Information is a terminal value without exception.
All information is inherently good.
We must gather and preserve information for its own sake.
These phrasings should mean the exact same thing. Correct me if they don’t.
Elaboration: Most people readily agree that most information is good most of the time. I want to see if I can go all the way and build a convincing argument that all information is good all of the time, or as close to it as I can get. That misuse of information is problem about the misuser and not the information (“guns don’t kill people”). Specific cases include: endangered species (DNA is best stored in living organisms), viruses (all three kinds), forbidden books, child pornography and other shocking information, free speech, Archive.org, The Rosetta Project, research on race.
Please post arguments and counterarguments in their own comments and separately from general discussion comments.
You probably don’t mean trivial information eg the position of every oxygen atom in my room at this exact moment. But if you eliminate trivial information and concentrate only on useful information, you’ve turned it into a circular argument—all useful information is inherently useful.
Further, saying that we “must” gather and preserve information ignores opportunity costs. Sure, anything might eventually turn out to be useful, but at some point we have to say the resources invested in disk space would be better used somewhere else.
It sounds more like you’re trying to argue that information can never be evil, but you can’t even state that meaningfully without making a similar error. Certainly giving information to certain people can be evil (for example, giving Hitler the information on how to make a nuclear bomb).
See this discussion for why I think calling something like “information” good is a bad idea.
One thing you may want to address is what you mean by “gather and preserve information.” The maximum amount of information possible to know about the universe is presently stored and encoded as the universe. The information that’s useful to us is reductions and simplifications of this information, which can only be stored by destroying some of the original set of information.
Yes. CannibalSmith’s usage sounded to me somewhere indeterminately in between the information theoretic definition and the common meaning which is indistinct but similar to “knowledge.” My request for clarification assumes the strictly information theoretic definition isn’t quite what he wanted.
My mom complains I take things too literally. Now I know what she means. :)
Seriously though, I mean readable, usable, computable information. The kind which can conceivably turned into knowledge. I could also say, we want to lossly compress the Universe, like an mp3, with as good a ratio as possible.
Do you mean that information already is a terminal value for (most) humans?
Arguing that something should be a terminal value makes only a limited amount of sense, terminal values usually don’t need reasons, though they have (evolutionary, cultural etc.) causes.
I don’t make arguments for terminal values. I assert them.
Arguments that make any (epistemic) sense in this instance would be references to evidence to something that represents the value system (eg. neurological, behavioural or introspective observations about the relevant brain).
Information takes work to produce, to filter, and to receive, and more work to evaluate it and (if genuinely new) to understand it. There’s a strong case that information isn’t a terminal value because it’s not the only thing people need to do with their time.
You wouldn’t want your inbox filled with all the things anyone believes might be information for you.
Another case of limiting information: rules about what juries are allowed to know before they come to a verdict.
There might be an important difference between forbidding censorchip vs. having information as a terminal value.
I very much doubt that we have enough understanding of human values / preferences / utility functions to say that anything makes the list, in any capacity, without exception.
In this case, I think that information is useful as an instrumental value, but not as a terminal value in and of itself. It may lie on the path to terminal values in enough instances (the vast majority), and be such a major part of realizing those values, that a resource-constrained reasoning agent might treat it like a terminal value, just to save effort.
I look at it like a genie bottle: nearly anything you want could be satisfied with it, or would be made much easier with its use, but the genie isn’t what you really want.
Storing information has an inherent cost in resources, and some information might be so meaningless that no matter how abundant those resources are, there will always be a better or more interesting use for them. I’m not sure if that’s true.
“Information” might be an unnatural category in the way you’re using it. Why are the bits encoded in an animal’s DNA worth more than the bits encoded in the structure of a particular rock? Doesn’t taking any action erase some information about the state the world was in before that action?
A straightforward counter-argument is that forgetting, i.e. erasing information, is a valuable habit to acquire; some “information” is of little value and we would burden our minds uselessly, perhaps to the point of paralysis, by hanging on to every trivial detail.
