Religious freedoms are a subsidy to keep the temperature low. There’s the myth that societies will slowly but surely get better, kind of like a gradient descent. If we increase the temperature too high, an entropic force would push us out of a narrow valley, so society could become much worse (e.g. nobody wants the Spanish Inquisition). It’s entirely possible that the stable equilibrium we’re being attracted to will still have religion.
I want to love this metaphor but don’t get it at all. Religious freedom isn’t a narrow valley; it’s an enormous Shelling hyperplane. 85% of people are religious, but no majority is Christian or Hindu or Kuvah’magh or Kraẞël or Ŧ̈ř̈ȧ̈ӎ͛ṽ̥ŧ̊ħ or Sisters of the Screaming Nightshroud of Ɀ̈ӊ͢Ṩ͎̈Ⱦ̸Ḥ̛͑.. These religions don’t agree on many things, but they all pull for freedom of religion over the crazy *#%! the other religions want.
People care about others, so their utility function naturally takes into account utilities of those around them. They may weight others’ utilities by familiarity, geographical distance, DNA distance, trust, etc. If every weight is nonnegative, there is a unique global utility function (Perron-Frobenius).
Some issues it solves:
Pascal’s mugging.
The argument “utilitarianism doesn’t work because you should care more about those around you”.
Big issue:
In a war, people assign negative weights towards their enemies, leading to multiple possible utility functions (which say the best thing to do is exterminate the enemy).
Risk is a great study into why selfish egoism fails.
I took an ethics class at university, and mostly came to the opinion that morality was utilitarianism with an added deontological rule to not impose negative externalities on others. I.e. “Help others, but if you don’t, at least don’t hurt them.” Both of these are tricky, because anytime you try to “sum over everyone” or have any sort of “universal rule” logic breaks down (due to Descartes’ evil demon and Russell’s vicious circle). Really, selfish egoism seemed to make more logical sense, but it doesn’t have a pro-social bias, so it makes less sense to adopt when considering how to interact with or create a society.
The great thing about societies is we’re almost always playing positive-sum games. After all, those that aren’t don’t last very long. Even if my ethics wasn’t well-defined, the actions proscribed will usually be pretty good ones, so it’s usually not useful to try to refine that definition. Plus, societies come with cultures that have evolved for thousands of years to bias people to act decently, often without needing to think how this relates to “ethics”. For example, many religious rules seem mildly ridiculous nowadays, but thousands of years ago they didn’t need to know why cooking a goatchild in its mother’s milk was wrong, just to not do it.
Well, all of this breaks down when you’re playing Risk. The scarcity of resources is very apparent to all the players, which limits the possibility for positive-sum games. Sure, you can help each other manoeuvre your stacks at the beginning of the game, or one-two slam the third and fourth players, but every time you cooperate with someone else, you’re defecting against everyone else. This is probably why everyone hates turtles so much: they only cooperate with themselves, which means they’re defecting against every other player.
I used to be more forgiving of mistakes or idiocracy. After all, everyone makes mistakes, and you can’t expect people to take the correct actions if they don’t know what they are! Shouldn’t the intentions matter more? Now, I disagree. If you can’t work with me, for whatever reason, I have to take you down.
One game in particular comes to mind. I had the North American position and signalled two or three times to the European and Africa+SA players to help me slam the Australian player. The Africa player had to go first, due to turn order and having 30 more troops; instead, they just sat and passed. The Australian player was obviously displeased about my intentions, and positioned their troops to take me out, so I broke SA and repositioned my troops there. What followed was a huge reshuffle (that the Africa player made take wayy longer due to their noobery), and eventually the European player died off. Then, again, I signal to the former Africa player to kill the Australian player, and again, they just sit and take a card. I couldn’t work with them, because they were being stupid and selfish. ‘And’, because that kind of selfishness is rather stupid. Since I couldn’t go first + second with them, I was forced to slam into them to guarantee second place. If they were smart about being selfish, they would have cooperated with me.
