What would really suck is another me walking through the door, informing me “Guess what! A benevolent alien-god duplicated you, I mean me, and granted me practical immortality in this new body! I won the Galactic Lottery! Isn’t that great news, you (I)’ll beat death! I’ll see you (me) around, I’ll even attend your (my) funeral.”
EDIT: Let’s settle this wedrified, once and for all! With a poll, I mean:
Copy walking in as described in the scenario above. Would that really suck? [pollid:395]
What would really suck is another me walking through the door, informing me “Guess what! A benevolent alien-god duplicated you, I mean me, and granted me practical immortality in this new body! I won the Galactic Lottery! Isn’t that great news, you (I)’ll beat death! I’ll see you (me) around, I’ll even attend your (my) funeral.”
Really suck? No! That’s fantastic news. No bad thing has happened and you also discovered something awesome happened. (Envy is irrational in this case.)
How bad do things have to get for you here, before you’re allowed to envy your other self?
Let me try to express that again since intuitions differ regarding concepts like envy, jealously and spite. What is irrational is considering a positive outcome for something you identify with (your clone) that has no known negative effects on anything you care about to be a net bad thing.
If Kawoomba actually has the preferences he implies and those preferences are even remotely internally consistent he will either:
Pay money to not be cloned at all. (This interpretation seems unlikely and would make the whole comment misleading.)
Pay money for clones of himself to not experience any significantly desirable outcomes. (This seems batshit insane.)
Yes. Just like in principle I’d wish everyone to be well off and swimming in resources.
However, I (due to envy, jealousy and spite) would prefer not to be the only poor guy living in such an enclave of millionaires. This is irrational because a resource-rich environment would benefit a poor-me more so than an environment in which all others are around my same socio-economic stratum.
(In a trade off, when given the choice of elevating everyone around me—excluding friends and relatives—but myself, I’d do it, but when given the choice I’d rather do so with strangers I do not encounter daily, as opposed to strangers that I do.)
People who live off of welfare in many European countries have a vastly better standard of living than many of the feudal lords in medieval times. Yet, they define their standard of living relative to their peers, and will feel much worse off than some medieval baron. Tyranny of relativity.
Also, re: wedrified “if my preferences are even remotely internally consistent”, well, they are not. Are yours? (Not: do you want them to be?)
What is irrational is considering a positive outcome for something you identify with (your clone) that has no known negative effects on anything you care about to be a net bad thing.
Breaking my own rule of not fighting the hypothetical, it surely would. That better-off clone could well replace me in many roles, and generally take my little niche in my environment. But we should assume there are no known negative effects, in which case you’d be right, of course. So now that we’ve established that the is-state of me is irrational (as opposed to the ought-state), quo vadis? :)
Interesting. I added a poll to the grandparent. Also, let’s keep in mind that we’re not talking from the position of a perfectly rational agent, or version of yourself, but from your/my position. As such, while feelings of envy may be irrational, that does not mean that our current selves would not experience them.
If I believed immortal-dupe-me, it’d be really awesome. I mean, it would be a high-utility outcome. I’d be envious—I’d be envious of anyone given immortality if I don’t get it too. But I’d vastly prefer that outcome to no-duplication, even after it was clear I was mortal-dupe-me. If one person was going to get immortality I’d rather it was a duplicate of me than anyone else except a tiny number of my nearest and dearest.
Pre-duplication me is the same as mortal-dupe-me and immortal-dupe-me, but the two afterwards are not the same person. I’d rather be immortal-dupe-me than mortal-dupe-me (hence envy) but I’d rather immortal-dupe-me existed than didn’t.
We could have some real fun together, for as long as I (mortal-dupe-me) has left. For one thing, we could do a lot of really cool practical research in to immortality and benevolent alien-gods.
Which leads me to my main point, which is that all this is perhaps besides the point. If someone looking just like me walked through the door and gave a speech like that, I simply wouldn’t believe them. There are loads of possibilities to explain that situation that don’t require such wholesale abandonment of science-as-we-know it: practical joke, previously unknown twin, hallucination/dream, etc. It’d probably throw me off a bit, but I like to imagine I wouldn’t jump to such a wild conclusion on such a flimsy pretext. Or, put another way, my prior for the existence of interventionist benevolent alien-gods is very, very low indeed.