If that holds for an individual mind, it could perhaps hold for a society’s collective records; perhaps not all of YouTube as it exists now needs to be preserved for an indefinite future, and a portion of it may be safely forgotten.
That’s a good point, but rather than Youtube I’d suggest something like the exact down-to-the-molecule geography and internal structure of Mercury; or better yet, the output of a random number generator that you accidentally left running for a year.
For the record, the wording I came up with originally was “Storing information has an inherent cost in resources, and some information might be so meaningless that no matter how abundant those resources are (even if they seem to be unlimited), there will always be a better or more interesting use for them.”.
(Edit 4/11: I was thinking of trying to come up with something like torture versus scrambling 3^^^3 bits of useless information, but that probably wouldn’t be a good line of argument anyway.)
That’s a fact about the human mind, though; DNB is designed to stress fuzzy human WM’s weaknesses. DNB is trivially doable by a computer (look at all the implementations).
It’s not just quantity; it’s quality. Human WM is qualitatively different from RAM.
Yes, you could invent a ‘dual 4-gigabyte back’, and the computer would do just as well. Bits don’t change in RAM. If it needs to compare 4 billion rounds back, it will compare as easily as if it were 1 round back. Computer ‘attention’ doesn’t drift, while a human can still make mistakes on D1B. And so on.
You could cripple a computer to make mistakes like a human, but the word ‘cripple’ is exactly what’s going on and demonstrates that the errors and problems of human WM have nothing interesting to say about the theoretical value (if any) of forgetting.
You only need to forget in DNB because you have so little WM. If you could remember 1000 items in your WM, what value would forgetting have on D10B? It would have none; forgetting is a hack, a workaround your limits, an optimization akin to Y2K.
Reading what you have said in this thread, I was confident that you were committing the fallacy of rationalization. Your statement is simple, and it seems like reality can be made to fit it, so you do so. But your name looked familiar, and so I clicked on it, and found that your karma is higher than mine, which seems to be strong evidence that you would not commit such a fallacy, using phrases so revealing as “I want to build a case for . . .”.
Your words say you are rationalizing; your karma says you are not. I am confused.
The OP asked for a specific thing to be done with arguments on both sides. “Please place garbage in the bin in the corner” doesn’t mean I want the bin to contain more garbage.
Or maybe you’re not referring to “Please post arguments and . . .”
May I suggest adding to your list of test cases the blueprints for a non-Friendly AI?
By that I mean any program which is expected to be a General Intelligence but which isn’t formally or rigorously proven to be Friendly. (I still haven’t come to definite conclusions about the plausibility of an AI intelligence explosion, therefore about the urgency of FAI research and that of banning or discouraging the dissemination of info leading to non-F, but given this blog’s history it feels as if this test case should definitely be on the list.)
What exactly is the pro-information position here? Cause I’m against this being produced and agree with bans on it’s distribution and possession as a way of hurting its purveyors. The way such laws are enforced, at least in America, is sometimes disgraceful. But I don’t think it is an inherrently bad policy.
viruses (all three kinds),
Biological, computer and memetic? The last one looks like an open and shut case to me. If learning information (being infected by a meme) can damage me then I should think that information should be destroyed. Maybe we want some record around so that we can identify them to protect people in the future? Maybe this stuff is too speculative to flesh out.
research on race
For the IQ issue: Here is my read of the status quo: most people believe the science says there is no innate racial difference in IQ. This is probably what it says but if we really want to know for sure we’d need to gather more data. If we gathered more data there are three possible outcomes: (1) we find out conclusively there is no innate IQ difference. Most people’s beliefs do not change. An impassioned minority continues to assert that there is an IQ difference and questions the science, perpetuating the controversy. This is socially the status quo but some people paying attention have actually learned something. (2) We don’t learn anything conclusive one way or the other. The status quo continues. (3) We learn there are innate racial differences in IQ. All hell breaks lose.