As that last sentence alludes to, selfish egoism seems to make a lot of sense for a moral understanding of Risk. Something I’ve noticed is almost all the Grandmasters that comment on the subreddit, or record on YouTube seem to have similar ideas:
“Alliances” are for coordination, not allegiances.
Why wouldn’t you kill someone on twenty troops for five cards?
It’s fine to manipulate your opponents into killing each other, especially if they don’t find out. For example, stacking next to a bot to get your ally’s troops killed, or cardblocking the SA position when in Europe and allied with NA and Africa.
This makes the stupidity issue almost more of a crime than intentionally harming someone. If someone plays well and punishes my greed, I can respect that. They want winning chances, so if I give them winning chances, they’ll work with me. But if I’m stupid, I might suicide my troops into them, ruining both of our games. Or, if someone gets their Asia position knocked out by Europe, I can understand them going through my NA/Africa bonus to get a new stack out. But, they’re ruining both of our games if they just sit on Central America or North Africa. And, since I’m smart enough, I would break the Europe bonus in retaliation. If everyone were smart and knew everyone else was smart, the Europe player wouldn’t knock out the SA player’s Asia stack. People wouldn’t greed for both Americas while I’m sitting in Africa. So on and so forth. Really, most of the “moral wrongs” we feel when playing Risk only occur because one of us isn’t smart enough!
My view on ethics has shifted; maybe smart selfish egoism really is a decent ethics to live by. However, also evidenced by Risk, most people aren’t smart enough to work with, and most that are took awhile to get there. I think utilitaranism/deontology works better because people don’t need to think as hard to take good actions. Even if they aren’t necessarily the best, they’re far better than most people would come up with!
Is there a difference between utilitarianism and selfish egoism?
For utilitarianism, you need to choose a utility function. This is entirely based on your preferences: what you value, and who you value get weighed and summed to create your utility function. I don’t see how this differs from selfish egoism: you decide what and who you value, and take actions that maximize these values.
Each doctrine comes with a little brainwashing. Utilitarianism is usually introduced as summing “equally” between people, but we all know some arrangements of atoms are more equal than others. However, introducing it this way naturally leads people to look for cooperation and value others more, both of which increase their chance of surviving.
Ayn Rand was rather reactionary against religion and its associated sacrificial behavior, so selfish egoism is often introduced as a reaction:
When you die, everything is over for you. Therefore, your survival is paramount.
You get nothing out of sacrificing your values. Therefore, you should only do things that benefit you.
Kant claimed people are good only by their strength of will. Wanting to help someone is a selfish action, and therefore not good. Rand takes the more individually rational approach: wanting to help someone makes you good, while helping someone against your interests is self-destructive. To be fair to Kant, when most agents are highly irrational your society will do better with universal laws than moral anarchy. This is also probably why selfish egoism gets a bad rapport: even if you are a selfish egoist, you want to influence your society to be more Kantian. Or, at the very least, like those utilitarians. They at least claim to value others.
However, I think rational utilitarians really are the same as rational selfish egoists. A rational selfish egoist would choose to look for cooperation. When they have fundamental disagreements with cooperative others, they would modify their values to care more about their counterpart so they both win. In the utilitarian bias, it’s more difficult to realize when to change your utility function, while it’s a little easier with selfish egoism. After all, the most important thing is survival, not utility.
I think both philosophies are slightly wrong. You shouldn’t care about survival per se, but expected discounted future entropy (i.e. how well you proliferate). This will obviously drop to zero if you die, but having a fulfilling fifty years of experiences is probably more important than seventy years in a 2x2 box. Utility is merely a weight on your chances of survival, and thus future entropy. ClosedAI is close with their soft actor-critic, though they say it’s entropy-regularized reinforcement learning. In reality, all reinforcement learning is maximizing energy-regularized entropy.
For utilitarianism, you need to choose a utility function. This is entirely based on your preferences: what you value, and who you value get weighed and summed to create your utility function. I don’t see how this differs from selfish egoism: you decide what and who you value, and take actions that maximize these values.
I see a difference in the word “summed”. In practice this would probably mean things like cooperating in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (maximizing the sum of utility, rather than the utility of an individual player).