Don’t accuse people of fighting the hypothetical, when in addition to questioning if anything like that would really happen, they also respond to the hypothetical as stated.
He said it was his main point, that’s what I responded to because I had nothing to add to his other remarks, which “[may be] besides the point”. Too easy to get off track with hypotheticals, and for a newcomer I thought it might be worth the links.
A problem with training narrow rationality skills is that without training balancing skills to a similar degree, you end up overapplying it. The classic example is that if know how to recognize biased reasoning, but you don’t know to (or fail to, despite knowing) apply the same level of scrutiny to arguments you like as to arguments you don’t like, then every bias you know about makes you stupider.
You may have an overdeveloped sense of “don’t fight the hypothetical” that needs some balance from attention to what questions are important, what answers are applicable in real life. Doug’s response to your hypothetical, which fully addressed the underlying philosophical question, combined with an evaluation of how realistic the scenario is, was a very nice answer, regardless of which part of it was labelled as the main point. Your criticism that it was fighting the hypothetical was just wrong.
Too easy to get off track with hypotheticals, and for a newcomer I thought it might be worth the links.
Bluntly telling them a newcomer they wrong when they happen to be right, and giving a bunch of links so they have to read 3 articles, 2 of them not even relevant, to understand the criticism you are trying to make, is not an effective strategy for community building. (Giving links to interested newcomers can be good, but it should not be confrontational.)
I’d at least be happy for my clone, because if I am supposed to love my family and offspring as normal people do, I should also love someone who shares 100% of my genetic plan, so I should be glad that someone on “Team MaoShan” got a good result. In fact, I used to use this argument to justify playing the lottery, in the sense that me losing meant that another version of me in the multiverse just did win, so I should be almost as happy. That was before I started using that money to purchase an equivalent amount of chocolate every week.
What would really suck is another me walking through the door, informing me “Guess what! A benevolent alien-god duplicated you, I mean me, and granted me practical immortality in this new body! I won the Galactic Lottery! Isn’t that great news, you (I)’ll beat death! I’ll see you (me) around, I’ll even attend your (my) funeral.”
EDIT: Let’s settle this wedrified, once and for all! With a poll, I mean:
Copy walking in as described in the scenario above. Would that really suck? [pollid:395]
Really suck? No! That’s fantastic news. No bad thing has happened and you also discovered something awesome happened. (Envy is irrational in this case.)
How bad do things have to get for you here, before you’re allowed to envy your other self?
Let me try to express that again since intuitions differ regarding concepts like envy, jealously and spite. What is irrational is considering a positive outcome for something you identify with (your clone) that has no known negative effects on anything you care about to be a net bad thing.
If Kawoomba actually has the preferences he implies and those preferences are even remotely internally consistent he will either:
Pay money to not be cloned at all. (This interpretation seems unlikely and would make the whole comment misleading.)
Pay money for clones of himself to not experience any significantly desirable outcomes. (This seems batshit insane.)
Pay money to never meet his better-off clones.
Yes. Just like in principle I’d wish everyone to be well off and swimming in resources.
However, I (due to envy, jealousy and spite) would prefer not to be the only poor guy living in such an enclave of millionaires. This is irrational because a resource-rich environment would benefit a poor-me more so than an environment in which all others are around my same socio-economic stratum.
(In a trade off, when given the choice of elevating everyone around me—excluding friends and relatives—but myself, I’d do it, but when given the choice I’d rather do so with strangers I do not encounter daily, as opposed to strangers that I do.)
People who live off of welfare in many European countries have a vastly better standard of living than many of the feudal lords in medieval times. Yet, they define their standard of living relative to their peers, and will feel much worse off than some medieval baron. Tyranny of relativity.
Also, re: wedrified “if my preferences are even remotely internally consistent”, well, they are not. Are yours? (Not: do you want them to be?)