What exactly is the pro-information position here? Cause I’m against this being produced and agree with bans on it’s distribution and possession as a way of hurting its purveyors. The way such laws are enforced, at least in America, is sometimes disgraceful. But I don’t think it is an inherrently bad policy.
If the purveyors are revealed to the public, I think we’ll find better ways to stop them, instead of creating a black-market environment which makes their product more valuable. There’s also the non-negligible side benefit of turning fewer innocent people into lifelong pariahs.
Well yes, that would be great information. But I don’t see how letting people own and distribute child porn is going to reveal that information. The market is always going to be black in some respect if it is illegal to produce it. The reason I asked what the position was is that it isn’t obvious to me that producing child pornography isn’t gathering information.
instead of creating a black-market environment which makes their product more valuable.
If you legalize possession but not production you’ve lowered the cost of consuming (increased the demand) while not affecting the supply. This will drive up prices.
There’s also the non-negligible side benefit of turning fewer innocent people into lifelong pariahs.
Just adjust the laws so that someone who decides to download a huge pornfile that happens to include a few illegal photos doesn’t get convicted...
If you legalize possession but not production you’ve lowered the cost of consuming (increased the demand) while not affecting the supply.
There is this thing called ‘peer-to-peer file sharing.’ If possession is legal, any possessor can also be a supplier by sharing what they’ve already got, but the original producers can’t claim copyright without incriminating themselves. That drastically increases the supply, driving the price down close to zero.
Close to zero? Really? There is already negligible enforcement of copyright and for a number of years there was zero enforcement of copyright. Media industries, porn and otherwise, have been doing fine.If necessary the industry will start only streaming video and uploading decoy files. Not to mention groups of people who just produce it for each other with no money changing hands will be able to operate unhindered. I’m not an expert but I imagine it is drastically more difficult to put someone away for distribution than production- and thats how the industry would end up working, shielding the producers while legal distributors buy and sell.
If producers work closely with specific distributors, it would be possible to get the distributors for ‘aiding and abetting’ or RICO sorts of things. Customers would also be more willing to cooperate with law enforcement if they knew they wouldn’t be punished for doing so, and limited enforcement resources could be concentrated on the actual producers instead of randomly harrassing anyone who happens to have it on their HD.
Groups of people who produce it for each other with no money involved would be hard to track down under any circumstances; I don’t see how decriminalizing possession makes that worse.
If producers work closely with specific distributors, it would be possible to get the distributors for ‘aiding and abetting’ or RICO sorts of things.
A lot harder to prove than distribution and possession.
Customers would also be more willing to cooperate with law enforcement if they knew they wouldn’t be punished for doing so
Well you’ve just taken away law enforcement’s entire bargaining position. Right now customers have to cooperate under threat of prosecution.
and limited enforcement resources could be concentrated on the actual producers instead of randomly harrassing anyone who happens to have it on their HD.
What we want is for law enforcement to concentrate their resources on the producers without taking away the tools they need to do so effectively. The key is structuring the law and incentives for law enforcement so that they have to go after the producers and not guys who accidentally download it. Maybe force prosecutors to demonstrate the possessor had intentionally downloaded it or has viewed it multiple times. Or offer institutional incentives for going after the big fish.
Groups of people who produce it for each other with no money involved would be hard to track down under any circumstances; I don’t see how decriminalizing possession makes that worse.
Well again, it is a lot easier to prove possession and distribution then it is production.
Well you’ve just taken away law enforcement’s entire bargaining position. Right now customers have to cooperate under threat of prosecution.
So most of them avoid law enforcement entirely for fear of getting ‘v&’ instead of providing tips out of concern for the welfare of the children. I mean, once you’ve cooperated, what’s law enforcement’s incentive not to prosecute you?
Justice is not necessarily best served by making the cop’s job easier. So long as law enforcement is rewarded by the conviction, they’ll go for low-hanging fruit: that is, the people who aren’t protecting themselves because they think they’re not doing anything wrong. Broad laws that anyone could violate unwittingly, and which the police enforce at their own discretion? That’s not a necessary tool for some higher purpose, it’s overwhelming power waiting to be abused.
