I agree with Nathan, but I think 1 or 2 per week would be ideal.
What do people think about moving to a system of laws an social norms focused on rationally minimizing our odds of death or harm, rather than on maintaining certain principles.
To take an example that gets extreme negative reactions, human societies don’t force random sets of people involuntarily into medical experiments that could adversely impact their health, even though every individual human might have our odds of health outcomes improved if we did have such a policy. Does that make us currently irrational for not pursuing such a policy? I think it does. If each individual human would odds-wise be better off healthwise if we engaged in mandatory compulsory drafting into medical experiments than if we didn’t, then I think it’s irrational for human societies not to do this. And I think this general principle applies widely to other areas of rule-making and social policy.
Is any expert in the fields of applied ethics and social policy studying this? Or done so in the past (no cheap throw away lines about Nazis or Tuskeegee please). Directions to links and publications are welcome.
I’m especially interested in responses from Anders Sandberg and TGGP. Contributors are welcome to respond in this thread on this topic anonymously for obvious reasons.
Maintaining certain principles? Currently our legal system is based on maximizing corporation profit with a bit of a front saying “justice”, so I’d say that is a much better alternative. We definitely do a shitty job with criminals in the USA as the system is set up to get people to repeat behaviors rather than change them. Social norms aren’t exactly controllable as far as I know. Unless you are also suggesting a mass brainwashing campaign armed with modern psychology I don’t see how we could change that much. Then again, it would also be insanely difficult to change the legal system. If we make a lunar or martian colony then maybe?
If such experiments could be carried out as effectively and efficiently as possible then I would agree that such experiments shouldn’t be disallowed. After all, if at some point we are going to be uploading minds we better get started replacing bits of people’s brains that they’ve lost.
Where I disagree is compulsory drafting of otherwise healthy happy individuals. Such a draft would lead to serious terror throughout the populace. Depending on how extreme the experiments effects are (read: death) it may lead to serious anti-science activists backed by personal tragedy.
There are plenty of people in the world who are living on the streets, or otherwise who suffering terribly from lost limbs, missing organs, ect, and would be happy to get a hot meal and a place to sleep in exchange for some experimental proceedure. There are enough maimed people that we don’t need to inflict additional damage.
I admit that there may be some areas where we need 100% healthy individuals, but it is more rational to move a quadriplegic to a robot body instead of someone with control of their limbs. Then again, by focusing on minorites, even a large number of them, we may skew our findings somewhat.
(edit: haha whoops replying to something from 2007)
I agree with Nathan, but I think 1 or 2 per week would be ideal. What do people think about moving to a system of laws an social norms focused on rationally minimizing our odds of death or harm, rather than on maintaining certain principles.
To take an example that gets extreme negative reactions, human societies don’t force random sets of people involuntarily into medical experiments that could adversely impact their health, even though every individual human might have our odds of health outcomes improved if we did have such a policy. Does that make us currently irrational for not pursuing such a policy? I think it does. If each individual human would odds-wise be better off healthwise if we engaged in mandatory compulsory drafting into medical experiments than if we didn’t, then I think it’s irrational for human societies not to do this. And I think this general principle applies widely to other areas of rule-making and social policy.
Is any expert in the fields of applied ethics and social policy studying this? Or done so in the past (no cheap throw away lines about Nazis or Tuskeegee please). Directions to links and publications are welcome.
I’m especially interested in responses from Anders Sandberg and TGGP. Contributors are welcome to respond in this thread on this topic anonymously for obvious reasons.
Maintaining certain principles? Currently our legal system is based on maximizing corporation profit with a bit of a front saying “justice”, so I’d say that is a much better alternative. We definitely do a shitty job with criminals in the USA as the system is set up to get people to repeat behaviors rather than change them. Social norms aren’t exactly controllable as far as I know. Unless you are also suggesting a mass brainwashing campaign armed with modern psychology I don’t see how we could change that much. Then again, it would also be insanely difficult to change the legal system. If we make a lunar or martian colony then maybe?
If such experiments could be carried out as effectively and efficiently as possible then I would agree that such experiments shouldn’t be disallowed. After all, if at some point we are going to be uploading minds we better get started replacing bits of people’s brains that they’ve lost.
Where I disagree is compulsory drafting of otherwise healthy happy individuals. Such a draft would lead to serious terror throughout the populace. Depending on how extreme the experiments effects are (read: death) it may lead to serious anti-science activists backed by personal tragedy.
There are plenty of people in the world who are living on the streets, or otherwise who suffering terribly from lost limbs, missing organs, ect, and would be happy to get a hot meal and a place to sleep in exchange for some experimental proceedure. There are enough maimed people that we don’t need to inflict additional damage.
I admit that there may be some areas where we need 100% healthy individuals, but it is more rational to move a quadriplegic to a robot body instead of someone with control of their limbs. Then again, by focusing on minorites, even a large number of them, we may skew our findings somewhat.
(edit: haha whoops replying to something from 2007)