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Torture. See Norcross: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~norcross/ComparingHarms.pdf
In response to
Torture vs. Dust Specks
Your link is 404ing. Is http://spot.colorado.edu/~norcross/Comparingharms.pdf the same one?
In response to
Torture vs. Dust Specks
What if it were a repeatable choice?
Suppose you choose dust specks, say, 1,000,000,000 times. That's a considerable amount of torture inflicted on 3^^^3 people. I suspect that you could find the number of times equivalent to torturing each of thoes 3^^^3 people 50 years, and that number would be smaller than 3^^^3. In other words, choose the dust speck enough times, and more people would be tortured effectually for longer than if you chose the 50-year torture an equivalent number of times.
If that math is correct, I'd have to go with the torture, not the dust specks.
Likewise, if this was iterated 3^^^3+1 times(ie 3^^^3 plus the reader),it could easily be 50*3^^^3 (ie > 3^^^3+1) people tortured. The odds are if it's possible for you to make this choice, unless you have reason to believe otherwise they may too, making this an implicit prisoner's dilemma of sorts. On the other side, 3^^^3 specks could possibly crush you, and/or your local cluster of galaxies into a black hole, so there's that to consider if you consider the life within meaningful distance of of every one of those 3^^^3 people valuable.
You are not entitled to assume a maximum disutility, even if you think you see a proof for it (see Confidence Levels Inside and Outside an Argument).
In response to
"Can't Say No" Spending
In response to
Radical Honesty
A few thoughts:
Whether this is a good idea or not might very well be something you have to try for yourself to know; but on the flip side we are fairly different people, 20 years after any particular decision. While some decisions may be final, especially in an age where we can display attributes of ourself very publicly it might make more sense to have a publicly accessible Crocker's Flag somewhere that might be unset perhaps 20 years down the line so that you don't damn your future self to a life of shameful feelings beyond necessary.
Secondly, 'none of your business' is neither radically honest, and with the possible exception of the person hiding from the secret police, I've long maintained that since MAD/nuclear weapons became a possibility that there is no such thing as 'none of your business'; we all have a vested interest in the emotional situation and financial incentives of those in the global village. Should a veil of secrecy exist, it may very well cover that which will undo us all.
edit 2013-me did not understand the full consequences of global surveillance. While it's true that what's covered by a veil of secrecy would doubtless cover the seeds of our destruction, we are all hiding from the secret police, post 2013. Proceed with caution
In response to
"Science" as Curiosity-Stopper
Hey Brandon, I hear you. I think you'll find is fascination to see this Google Video Presentation by Thomas Metzinger:
"Being No One: Consciousness, The Phenomenal Self, and First-Person Perspective"
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-3658963188758918426
He tries to do exactly what you suggest. He reviews what we know empirically about self-awareness, and constructs a philosophical model of self that accounts for those phenomena. I got a lot out of it.
He even complains about certain Kantians who have taken the bold step of denying certain kinds of mental illness, because their world view can't account for them.
This link is broken.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mthDxnFXs9k looks like it might be the same video though.
In response to
The Third Alternative
Jeremy: I clearly misunderstood what you meant by "an internalised sense of morality". Though I still suspect you're wrong about the contradiction, that could be because I still don't really understand the way in which you're using the phrase. In any event, it's clear that my "cheap shot" call was way off, and I apologise.
Michael V: Depends whether TGGP is making an epistemic claim about his/her personal knowledge of morality, or whether he/she is claiming that that moral statements are not true in general. In the latter case, I think it would be standard to say he/she doesn't believe in morality.
Anyone else want to spearhead a movement to come up with a gender neutral pronoun?
In response to
Consolidated Nature of Morality Thread
"No results found for \" expert moral system \"."
-google.
Remember: it doesn't have to be perfect, just better than us.
edit google was misinformed - this has been discussed. Nevertheless the point stands -- unless there's a particular reason why we think that we would perform better than an expert system in this topic I am skeptical that acting except insofar as to create one is anything but short-term context dependent moral.
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I'm not sure I follow your argument.
I'm going to assume that for a single person, 3^^3 dust specks = 50 years of torture. (My earlier figure seems wrong, but 3^^3 dust specks over 50 years is a little under 5,000 dust specks per second.) I'm going to ignore the +1 because these are big numbers already.
If this were iterated 3^^^3 times, then we have the choice between:
TORTURE: 3^^^3 people are each tortured for 50 years, once.
DUST SPECKS: 3^^^3 people are tortured for 50 years, repeated (3^^^3)/(3^^3)=3^(3^^3-3^3) times.
The probability I'm the only person person selected out of 3^^^3 for such a decision p(i) is less than any reasonable estimate of how many people could be selected, imho. Let's say well below 700dB against. The chances are much greater that some probability fo those about to be dust specked or tortured also gets this choice (p(k)). p(k)*3^^^3 > p(i) => 3^^^3 > p(i)/p(k) => true for any reasonable p(i)/p(k)
So this means that the effective number of dust particles given to each of us is going to be roughly (1-p(i))p(k)3^^^3.
I'm going to assume any amount of dust larger in mass than a few orders of magnitude above the Chandrasekhar limit (1e33 kg) is going to result in a black hole. I can even assume a significant error margin in my understanding of how black holes work, and the reuslts do not change.
The smallest dust particle is probably a single hydrogen atom(really everything resoles to hydrogen at small enough quantities, right?). 1 mol of hydrogen weighs about 1 gram. So (1-p(i))(p(k)3^^^3 * (1 gram/mol)*(6e-23 'specks'/mol) * (1e-3 kg/g) * (1e-33 kg/black hole) = roughly ( 3^^^3 ) (~1e-730) = roughly 3^^^3 black holes.
ie 3^(31^32^33^...^37e13 -730) = roughly 3^(31^32^33^...^37e13)
ie 31^32^33^...^37e13 - 730 = roughly 31^32^33^...^37e13.
In conclusion, I think at this level, I would choose 'cancel' / 'default' / 'roll a dice and determine the choice randomly/not choose' BUT would woefully update my concept of the sizee of the universe to contain enough mass to even support a reasonably infentessimal probability of some proportion of 3^^^3 specks of dust, and 3^^^3 people or at least some reasonable proportion thereof.
The question I have now is how is our model of the universe to update given this moral dillema? What is the new radius of the universe given this situation? It can't be big enough for 3^^^3 dust specks piled on the edge of our universe outside of our light cone somewhere. Either way I think the new radius ought to be termed the "Yudkowsky Radius".