So most of them avoid law enforcement entirely for fear of getting ‘v&’ instead of providing tips out of concern for the welfare of the children. I mean, once you’ve cooperated, what’s law enforcement’s incentive not to prosecute you?
You know what prosecutorial immunity is, right? Also, I don’t know why you think pedophiles are itching to come forward with tips on their porn suppliers. If they were there are always ways to make anonymous tips to the police.
Justice is not necessarily best served by making the cop’s job easier. So long as law enforcement is rewarded by the conviction, they’ll go for low-hanging fruit: that is, the people who aren’t protecting themselves because they think they’re not doing anything wrong.
For the third time: make prosecuting the low-hanging fruit more difficult and lower the incentives to do so. That is my position. You don’t have to handcuff law enforcement’s investigation of the producers to do this.
Edit: One other way to do this that I haven’t mentioned: legalize small possession of a small amount of child pornography or make small amounts a misdemeanor.
I’ll attempt a counter-example. It’s not definitive, but at least makes me question your notion:
Does a spy want to know the purpose of his mission? What if (s)he gets caught? Is it easier for them to get though an interrogation not knowing the answers to the questions?
Please post arguments and counterarguments in their own comments and separately from general discussion comments.
At first I thought you were saying that you wanted the comments to be flat rather than threaded; I figured that that was because you wanted inbox notification of each new reply. Then I saw you replying to replies yourself, so I was less sure. I take it you actually mean that (for example) I shouldn’t include remarks on the main topic in this comment, or vice versa?
What would an unfriendly superintelligence that wanted to hack your brain say to you? Does knowing the answer to that have positive value in your utility function?
That said, I do think information is a terminal value, at least in my utility function; but I think an exception must be made for mind-damaging truths, if such truths exist.
I don’t think the idea of a conditional terminal value is very useful. If information is a terminal value for me I’d want to know what the unfriendly superintelligence would say, but unless it’s the only terminal value and I don’t think the result would have any influence on other information gathering there would be other considerations speaking against learning that particular piece of information and probably outweighing it. No need to make any exceptions for mind damaging truths because to the extent mind damage is a bad thing according to my terminal values they will already be accounted for anyway.
First of all, I recommend clearing away the moral language (value, good, and must) unless you want certain perennial moral controversies to muddy the waters.
Example phrasings of the case you may be trying to make:
Bayesian predictions made from (100% certain) information set {N}U{M} are usually more accurate than those made from {N} alone
I suppose this is true.
Bayesian predictions made from (100% certain) information set {N}U{M} are always more accurate than those made from {N} alone
If you’ve ever done a jigsaw puzzle, you can probably think of a counterexample to this.
Here’s a counterexample. There is an urn filled with lots of balls, each colored either red or blue. You think there’s a 40% chance that the next ball you pull out will be red. You pull out a ball, and it’s red; you put it back in and shake the urn. Now you think there’s a 60% chance that the next ball you pull out will be red, and you announce this fact and bet on it. You pull out one more ball, and it’s blue. If you hadn’t seen that piece of evidence, your prediction would have been more accurate.
We cannot know what information we might need in the future, therefore we must gather as much as we can and preserve all of it. Especially since much (most?) of it cannot be recreated on demand.
That’s not an argument for information as a terminal value since it depends on the consequences of information, but it’s a decent argument for gathering and preserving information.
Not sure. “Inherently good” could mean “good for its own sake, not good for a purpose”, but it seems like it could also mean “by its very nature, it’s (instrumentally) good”. And the fact that you said “gather or preserve” makes me want to come up with a value system that only cares about gathering or only cares about preserving.
I’m not sure one couldn’t find similarly sized semantic holes in anything, but there they are regardless.