Answered here (just so you don’t miss it).
Breaking my own rule of not fighting the hypothetical, it surely would. That better-off clone could well replace me in many roles, and generally take my little niche in my environment. But we should assume there are no known negative effects, in which case you’d be right, of course. So now that we’ve established that the is-state of me is irrational (as opposed to the ought-state), quo vadis? :)
Interesting. I added a poll to the grandparent. Also, let’s keep in mind that we’re not talking from the position of a perfectly rational agent, or version of yourself, but from your/my position. As such, while feelings of envy may be irrational, that does not mean that our current selves would not experience them.
If I believed immortal-dupe-me, it’d be really awesome. I mean, it would be a high-utility outcome. I’d be envious—I’d be envious of anyone given immortality if I don’t get it too. But I’d vastly prefer that outcome to no-duplication, even after it was clear I was mortal-dupe-me. If one person was going to get immortality I’d rather it was a duplicate of me than anyone else except a tiny number of my nearest and dearest.
Pre-duplication me is the same as mortal-dupe-me and immortal-dupe-me, but the two afterwards are not the same person. I’d rather be immortal-dupe-me than mortal-dupe-me (hence envy) but I’d rather immortal-dupe-me existed than didn’t.
We could have some real fun together, for as long as I (mortal-dupe-me) has left. For one thing, we could do a lot of really cool practical research in to immortality and benevolent alien-gods.
Which leads me to my main point, which is that all this is perhaps besides the point. If someone looking just like me walked through the door and gave a speech like that, I simply wouldn’t believe them. There are loads of possibilities to explain that situation that don’t require such wholesale abandonment of science-as-we-know it: practical joke, previously unknown twin, hallucination/dream, etc. It’d probably throw me off a bit, but I like to imagine I wouldn’t jump to such a wild conclusion on such a flimsy pretext. Or, put another way, my prior for the existence of interventionist benevolent alien-gods is very, very low indeed.
EDIT: Just concerning the main point / last paragraph:
Don’t fight the hypothetical, otherwise the answer to any kind of Parfit’s Hitchhiker or Newcomb’s Problem class quagmire would be “I’ve probably been duped, there is no such Omega, and if there is, it ain’t offering boxes.”
Don’t accuse people of fighting the hypothetical, when in addition to questioning if anything like that would really happen, they also respond to the hypothetical as stated.
He said it was his main point, that’s what I responded to because I had nothing to add to his other remarks, which “[may be] besides the point”. Too easy to get off track with hypotheticals, and for a newcomer I thought it might be worth the links.
A problem with training narrow rationality skills is that without training balancing skills to a similar degree, you end up overapplying it. The classic example is that if know how to recognize biased reasoning, but you don’t know to (or fail to, despite knowing) apply the same level of scrutiny to arguments you like as to arguments you don’t like, then every bias you know about makes you stupider.
You may have an overdeveloped sense of “don’t fight the hypothetical” that needs some balance from attention to what questions are important, what answers are applicable in real life. Doug’s response to your hypothetical, which fully addressed the underlying philosophical question, combined with an evaluation of how realistic the scenario is, was a very nice answer, regardless of which part of it was labelled as the main point. Your criticism that it was fighting the hypothetical was just wrong.
Bluntly telling them a newcomer they wrong when they happen to be right, and giving a bunch of links so they have to read 3 articles, 2 of them not even relevant, to understand the criticism you are trying to make, is not an effective strategy for community building. (Giving links to interested newcomers can be good, but it should not be confrontational.)
You are reading a whole lot into very little. I’m tapping out, but am available via PM.
I’d at least be happy for my clone, because if I am supposed to love my family and offspring as normal people do, I should also love someone who shares 100% of my genetic plan, so I should be glad that someone on “Team MaoShan” got a good result. In fact, I used to use this argument to justify playing the lottery, in the sense that me losing meant that another version of me in the multiverse just did win, so I should be almost as happy. That was before I started using that money to purchase an equivalent amount of chocolate every week.