Religious freedoms are a subsidy to keep the temperature low. There’s the myth that societies will slowly but surely get better, kind of like a gradient descent. If we increase the temperature too high, an entropic force would push us out of a narrow valley, so society could become much worse (e.g. nobody wants the Spanish Inquisition). It’s entirely possible that the stable equilibrium we’re being attracted to will still have religion.
I want to love this metaphor but don’t get it at all. Religious freedom isn’t a narrow valley; it’s an enormous Shelling hyperplane. 85% of people are religious, but no majority is Christian or Hindu or Kuvah’magh or Kraẞël or Ŧ̈ř̈ȧ̈ӎ͛ṽ̥ŧ̊ħ or Sisters of the Screaming Nightshroud of Ɀ̈ӊ͢Ṩ͎̈Ⱦ̸Ḥ̛͑.. These religions don’t agree on many things, but they all pull for freedom of religion over the crazy *#%! the other religions want.
Graph Utilitarianism:
People care about others, so their utility function naturally takes into account utilities of those around them. They may weight others’ utilities by familiarity, geographical distance, DNA distance, trust, etc. If every weight is nonnegative, there is a unique global utility function (Perron-Frobenius).
Some issues it solves:
Pascal’s mugging.
The argument “utilitarianism doesn’t work because you should care more about those around you”.
Big issue:
In a war, people assign negative weights towards their enemies, leading to multiple possible utility functions (which say the best thing to do is exterminate the enemy).
This is a very imprecise use of “utility”. Caring about others does not generally take their utility into account.
It takes one’s model of the utility that one thinks the others should have into account.
And, as you note, even this isn’t consistent across people or time.
Risk is a great study into why selfish egoism fails.
I took an ethics class at university, and mostly came to the opinion that morality was utilitarianism with an added deontological rule to not impose negative externalities on others. I.e. “Help others, but if you don’t, at least don’t hurt them.” Both of these are tricky, because anytime you try to “sum over everyone” or have any sort of “universal rule” logic breaks down (due to Descartes’ evil demon and Russell’s vicious circle). Really, selfish egoism seemed to make more logical sense, but it doesn’t have a pro-social bias, so it makes less sense to adopt when considering how to interact with or create a society.
The great thing about societies is we’re almost always playing positive-sum games. After all, those that aren’t don’t last very long. Even if my ethics wasn’t well-defined, the actions proscribed will usually be pretty good ones, so it’s usually not useful to try to refine that definition. Plus, societies come with cultures that have evolved for thousands of years to bias people to act decently, often without needing to think how this relates to “ethics”. For example, many religious rules seem mildly ridiculous nowadays, but thousands of years ago they didn’t need to know why cooking a goatchild in its mother’s milk was wrong, just to not do it.
Well, all of this breaks down when you’re playing Risk. The scarcity of resources is very apparent to all the players, which limits the possibility for positive-sum games. Sure, you can help each other manoeuvre your stacks at the beginning of the game, or one-two slam the third and fourth players, but every time you cooperate with someone else, you’re defecting against everyone else. This is probably why everyone hates turtles so much: they only cooperate with themselves, which means they’re defecting against every other player.
I used to be more forgiving of mistakes or idiocracy. After all, everyone makes mistakes, and you can’t expect people to take the correct actions if they don’t know what they are! Shouldn’t the intentions matter more? Now, I disagree. If you can’t work with me, for whatever reason, I have to take you down.
One game in particular comes to mind. I had the North American position and signalled two or three times to the European and Africa+SA players to help me slam the Australian player. The Africa player had to go first, due to turn order and having 30 more troops; instead, they just sat and passed. The Australian player was obviously displeased about my intentions, and positioned their troops to take me out, so I broke SA and repositioned my troops there. What followed was a huge reshuffle (that the Africa player made take wayy longer due to their noobery), and eventually the European player died off. Then, again, I signal to the former Africa player to kill the Australian player, and again, they just sit and take a card. I couldn’t work with them, because they were being stupid and selfish. ‘And’, because that kind of selfishness is rather stupid. Since I couldn’t go first + second with them, I was forced to slam into them to guarantee second place. If they were smart about being selfish, they would have cooperated with me.
