I share this sentiment to an extent. I remember, for instance, noticing that I actually never really understood the Prisoner’s Dilemma until reading this post. Afterwards the original formulation of the dilemma just sounded straight uplazy. I’m supposed to pretend that money is equivalent to utilons and disregard human relations? C’mon, do you see any movie directors telling the audience to just suspend their disbelief instead of, y’know, actually making an effort to tell the story in a more believable manner?
One thing I might be able to contribute: Estimating one’s own IQ can be a difficult task as one is often involuntarily biased by social conditioning to virtue signal either confidence or humility. A thought experiment that I found helpful as an intuition pump is imagining someone with a gadget that can read out your true IQ holding a gun to your head, telling you to predict your own IQ and threatening to kill you if you get it wrong by 10 points or more.
I think introducing an agent that is deliberately setting up a certain scenario helps in a lot of cases. For the trolley problem, you could imagine some sort of evil genius orchestrating the dilemma like a SAW movie or something.
For many audiences, presuming an adversarial agent changes the situation greatly—it’s no longer about the competition between different intuitions of what do do, it’s now about how to thwart the adversary.
This does occur in some of the Newcomb discussions—“Fuck Omega, it’s cheating!” is probably not that common, but it’s not unheard-of either.
I share this sentiment to an extent. I remember, for instance, noticing that I actually never really understood the Prisoner’s Dilemma until reading this post. Afterwards the original formulation of the dilemma just sounded straight up lazy. I’m supposed to pretend that money is equivalent to utilons and disregard human relations? C’mon, do you see any movie directors telling the audience to just suspend their disbelief instead of, y’know, actually making an effort to tell the story in a more believable manner?
One thing I might be able to contribute: Estimating one’s own IQ can be a difficult task as one is often involuntarily biased by social conditioning to virtue signal either confidence or humility. A thought experiment that I found helpful as an intuition pump is imagining someone with a gadget that can read out your true IQ holding a gun to your head, telling you to predict your own IQ and threatening to kill you if you get it wrong by 10 points or more.
I think introducing an agent that is deliberately setting up a certain scenario helps in a lot of cases. For the trolley problem, you could imagine some sort of evil genius orchestrating the dilemma like a SAW movie or something.
For many audiences, presuming an adversarial agent changes the situation greatly—it’s no longer about the competition between different intuitions of what do do, it’s now about how to thwart the adversary.
This does occur in some of the Newcomb discussions—“Fuck Omega, it’s cheating!” is probably not that common, but it’s not unheard-of either.