I try to practice independent reasoning/critical thinking, to challenge current solutions to be more considerate/complete. I do not reply to DMs for non-personal (with respect to the user who reached out directly) discussions, and will post here instead with reference to the user and my reply.
When thinking about deontology and consequentialism in application, it is useful to me to rate morality of actions based on intention, execution, and outcome. (Some cells are "na" as they are not really logical in real world scenarios.)
In reality, to me, it seems executed "some" intention matters (though I am not sure how much) the most when doing something bad, and executed to the best ability matters the most when doing something good.
It also seems useful to me, when we try to learn about applications of philosophy from law. (I am not an expert though in neither philosophy nor law, so these may contain errors.)
| Intention to kill the person | Executed "some" intention | Killed the person | "Bad" level | Law |
| Yes | Yes | Yes | 10 | murder |
| Yes | Yes | No | 8-10 | as an example, attempted first-degree murder is punished by life in state prison (US, CA) |
| Yes | No | Yes | na | |
| Yes | No | No | 0-5 | no law on this (I can imagine for reasons on "it's hard to prove") but personally, assuming multiple "episodes", or just more time, this leads to murder and attempted murder later anyways; very rare a person can have this thought without executing it in reality. |
| No | Yes | Yes | na | |
| No | Yes | No | na | |
| No | No | Yes | 0-5 | typically not a crime, unless something like negligence |
| No | No | No | 0 | |
| Intention save a person (limited decision time) | Executed intention to the best of ability | Saved the person | "Good" Level | |
| Yes | Yes | Yes | 10 | |
| Yes | Yes | No | 10 | |
| Yes | No | Yes | na | |
| Yes | No | No | 0-5 | |
| No | Yes | Yes | na | |
| No | Yes | No | na | |
| No | No | Yes | 0-5 | |
| No | No | No | 0 | |
| Intention to do good | Executed intention to the best of personal ability1[1] | Did good | "Good" Level | |
| Yes | Yes | Yes | 10 | |
| Yes | Yes | No | 8-10 | |
| Yes | No | Yes | na | |
| Yes | No | No | 0-5 | |
| No | Yes | Yes | na | |
| No | Yes | No | na | |
| No | No | Yes | 0-5 | |
| No | No | No | 0 |
Possible to collaborate when there is enough time.
If you look into a bit more history on social justice/equality problems, you would see we have actually made many many progress (https://gcdd.org/images/Reports/us-social-movements-web-timeline.pdf), but not enough as the bar was so low. These also have made changes in our law. Before 1879, women cannot be lawyers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women_lawyers_in_the_United_States). On war, I don't have too much knowledge myself, so I will refrain from commenting for now. It is also my belief that we should not stop at attempt, but attempt is the first step (necessary but not sufficient), and they have pushed to real changes as history shown, but it will have to take piles of piles of work, before a significant change. Just because something is very hard to do, does not mean we should stop, nor there will not be a way (just like ensuring there is humanity in the future.) For example, we should not give up on helping people during war nor try to reduce wars in the first place, and we should not give up on preventing women being raped. In my opinion, this is in a way ensuring there is future, as human may very well be destroyed by other humans, or by mistakes by ourselves. (That's also why in the AI safety case, governance is so important so that we consider the human piece.)
As you mentioned political party - it is interesting to see surveys happening here; a side track - I believe general equality problems such as "women can go to school", is not dependent on political party. And something like "police should not kill a black person randomly" should not be supported just by blacks, but also other races (I am not black).
Thanks for the background otherwise.
how to punish fewer people in the first place
This seems to be hard when actual crimes (murder, violent crimes, etc.) are committed; seems to be good to figure out why they commit the crimes, and reducing that reason in the first place is more fundamental.
A side note -
We don’t own slaves, women can drive, while they couldn’t in Ancient Rome, and so on.
Seems to be a very low bar for being "civilized"
focusing less on intent and more on patterns of harm
In a general context, understanding intent though will help to solve the issue fundamentally. There might be two general reasons behind harmful behaviors: 1.do not know this will cause harm, or how not to cause harm, aka uneducated on this behavior/being ignorant, 2.do know this will cause harm, and still decided to do so. There might be more nuances but these two are probably the two high level categories. Knowing what the intent is helps to create strategies to address the issue - 1.more education? 2.more punishments/legal actions?
In my opinion, theoretically, the key to have "safe" humans and "safe" models, is "to do no harm" under any circumstances, even when they have power. This is roughly what law is about, and what moral values should be about (in my opinion)
Yeah nice; I heard youtube also has something similar for checking videos as well
It is interesting; I am only a half musician but I wonder what a true musician think about the music generation quality generally; also this reminds me of the Silicon Valley show's music similarity tool to check for copyright issues; that might be really useful nowadays lmao
On the side - could you elaborate why you think "relu better than sigmoid" is a "weird trick", if that is implied by this question?
The reason that I thought to be commonly agreed is that it helps with the vanishing gradient problem (this could be shown from the graphs).
Oxford languages (or really just after googling) says "rational" is "based on or in accordance with reason or logic."
I think there are a lot of other types of definitions (I think lesswrong mentioned it is related to the process of finding truth). For me, first of all it is useful to break this down into two parts: 1) observation and information analysis, and 2) decision making.
For 1): Truth, but also particularly causality finding. (Very close to the first one you bolded, and I somehow feel many other ones are just derived from this one. I added causality because many true observations are not really causality).
For 2): My controversial opinion is everyone are probably/usually "rationalists" - just sometimes the reasonings are conscious, and other times they are sub/un-conscious. These reasonings/preferences are unique to each person. It would be dangerous in my opinion if someone try to practice "rationality" based on external reasonings/preferences, or reasonings/preferences that are only recognized by the person's conscious mind (even if a preference is short term). I think a useful practice is to 1. notice what one intuitively want to do vs. what one think they should do (or multiple options they are considering), 2. ask why there is the discrepancy, 3. at least surface the unconscious reasoning, and 4. weigh things (the potential reasonings that leads to conflicting results, for example short term preference vs long term goals) out.