As that last sentence alludes to, selfish egoism seems to make a lot of sense for a moral understanding of Risk. Something I’ve noticed is almost all the Grandmasters that comment on the subreddit, or record on YouTube seem to have similar ideas:
“Alliances” are for coordination, not allegiances.
Why wouldn’t you kill someone on twenty troops for five cards?
It’s fine to manipulate your opponents into killing each other, especially if they don’t find out. For example, stacking next to a bot to get your ally’s troops killed, or cardblocking the SA position when in Europe and allied with NA and Africa.
This makes the stupidity issue almost more of a crime than intentionally harming someone. If someone plays well and punishes my greed, I can respect that. They want winning chances, so if I give them winning chances, they’ll work with me. But if I’m stupid, I might suicide my troops into them, ruining both of our games. Or, if someone gets their Asia position knocked out by Europe, I can understand them going through my NA/Africa bonus to get a new stack out. But, they’re ruining both of our games if they just sit on Central America or North Africa. And, since I’m smart enough, I would break the Europe bonus in retaliation. If everyone were smart and knew everyone else was smart, the Europe player wouldn’t knock out the SA player’s Asia stack. People wouldn’t greed for both Americas while I’m sitting in Africa. So on and so forth. Really, most of the “moral wrongs” we feel when playing Risk only occur because one of us isn’t smart enough!
My view on ethics has shifted; maybe smart selfish egoism really is a decent ethics to live by. However, also evidenced by Risk, most people aren’t smart enough to work with, and most that are took awhile to get there. I think utilitaranism/deontology works better because people don’t need to think as hard to take good actions. Even if they aren’t necessarily the best, they’re far better than most people would come up with!
Is there a difference between utilitarianism and selfish egoism?
For utilitarianism, you need to choose a utility function. This is entirely based on your preferences: what you value, and who you value get weighed and summed to create your utility function. I don’t see how this differs from selfish egoism: you decide what and who you value, and take actions that maximize these values.
Each doctrine comes with a little brainwashing. Utilitarianism is usually introduced as summing “equally” between people, but we all know some arrangements of atoms are more equal than others. However, introducing it this way naturally leads people to look for cooperation and value others more, both of which increase their chance of surviving.
Ayn Rand was rather reactionary against religion and its associated sacrificial behavior, so selfish egoism is often introduced as a reaction:
When you die, everything is over for you. Therefore, your survival is paramount.
You get nothing out of sacrificing your values. Therefore, you should only do things that benefit you.
Kant claimed people are good only by their strength of will. Wanting to help someone is a selfish action, and therefore not good. Rand takes the more individually rational approach: wanting to help someone makes you good, while helping someone against your interests is self-destructive. To be fair to Kant, when most agents are highly irrational your society will do better with universal laws than moral anarchy. This is also probably why selfish egoism gets a bad rapport: even if you are a selfish egoist, you want to influence your society to be more Kantian. Or, at the very least, like those utilitarians. They at least claim to value others.
However, I think rational utilitarians really are the same as rational selfish egoists. A rational selfish egoist would choose to look for cooperation. When they have fundamental disagreements with cooperative others, they would modify their values to care more about their counterpart so they both win. In the utilitarian bias, it’s more difficult to realize when to change your utility function, while it’s a little easier with selfish egoism. After all, the most important thing is survival, not utility.
I think both philosophies are slightly wrong. You shouldn’t care about survival per se, but expected discounted future entropy (i.e. how well you proliferate). This will obviously drop to zero if you die, but having a fulfilling fifty years of experiences is probably more important than seventy years in a 2x2 box. Utility is merely a weight on your chances of survival, and thus future entropy. ClosedAI is close with their soft actor-critic, though they say it’s entropy-regularized reinforcement learning. In reality, all reinforcement learning is maximizing energy-regularized entropy.
I see a difference in the word “summed”. In practice this would probably mean things like cooperating in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (maximizing the sum of utility, rather than the utility of an individual player).
How do you choose to sum the utility when playing a Prisoner’s Dilemma against a rock?