If it turns out that women and men have different brain designs, and I don’t have particularly strong evidence that I’m a extreme genetic or developmental anomaly, then I should update my beliefs about myself based on this information, even if it isn’t at all obvious from the inside, and even though the fact may offend me and make me want to cry.
Might be just mind projection on my part, but it seems to me that in those accursed cases, where various aspects of an “egalitarian” way of thought—that includes both values, moral intuitions, ethical rules, actual beliefs about the world and beliefs about one’s beliefs—all get conflated, and the entire (silly for an AI but identity-forming for lots of current humans) system perceives some statement of fact as a challenge to its entire existence… well, the LW crowd at least would pride themselves on not being personally offended.
If tomorrow it was revealed with high certainty that us Slavs are genetically predisposed against some habits that happen to be crucial for civilized living and running a state nicely, I’d most definitely try to take it in stride. But when something like this stuff is said, I tend to feel sick and uncertain; I don’t see a purely consequentialist way out which would leave me ethically unscathed.
Ah, if only it was so easy as identifying the objective state of the world, than trying to act in accordance with (what you’ve settled on as) your terminal values. But this would require both* more rationality and more compartmentalization than I’ve seen in humans so far.
“You come to amidst the wreckage of your own making. Do you stay there, eyes squeezed shut, afraid to move, hoping to bleed to death? Or do you crawl out, help your loved ones, make sure the fire doesn’t spread, try to fix it?”—Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
Might be just mind projection on my part, but it seems to me that in those accursed cases, where various aspects of an “egalitarian” way of thought—that includes both values, moral intuitions, ethical rules, actual beliefs about the world and beliefs about one’s beliefs—all get conflated, and the entire (silly for an AI but identity-forming for lots of current humans) system perceives some statement of fact as a challenge to its entire existence… well, the LW crowd at least would pride themselves on not being personally offended.
If tomorrow it was revealed with high certainty that us Slavs are genetically predisposed against some habits that happen to be crucial for civilized living and running a state nicely, I’d most definitely try to take it in stride. But when something like this stuff is said, I tend to feel sick and uncertain; I don’t see a purely consequentialist way out which would leave me ethically unscathed.
Ah, if only it was so easy as identifying the objective state of the world, than trying to act in accordance with (what you’ve settled on as) your terminal values. But this would require both* more rationality and more compartmentalization than I’ve seen in humans so far.
“You come to amidst the wreckage of your own making. Do you stay there, eyes squeezed shut, afraid to move, hoping to bleed to death? Or do you crawl out, help your loved ones, make sure the fire doesn’t spread, try to fix it?”—Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne