Jesus Christ put a trigger warning on that. Just … damn.
Also, emotional appeals to how terrible one option is aren’t going to change the outcomes of utility calculations. I’m not knowledgeable in this area to weigh in on this discussion, but when one side is saying shut up and multiply and the other is using obvious and clumsy dark arts attacks on the audience’s rationality, I’m inclined to support the utilitarian over the deontologist.
Multiheaded, usually I would pay the karma toll to reply to your comment, but I’ve just been karmassasinated and so I’ll put it here instead.
Firstly, while I personally am perfectly capable of reading such material without serious harm (thank God), many people are not, so I was fairly shocked to stumble across it in the middle of your post. It would not have damaged your point to warn those who find such things traumatic beforehand, and neglecting to do so is, to be dark-artsy for a moment, hardly strengthening your claim to be the empathic one in this discussion.
As for whether I would like to live in a world where people are willing to torture me and my loved ones if they think it’s justified—I already live in such a world. This is a thing humans do. Emotional appeals are, in fact, noticeably more effective at getting people to do this than cold utility calculations. So yes, I would rather people based their atrocities on a rigorous epistemic foundation rather than how those guys are The Enemy and must be fought, no matter the cost. For the children!
I’m well aware of the dangers of self-deception, as should anyone trying to make such calculations be. But it’s even easier when you’re relying on outrage rather than rationality.
Finally, it’s interesting that you claim it’s OK to make use of dark arts techniques to (attempt to) manipulate us, because this is so important that the usual LessWrong standards of trying to minimise bias, mindkilling and generally help people discern the correct position rather than the one that’s covered in applause lights. Isn’t truth and so on another precommtment you shouldn’t break just because the expected utility is so high?
So yes, I would rather people based their atrocities on a rigorous epistemic foundation rather than how those guys are The Enemy and must be fought, no matter the cost.
Has such a thing actually happened even once in human history?
Maybe someday, if we manage to raise the sanity waterline enough, and if everyone who tries it doesn’t get denounced as giving aid an comfort to the Enemy for even considering the idea.
EDIT: Possible example:
You should never, ever murder an innocent person who’s helped you, even if it’s the right thing to do; because it’s far more likely that you’ve made a mistake, than that murdering an innocent person who helped you is the right thing to do.
Sound reasonable?
During World War II, it became necessary to destroy Germany’s supply of deuterium, a neutron moderator, in order to block their attempts to achieve a fission chain reaction. Their supply of deuterium was coming at this point from a captured facility in Norway. A shipment of heavy water was on board a Norwegian ferry ship, the SF Hydro. Knut Haukelid and three others had slipped on board the ferry in order to sabotage it, when the saboteurs were discovered by the ferry watchman. Haukelid told him that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman immediately agreed to overlook their presence. Haukelid “considered warning their benefactor but decided that might endanger the mission and only thanked him and shook his hand.” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.) So the civilian ferry Hydro sank in the deepest part of the lake, with eighteen dead and twenty-nine survivors. Some of the Norwegian rescuers felt that the German soldiers present should be left to drown, but this attitude did not prevail, and four Germans were rescued. And that was, effectively, the end of the Nazi atomic weapons program.
Taking abstract ideas too seriously and unreservedly privileging them over your moral emotion is a terribly,terribly dangerous thing. And it tends to corrupt the one who would make such a choice, too.
Would you like to live in a world where people thought that doing these things to you and yours could ever be justified? Sure, the apologists would say it’s only forgivable in dire circumstances, only for the greater good—but still, wouldn’t you prefer as firm a precommitment as possible?
And no, I’m not sorry for exposing you to such content. The enormity of the moral commitments at stake is too great for me not to “manipulate” you. The language of simplistic utilitarianism does not have enough bandwidth to express the weight of such commitments, so I have to draw your attention to them through “emotional” appeals.
“You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty. But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can’t occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine. Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree. However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings.”
Instead of shutting up and multiplying, might it be wiser to shut up and obey our Glorious Leader?
And no, I’m not sorry for exposing you to such content.
What the fuck? Causing unnecessary psychological damage to anyone reading this page—even more so just for the sake of some stupid political point—is not acceptable. Downvoted.