I think so. “All information is inherently good” could mean “inherently instrumentally good”, and the fact that you said “gather or preserve” makes me want to come up with a value system that only cares about gathering or only cares about preserving.
Your 3 formulations should be identical. Here’s your argument:
We cannot know what information we might need in the future, therefore we must gather as much as we can and preserve all of it
My first thought when I read this is, Why are we gathering information? The answer? Because we may need it in the future. What will we need it for? Presumably to attain some other (terminal) end, since if information was a terminal end the argument wouldn’t be “we may need it in the future,” it would be “we need it.”
Help me, LessWrong. I want to build a case for
Information is a terminal value without exception.
All information is inherently good.
We must gather and preserve information for its own sake.
These phrasings should mean the exact same thing. Correct me if they don’t.
Elaboration: Most people readily agree that most information is good most of the time. I want to see if I can go all the way and build a convincing argument that all information is good all of the time, or as close to it as I can get. That misuse of information is problem about the misuser and not the information (“guns don’t kill people”). Specific cases include: endangered species (DNA is best stored in living organisms), viruses (all three kinds), forbidden books, child pornography and other shocking information, free speech, Archive.org, The Rosetta Project, research on race.
Please post arguments and counterarguments in their own comments and separately from general discussion comments.
You probably don’t mean trivial information eg the position of every oxygen atom in my room at this exact moment. But if you eliminate trivial information and concentrate only on useful information, you’ve turned it into a circular argument—all useful information is inherently useful.
Further, saying that we “must” gather and preserve information ignores opportunity costs. Sure, anything might eventually turn out to be useful, but at some point we have to say the resources invested in disk space would be better used somewhere else.
It sounds more like you’re trying to argue that information can never be evil, but you can’t even state that meaningfully without making a similar error. Certainly giving information to certain people can be evil (for example, giving Hitler the information on how to make a nuclear bomb).
See this discussion for why I think calling something like “information” good is a bad idea.
One thing you may want to address is what you mean by “gather and preserve information.” The maximum amount of information possible to know about the universe is presently stored and encoded as the universe. The information that’s useful to us is reductions and simplifications of this information, which can only be stored by destroying some of the original set of information.
In other words, “information” in this case might be an unnatural category.
Yes. CannibalSmith’s usage sounded to me somewhere indeterminately in between the information theoretic definition and the common meaning which is indistinct but similar to “knowledge.” My request for clarification assumes the strictly information theoretic definition isn’t quite what he wanted.
My mom complains I take things too literally. Now I know what she means. :)
Seriously though, I mean readable, usable, computable information. The kind which can conceivably turned into knowledge. I could also say, we want to lossly compress the Universe, like an mp3, with as good a ratio as possible.
Do you mean that information already is a terminal value for (most) humans? Arguing that something should be a terminal value makes only a limited amount of sense, terminal values usually don’t need reasons, though they have (evolutionary, cultural etc.) causes.
Neither. I guess I shouldn’t have used the term “terminal value”. See the elaboration—how do you think I should generalize and summarize it?
It sounds like you’re trying to say information is an instrumental value, without exception.
I don’t make arguments for terminal values. I assert them.
Arguments that make any (epistemic) sense in this instance would be references to evidence to something that represents the value system (eg. neurological, behavioural or introspective observations about the relevant brain).
Looks like I’ve been using “terminal values” incorrectly.
Information takes work to produce, to filter, and to receive, and more work to evaluate it and (if genuinely new) to understand it. There’s a strong case that information isn’t a terminal value because it’s not the only thing people need to do with their time.
You wouldn’t want your inbox filled with all the things anyone believes might be information for you.
Another case of limiting information: rules about what juries are allowed to know before they come to a verdict.
There might be an important difference between forbidding censorchip vs. having information as a terminal value.
I very much doubt that we have enough understanding of human values / preferences / utility functions to say that anything makes the list, in any capacity, without exception.
In this case, I think that information is useful as an instrumental value, but not as a terminal value in and of itself. It may lie on the path to terminal values in enough instances (the vast majority), and be such a major part of realizing those values, that a resource-constrained reasoning agent might treat it like a terminal value, just to save effort.
