.

Art is different.  There's not much downside to art.  There are some exceptions - romance novels perpetuate destructive views of love; 20th-century developments in orchestral music killed orchestral music; and Ender's Game has warped the psyches of many intelligent people.  But artists seldom worry that their art might destroy the world.  And if you write a great song, you've really contributed, because no one else would have written that song.

EDIT: What is above is instrumental talk.  I find that, as I get older, science fails to satisfy me as much.  I don't assign it the high intrinsic value I used to.  But it's hard for me to tell whether this is really an intrinsic valuation, or the result of diminishing faith in its instrumental value.

I think that people who value rationality tend to place an unusually high value on knowledge.  Rationality requires knowledge; but that gives knowledge only instrumental value.  It doesn't (can't, by definition) justify giving knowledge intrinsic value.

What do the rest of you think?  Is there a strong correlation between rationalism, giving knowledge high intrinsic value, and giving art low intrinsic value?  If so, why?  And which would you rather be - a great scientist, or a great artist of some type?  (Pretend that great scientists and great artists are equally well-paid and sexually attractive.)

(I originally wrote this as over-valuing knowledge and under-valuing art, but Roko pointed out that that's incoherent.)

Under a theory that intrinsic and instrumental values are separate things, there's no reason why giving science a high instrumental value should correlate with giving it a high intrinsic value, or vice-versa.  Yet the people here seem to be doing one of those things.

My theory is that we can't keep intrinsic and instrumental values separate from each other.  We attach positive valences to both, and then operate on the positive valences.  Or, we can't distinguish our intrinsic values from our instrumental values by introspection.  (You may have noticed that I started using examples that refer to both intrinsic and instrumental values.  I don't think I can separate them, except retrospectively; and with about as much accuracy as a courtroom witness asked to testify about an event that took place 20 years ago.)

It's tempting to mention friends and family in here too, as another competing fundamental value.  But that would demand solving the relationship between personal values that you yourself take, and the valuations you would want a society or a singleton AI to make.  That's too much to take on here.  I want to talk just about intrinsic value given to science vs. art.

Oh, and saying science is an art is a dodge.  You then have to say whether you value the knowledge, or the artistic endeavor.  Also, ignore the possibility that your scientific work can make a safe Singularity.  That would be science as instrumental value.  I'm asking about science vs. art as intrinsic values.

EDIT:  An obvious explanation:  I was assuming that people here want to be rational as an instrumental value, and that we should find the distribution of intrinsic values to be the same as in the general populace.  But of course some people are drawn here because rationality is an intrinsic value to them, and this heavily biases the distribution of intrinsic values found here.

An interesting article on forgetomori about Boxxy and Reagan and mirror neurons.

In reply to: Community Epistemic Practice

There are software tools, possibly helpful for community truth-seeking. For example, truthmapping.com is described very well here. Also, debategraph.org, and I'm sure there are others.