Okay, so I’ll ask again: why couldn’t the humans real preference be to not sacrifice the children? [...] In the latter case, you still haven’t explained why giving up the children is winning, and not doing so is not winning.
It seems like you are seeing my replies as soldier-arguments for the object-level question about the sacrifice of children, stumped on a particular conclusion that sacrificing children is right, while I’m merely giving opinion-neutral meta-comments about the semantics of such opinions. (I’m not sure I’m reading this right.)
You can’t decide your preference, preference is not what you actually do, it is what you should do.
You haven’t really elucidated this. You’re either pulling an ought out of nowhere, or you’re saying “preference is what you should do if you want to win”.
Preference defines what constitutes winning, your actions rank high in the preference order if they determine the world high in preference order. Preference can’t be reduced to winning or actions, as these all are the sides of the same structure.
It seems like you are seeing my replies as soldier-arguments for the object-level question about the sacrifice of children, stumped on a particular conclusion that sacrificing children is right, while I’m merely giving opinion-neutral meta-comments about the semantics of such opinions. (I’m not sure I’m reading this right.)
...so you’re NOT attempting to respond to my original question? My original question was “what’s irrational about not sacrificing the children?”
There is nothing intrinsically irrational about any action, rationality or irrationality depends on preference, which is the point I was trying to communicate. Any question about “rationality” of a decision is a question about correctness of preference-optimization. So, my reply to your original question is that the question is ill-posed, and the content of the reply was explanation as to why.
Okay, that’s fine. So you’ll agree that the various people—who were saying that the decision made in the show was the rational route—these people were speaking (at least somewhat) improperly?
It seems like you are seeing my replies as soldier-arguments for the object-level question about the sacrifice of children, stumped on a particular conclusion that sacrificing children is right, while I’m merely giving opinion-neutral meta-comments about the semantics of such opinions. (I’m not sure I’m reading this right.)
Preference defines what constitutes winning, your actions rank high in the preference order if they determine the world high in preference order. Preference can’t be reduced to winning or actions, as these all are the sides of the same structure.
...so you’re NOT attempting to respond to my original question? My original question was “what’s irrational about not sacrificing the children?”
There is nothing intrinsically irrational about any action, rationality or irrationality depends on preference, which is the point I was trying to communicate. Any question about “rationality” of a decision is a question about correctness of preference-optimization. So, my reply to your original question is that the question is ill-posed, and the content of the reply was explanation as to why.
Okay, that’s fine. So you’ll agree that the various people—who were saying that the decision made in the show was the rational route—these people were speaking (at least somewhat) improperly?