I look at it like a genie bottle: nearly anything you want could be satisfied with it, or would be made much easier with its use, but the genie isn’t what you really want.
Well, all agents are resource-constrained. But I get what you mean.
Storing information has an inherent cost in resources, and some information might be so meaningless that no matter how abundant those resources are, there will always be a better or more interesting use for them. I’m not sure if that’s true.
“Information” might be an unnatural category in the way you’re using it. Why are the bits encoded in an animal’s DNA worth more than the bits encoded in the structure of a particular rock? Doesn’t taking any action erase some information about the state the world was in before that action?
EY might call information bad that prevents pleasant surprise.
A straightforward counter-argument is that forgetting, i.e. erasing information, is a valuable habit to acquire; some “information” is of little value and we would burden our minds uselessly, perhaps to the point of paralysis, by hanging on to every trivial detail.
If that holds for an individual mind, it could perhaps hold for a society’s collective records; perhaps not all of YouTube as it exists now needs to be preserved for an indefinite future, and a portion of it may be safely forgotten.
That’s a good point, but rather than Youtube I’d suggest something like the exact down-to-the-molecule geography and internal structure of Mercury; or better yet, the output of a random number generator that you accidentally left running for a year.
For the record, the wording I came up with originally was “Storing information has an inherent cost in resources, and some information might be so meaningless that no matter how abundant those resources are (even if they seem to be unlimited), there will always be a better or more interesting use for them.”.
(Edit 4/11: I was thinking of trying to come up with something like torture versus scrambling 3^^^3 bits of useless information, but that probably wouldn’t be a good line of argument anyway.)
Forgetting is crucial for my ability to do dual n-back.
That’s a fact about the human mind, though; DNB is designed to stress fuzzy human WM’s weaknesses. DNB is trivially doable by a computer (look at all the implementations).
Computers have memory limits. They’re just much higher than human limits.
WM?
It’s not just quantity; it’s quality. Human WM is qualitatively different from RAM.
Yes, you could invent a ‘dual 4-gigabyte back’, and the computer would do just as well. Bits don’t change in RAM. If it needs to compare 4 billion rounds back, it will compare as easily as if it were 1 round back. Computer ‘attention’ doesn’t drift, while a human can still make mistakes on D1B. And so on.
You could cripple a computer to make mistakes like a human, but the word ‘cripple’ is exactly what’s going on and demonstrates that the errors and problems of human WM have nothing interesting to say about the theoretical value (if any) of forgetting.
You only need to forget in DNB because you have so little WM. If you could remember 1000 items in your WM, what value would forgetting have on D10B? It would have none; forgetting is a hack, a workaround your limits, an optimization akin to Y2K.
Working memory.
Reading what you have said in this thread, I was confident that you were committing the fallacy of rationalization. Your statement is simple, and it seems like reality can be made to fit it, so you do so. But your name looked familiar, and so I clicked on it, and found that your karma is higher than mine, which seems to be strong evidence that you would not commit such a fallacy, using phrases so revealing as “I want to build a case for . . .”.
Your words say you are rationalizing; your karma says you are not. I am confused.
Argument screens off karma. ;)
I agree with you about “I want to build a case”, the phrasing is unfortunate. However I note that the OP asked for arguments on both “sides”.
The OP asked for a specific thing to be done with arguments on both sides. “Please place garbage in the bin in the corner” doesn’t mean I want the bin to contain more garbage.
Or maybe you’re not referring to “Please post arguments and . . .”
May I suggest adding to your list of test cases the blueprints for a non-Friendly AI?
By that I mean any program which is expected to be a General Intelligence but which isn’t formally or rigorously proven to be Friendly. (I still haven’t come to definite conclusions about the plausibility of an AI intelligence explosion, therefore about the urgency of FAI research and that of banning or discouraging the dissemination of info leading to non-F, but given this blog’s history it feels as if this test case should definitely be on the list.)