I’m not the one willing to tolerate such acts given a counterfactual excuse, or measure them on an easily subverted one-dimensional scale. If they occur in the world, I not only wish to be fully aware of them, I wish that others would not be able to easily shrink from considering them either. A detached discussion of faraway horrible events is a luxury and a privilege, and people who want to participate in it should at least pay a toll of properly visualizing the consequences.
I don’t care who has what bullshit political opinions here. No-one gave you the authority to emotionally traumatize the readers of this site “for the greater good”. Especially when you could have even just added a trigger warning to the top of your post and it would not have diminished your argument in the slightest. Frankly, if you’re going to be a dick you don’t need to be here.
Jesus Christ put a trigger warning on that. Just … damn.
Also, emotional appeals to how terrible one option is aren’t going to change the outcomes of utility calculations. I’m not knowledgeable in this area to weigh in on this discussion, but when one side is saying shut up and multiply and the other is using obvious and clumsy dark arts attacks on the audience’s rationality, I’m inclined to support the utilitarian over the deontologist.
Multiheaded, usually I would pay the karma toll to reply to your comment, but I’ve just been karmassasinated and so I’ll put it here instead.
Firstly, while I personally am perfectly capable of reading such material without serious harm (thank God), many people are not, so I was fairly shocked to stumble across it in the middle of your post. It would not have damaged your point to warn those who find such things traumatic beforehand, and neglecting to do so is, to be dark-artsy for a moment, hardly strengthening your claim to be the empathic one in this discussion.
As for whether I would like to live in a world where people are willing to torture me and my loved ones if they think it’s justified—I already live in such a world. This is a thing humans do. Emotional appeals are, in fact, noticeably more effective at getting people to do this than cold utility calculations. So yes, I would rather people based their atrocities on a rigorous epistemic foundation rather than how those guys are The Enemy and must be fought, no matter the cost. For the children!
I’m well aware of the dangers of self-deception, as should anyone trying to make such calculations be. But it’s even easier when you’re relying on outrage rather than rationality.
Finally, it’s interesting that you claim it’s OK to make use of dark arts techniques to (attempt to) manipulate us, because this is so important that the usual LessWrong standards of trying to minimise bias, mindkilling and generally help people discern the correct position rather than the one that’s covered in applause lights. Isn’t truth and so on another precommtment you shouldn’t break just because the expected utility is so high?
Has such a thing actually happened even once in human history?
Not yet (to my knowledge.)
Maybe someday, if we manage to raise the sanity waterline enough, and if everyone who tries it doesn’t get denounced as giving aid an comfort to the Enemy for even considering the idea.
EDIT: Possible example:
-Ethical Injuctions
Taking abstract ideas too seriously and unreservedly privileging them over your moral emotion is a terribly, terribly dangerous thing. And it tends to corrupt the one who would make such a choice, too.
Would you like to live in a world where people thought that doing these things to you and yours could ever be justified? Sure, the apologists would say it’s only forgivable in dire circumstances, only for the greater good—but still, wouldn’t you prefer as firm a precommitment as possible?
And no, I’m not sorry for exposing you to such content. The enormity of the moral commitments at stake is too great for me not to “manipulate” you. The language of simplistic utilitarianism does not have enough bandwidth to express the weight of such commitments, so I have to draw your attention to them through “emotional” appeals.
Instead of shutting up and multiplying, might it be wiser to shut up and obey our Glorious Leader?
What the fuck? Causing unnecessary psychological damage to anyone reading this page—even more so just for the sake of some stupid political point—is not acceptable. Downvoted.
I’m not the one willing to tolerate such acts given a counterfactual excuse, or measure them on an easily subverted one-dimensional scale. If they occur in the world, I not only wish to be fully aware of them, I wish that others would not be able to easily shrink from considering them either. A detached discussion of faraway horrible events is a luxury and a privilege, and people who want to participate in it should at least pay a toll of properly visualizing the consequences.
I don’t care who has what bullshit political opinions here. No-one gave you the authority to emotionally traumatize the readers of this site “for the greater good”. Especially when you could have even just added a trigger warning to the top of your post and it would not have diminished your argument in the slightest. Frankly, if you’re going to be a dick you don’t need to be here.
OK, I’m adding a TW, but I’m not going to abridge or rot13 it.
Thank you. That’s a sufficient improvement.