Why should people care about the odds ratio in this case instead of caring about the absolute risk?

It seems to me that if a patient get's a child with a cleft palate they care about the absolute risk of their next child also getting it.

The way the problem reads to me, choosing dust specks means I live in a universe where 3^^^3 of me exist, and choosing torture means 1 of me exist. I prefer that more of myself exist than not, so I should choose specks in this case.

In a choice between "torture for everyone in the universe" and "specks for everyone in the universe", the negative utility of the former obviously outweighs that of the latter, so I should choose specks.

I don't see any incongruity or reason to question my beliefs? I suppose it's meant to be implied that it's other selves that exist because of the size of the universe, so there's either one of "everyone in the universe" or 3^^^3 copies of everyone, but in that case my other selves are too far outside my light-cone for "iff you are alone" to be a prediction that makes sense.

No. Think about what sort of conclusions an AI in a game we make would come to about reality. Pretty twisted, right?

At 26, I got my first girlfriend, and lost my virginity to her.

I've launched the first version of my startup, lumiverse:

http://lumiverse.io

I want lumiverse to become the perfect place for people to publish, discover and discuss great educational videos. I want to build a friendly and intelligent community, make it easy for video creators to find an audience, and make it easy for viewers to discover awesome videos.

I also have finaly made the first few episodes of Orange Mind - my video series about rationality.

Past surveys show that most LessWrongers are consequentialists, and many are also effective altruism advocates. What do they think of infinities in ethics?

As I've intuitively always favoured some kind of negative utilitarianism, this has caused me some confusion.

It's the remake.

But can't the same be said for rationality and science? As Descartes showed a "demon" could continuously trick us with a fake reality, or we could be in the matrix for all we know. For rationality to work we have to assume that empiricism holds true. Why couldn't the same be true for ethics? I think that if science can have its empiricism axiom, ethics can have its suffering axiom.

Ah yes the illusion of transparency. I should have seen it coming that the OS would be first on peoples minds. Stupid.

My position on moral realism/relativism is a bit middle ground between the two. There is no law of the universe that says we all should be "good" or even what this "good" is supposed to be. But I believe that does not mean we can't think rationally about it. We can show that some moral systems are at least inconsistent with respect to their stated goals. And on top of that if we assume for the sake of argument that we can get everyone to believe "suffering is bad" we can rule out a few more. For example the pro-life lobby in the US is vehemently against abortion, yet thinks that the death penalty is a good thing. If life were in fact sacrosanct would it not be logical to stop killing people? (This would also extend to cryonism, but since most of the pro-life lobby is christian, most adherents believe they are going to heaven and won't actually die. So that doesn't necessarily make it inconsistent.) Such a philosophy could be made more rational by making its beliefs consistent with its goal. To say that it would be better or more moral to do so would require people to at least agree suffering is bad, although I think most people would agree on that one.

I deleted the post by now. This entire ordeal was very bad for my karma. Which come to think of it, is a strange term. Why not call it "thumbs up" or something? Such a reference to a non-scientific meta-physical idea seems a bit inconsistent with the rest of the content of the site.

Haha the "pointless and counterproductive" was a joke actually, since well, all irrational ideas are pointless and counterproductive. As you already mentioned giving detailed explanations for all ideas will make into a four volume work so obviously I can't do that.

But to come to Ubuntu, I think we definitely should see this as a bad idea. Although admittedly it has had a large net positive effect in South Africa so I should probably just delete the last column. The central tennet of Ubuntu "A person is a person through other people", can be very easily corrupted into a form of communitarian dictatorship, as has in fact happened in Zimbabwe. The fact that a philosophy allows itself to be used by Mugabe does not make it look good. Of course just because Mugabe uses it doesn't mean it is a bad idea, it could just be his one good trait, but it probably isn't. The idea has more negative facets. It includes a form of philosophical innatism which is just factually wrong (see for example:Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil) and it also has as a third central tennet "that the king owed his status, including all the powers associated with it, to the will of the people under him". I think it strange that any modern philosophy would take monarchy as a basis. One positive side is that under "unhu" children are never orphans since the roles of mother and father are by definition not vested in a single individual with respect to a single child, so no orphans.

Also moral relativism is kind of a bad idea.. Just because North Koreans think concentration camps are a good idea does not mean they are suddenly moral.