Some counter-arguments
What exactly is the pro-information position here? Cause I’m against this being produced and agree with bans on it’s distribution and possession as a way of hurting its purveyors. The way such laws are enforced, at least in America, is sometimes disgraceful. But I don’t think it is an inherrently bad policy.
Biological, computer and memetic? The last one looks like an open and shut case to me. If learning information (being infected by a meme) can damage me then I should think that information should be destroyed. Maybe we want some record around so that we can identify them to protect people in the future? Maybe this stuff is too speculative to flesh out.
For the IQ issue: Here is my read of the status quo: most people believe the science says there is no innate racial difference in IQ. This is probably what it says but if we really want to know for sure we’d need to gather more data. If we gathered more data there are three possible outcomes: (1) we find out conclusively there is no innate IQ difference. Most people’s beliefs do not change. An impassioned minority continues to assert that there is an IQ difference and questions the science, perpetuating the controversy. This is socially the status quo but some people paying attention have actually learned something. (2) We don’t learn anything conclusive one way or the other. The status quo continues. (3) We learn there are innate racial differences in IQ. All hell breaks lose.
If the purveyors are revealed to the public, I think we’ll find better ways to stop them, instead of creating a black-market environment which makes their product more valuable. There’s also the non-negligible side benefit of turning fewer innocent people into lifelong pariahs.
Well yes, that would be great information. But I don’t see how letting people own and distribute child porn is going to reveal that information. The market is always going to be black in some respect if it is illegal to produce it. The reason I asked what the position was is that it isn’t obvious to me that producing child pornography isn’t gathering information.
If you legalize possession but not production you’ve lowered the cost of consuming (increased the demand) while not affecting the supply. This will drive up prices.
Just adjust the laws so that someone who decides to download a huge pornfile that happens to include a few illegal photos doesn’t get convicted...
There is this thing called ‘peer-to-peer file sharing.’ If possession is legal, any possessor can also be a supplier by sharing what they’ve already got, but the original producers can’t claim copyright without incriminating themselves. That drastically increases the supply, driving the price down close to zero.
Close to zero? Really? There is already negligible enforcement of copyright and for a number of years there was zero enforcement of copyright. Media industries, porn and otherwise, have been doing fine.If necessary the industry will start only streaming video and uploading decoy files. Not to mention groups of people who just produce it for each other with no money changing hands will be able to operate unhindered. I’m not an expert but I imagine it is drastically more difficult to put someone away for distribution than production- and thats how the industry would end up working, shielding the producers while legal distributors buy and sell.
If producers work closely with specific distributors, it would be possible to get the distributors for ‘aiding and abetting’ or RICO sorts of things. Customers would also be more willing to cooperate with law enforcement if they knew they wouldn’t be punished for doing so, and limited enforcement resources could be concentrated on the actual producers instead of randomly harrassing anyone who happens to have it on their HD.
Groups of people who produce it for each other with no money involved would be hard to track down under any circumstances; I don’t see how decriminalizing possession makes that worse.
A lot harder to prove than distribution and possession.
Well you’ve just taken away law enforcement’s entire bargaining position. Right now customers have to cooperate under threat of prosecution.
What we want is for law enforcement to concentrate their resources on the producers without taking away the tools they need to do so effectively. The key is structuring the law and incentives for law enforcement so that they have to go after the producers and not guys who accidentally download it. Maybe force prosecutors to demonstrate the possessor had intentionally downloaded it or has viewed it multiple times. Or offer institutional incentives for going after the big fish.
Well again, it is a lot easier to prove possession and distribution then it is production.
So most of them avoid law enforcement entirely for fear of getting ‘v&’ instead of providing tips out of concern for the welfare of the children. I mean, once you’ve cooperated, what’s law enforcement’s incentive not to prosecute you?
