An observation: In my experience, when talking past each other is more difficult to resolve, it tends often to be the case that one or both parties think the other's position is wrong morally. This appears to be the case in the example in your post, and a contributing factor in some of the conversations in the comments. If you're on the "a betrayal has occurred" side, it's difficult to process "but this person's perspective is that no betrayal has occurred", and attempts to explain that perspective may come across as trying to excuse the betrayal, rather t...
"Peer pressure" is a negatively-valanced term that could be phrased more neutrally as "social consequences". Seems to me it's good to think about what the social consequences of doing or not doing a thing will be (whether to "give in to peer pressure", and act in such a way as to get positive reactions from other people/avoid negative reactions, or not), but not to treat conforming when there is social pressure as inherently bad. It can lead to mob violence. Or, it can lead to a simplified social world which is easier for everyone to navigate, because you'...
We can't steer the future
What about influencing? If, in order for things to go OK, human civilization must follow a narrow path which I individually need to steer us down, we're 100% screwed because I can't do that. But I do have some influence. A great deal of influence over my own actions (I'm resisting the temptation to go down a sidetrack about determinism, assuming you're modeling humans as things that can make meaningful choices), substantial influence over the actions of those close to me, some influence over my acquaintances, and so on until very e...
This is fun! I don't know which place I'm a citizen of, though, it just says "hello citizen"... I feel John Rawls would be pleased...
I think a search for a rule that:
is likely to find no such rule exists.
The platinum rule is pretty good, as a simple to teach to children thing, I think. They will already intuitively understand that you don't have to play fair with someone who isn't following the rules...
I think maybe the root of the confusion here might be a matter of language. We haven't had copier technology, and so our language doesn't have a common sense way of talking about different versions of ourselves. So when one asks "is this copy me?", it's easy to get confused. With versioning, it becomes clearer. I imagine once we have copier technology for a while, we'll come up with linguistic conventions for talking about different versions of ourselves that aren't clunky, but let me suggest a clunky convention to at least get the point across:
I, as I am ...
Ok. I thought after I posted my first answer, one of the things that would be really quite valuable during the turbulent transition, is understanding what's going on and translating it for people who are less able to keep up, because of lacking background knowledge or temperament. While it will be the case after a certain point that AI can give people reliable information, there will be a segment of the population that will want to hear the interpretation of a trustworthy human, and also, the cognitive flexibility to deal with a complex and rapidly changin...
I think my answer would depend on your answer to "Why do you want a job?". I think that when AI and robotics have advanced to the point where all physical and intellectual tasks can be done better by AI/robots, we've reached a situation where things change very rapidly and "what is a safe line of work long term?" is hard to answer because we could see rapid changes over a period of a few years, and who knows what the end-state will look like? Also, any line of work which at time X it is economically valuable to have humans do, will have a lot of built-in i...
When a person isn't of a sound mind, they are still expected to maintain their responsibility but they may simply be unwell. Unable to be responsible for themselves or their actions.
We have various ways of dealing with this. Contracts are not enforceable (or can be deemed unenforceable) against people who were not of sound mind when entering into them, meaning if you are contracting with someone, you have an incentive to make sure they are of sound mind at the time. There are a bunch of bars you have to clear in terms of mental capacity and non...
Just during lectures or work/volunteer organization meetings. I don't tend to zone out much during 1:1 or very small group conversations, and if I do, I'm only inconveniencing one or a few people by asking someone to repeat what they said, who would also be inconvenienced by my not being able to participate in the conversation because I've stopped following, so I just ask for clarification. I find zoning out happens most often when no response is required from me for an extended period of time.
I occasionally do feel a little qualmy, but whenever I have ask...
My solution is to use the voice recorder app on my phone, so I can review any points I missed after the fact, and take notes about where I zoned out with timestamps so that I don't have to review the whole thing. If you have a wristwatch you can use the watch-time rather than recorder-time and synch up later, and it's not very obvious.
It would be cool if we could get more than 1% of the working population into the top 1% of earners, for sure. But, we cannot. The question then becomes, how much of what a top 1% earner earns is because they are productive in an absolute sense (they generate $x in revenue for their employer/business), vs. being paid to them because they are the (relative) best at what they do, and so they have more bargaining power?