Justice is not necessarily best served by making the cop’s job easier. So long as law enforcement is rewarded by the conviction, they’ll go for low-hanging fruit: that is, the people who aren’t protecting themselves because they think they’re not doing anything wrong. Broad laws that anyone could violate unwittingly, and which the police enforce at their own discretion? That’s not a necessary tool for some higher purpose, it’s overwhelming power waiting to be abused.
You know what prosecutorial immunity is, right? Also, I don’t know why you think pedophiles are itching to come forward with tips on their porn suppliers. If they were there are always ways to make anonymous tips to the police.
For the third time: make prosecuting the low-hanging fruit more difficult and lower the incentives to do so. That is my position. You don’t have to handcuff law enforcement’s investigation of the producers to do this.
Edit: One other way to do this that I haven’t mentioned: legalize small possession of a small amount of child pornography or make small amounts a misdemeanor.
I’ll attempt a counter-example. It’s not definitive, but at least makes me question your notion:
Does a spy want to know the purpose of his mission? What if (s)he gets caught? Is it easier for them to get though an interrogation not knowing the answers to the questions?
At first I thought you were saying that you wanted the comments to be flat rather than threaded; I figured that that was because you wanted inbox notification of each new reply. Then I saw you replying to replies yourself, so I was less sure. I take it you actually mean that (for example) I shouldn’t include remarks on the main topic in this comment, or vice versa?
What would an unfriendly superintelligence that wanted to hack your brain say to you? Does knowing the answer to that have positive value in your utility function?
That said, I do think information is a terminal value, at least in my utility function; but I think an exception must be made for mind-damaging truths, if such truths exist.
I don’t think the idea of a conditional terminal value is very useful. If information is a terminal value for me I’d want to know what the unfriendly superintelligence would say, but unless it’s the only terminal value and I don’t think the result would have any influence on other information gathering there would be other considerations speaking against learning that particular piece of information and probably outweighing it. No need to make any exceptions for mind damaging truths because to the extent mind damage is a bad thing according to my terminal values they will already be accounted for anyway.
First of all, I recommend clearing away the moral language (value, good, and must) unless you want certain perennial moral controversies to muddy the waters.
Example phrasings of the case you may be trying to make:
I suppose this is true.
If you’ve ever done a jigsaw puzzle, you can probably think of a counterexample to this.
You’ve never done a jigsaw puzzle using optimal Bayesian methods.
(Or he just believes you probably haven’t!)
Here’s a counterexample. There is an urn filled with lots of balls, each colored either red or blue. You think there’s a 40% chance that the next ball you pull out will be red. You pull out a ball, and it’s red; you put it back in and shake the urn. Now you think there’s a 60% chance that the next ball you pull out will be red, and you announce this fact and bet on it. You pull out one more ball, and it’s blue. If you hadn’t seen that piece of evidence, your prediction would have been more accurate.
We cannot know what information we might need in the future, therefore we must gather as much as we can and preserve all of it. Especially since much (most?) of it cannot be recreated on demand.
That’s not an argument for information as a terminal value since it depends on the consequences of information, but it’s a decent argument for gathering and preserving information.
If that distinction exists, my three formulations are not identical. Yes?
Not sure. “Inherently good” could mean “good for its own sake, not good for a purpose”, but it seems like it could also mean “by its very nature, it’s (instrumentally) good”. And the fact that you said “gather or preserve” makes me want to come up with a value system that only cares about gathering or only cares about preserving.
I’m not sure one couldn’t find similarly sized semantic holes in anything, but there they are regardless.
I think so. “All information is inherently good” could mean “inherently instrumentally good”, and the fact that you said “gather or preserve” makes me want to come up with a value system that only cares about gathering or only cares about preserving.
Your 3 formulations should be identical. Here’s your argument:
My first thought when I read this is, Why are we gathering information? The answer? Because we may need it in the future. What will we need it for? Presumably to attain some other (terminal) end, since if information was a terminal end the argument wouldn’t be “we may need it in the future,” it would be “we need it.”
Maybe I am just misunderstanding you?