Increasing people's productivity will likely raise earnings. Helping people get into the top 1% relative to others, just means someone else is ...
I've skimmed the answers so far and I don't think I'm repeating things that have already been said, but please feel free to let me know if I am and skip re-reading.
> What I know about science and philosophy suggests that determinism is probably true
What I know about science and philosophy suggests we shouldn't be really sure that the understanding we believe to be accurate now won't be overturned later. There are problems with our physics sufficient to potentially require a full paradigm shift to something else, as yet unknown. So if "determinism is tru...
I'm unclear why you consider low-trust societies to be natural and require no explanation. To me it makes intuitive sense that small high-trust groups would form naturally at times, and sometimes those groups would, by virtue of cooperation being an advantage, grow over time to be big and successful enough to be classed as "societies".
I picture a high trust situation like a functional family unit or small village where everyone knows everyone, to start. A village a few kilometers away is low trust. Over time, both groups grow, but there's less murdering an...
My brain froze up on that question. In order for there to be mysterious old wizards, there have to be wizards, and in order for the words "mysterious" and "old" to be doing useful work in that question the wizards would have to vary in their age and mysteriousness, and I'm very unsure how the set of potential worlds that implies compares to this one.
I'm probably taking the question too literally... :D
And, um, done.
Generically, having more money in the bank gives you more options, being cash-constrained means you have fewer options. And, also generically, when the future is very uncertain, it is important to have options for how to deal with it.
If how the world currently works changes drastically in the next few decades, I'd like to have the option to just stop what I'm doing and do something else that pays no money or costs some money, if that seems like the situationally-appropriate response. Maybe that's taking some time to think and plan my next move after ...
To be clear, I do not endorse the argument that mental models embedded in another person are necessarily that person. It makes sense that a sufficiently intelligent person with the right neural hardware would be able to simulate another person in sufficient detail that that simulated person should count, morally.
I appreciate your addendum, as well, and acknowledge that yes, given a situation like that it would be possible for a conscious entity which we should treat as a person to exist in the mind of another conscious entity we should treat as a person, w...
I elaborated on this a little elsewhere, but the feature I would point to would be "ability to have independent subjective experiences". A chicken has its own brain and can likely have a separate experience of life which I don't share, and so although I wouldn't call it a person, I'd call it a being which I ought to care about and do what I can to see that it doesn't suffer. By contrast, if I imagine a character, and what that character feels or thinks or sees or hears, I am the one experiencing that character's (imagined) sensorium and thoughts - and for ...
Having written the above, I went away and came back with a clearer way to express it: For suffering-related (or positive experience related) calculations, one person = one stream of conscious experience, two people = two streams of conscious experience. My brain can only do one stream of conscious experience at a time, so I'm not worried that by imagining characters, I've created a bunch of people. But I would worry that something with different hardware than me could.
I have a question related to the "Not the same person" part, the answer to which is a crux for me.
Let's suppose you are imagining a character who is experiencing some feeling. Can that character be feeling what it feels, while you feel something different? Can you be sad while your character is happy, or vice versa?
I find that I can't - if I imagine someone happy, I feel what I imagine they are feeling - this is the appeal of daydreams. If I imagine someone angry during an argument, I myself feel that feeling. There is no other person in my mind having a s...
I think there are at least two levels where you want change to happen - on an individual level, you want people to stop doing a thing they're doing that hurts you, and on a social level, you want society to be structured so that you and others don't keep having that same/similar experience.
The second thing is going to be hard, and likely impossible to do completely. But the first thing... responding to this:
...It wouldn't be so bad, if I only heard it fifty times a month. It wouldn't be so bad, if I didn't hear it from friends, family,
I think it depends how much of a sacrifice you are making by saving. If your life is materially very much worse today than it could be, because you're hoping for a payoff 10 or 20+ years hence, I'd say probably save less, but not 0. But money has sharply decreasing marginal utility once your basic needs are met, and I can picture myself blowing all of my savings on a year-long party, and then going "well actually that wasn't that much fun and my health is much worse and I have no savings, I regret this decision". On the other hand, I can picture myself dec... (read more)