Puzzle 1: George mortgages his house to invest in lottery tickets. He wins and becomes a millionaire. Did he make a good choice?
This looks like a tree-falls-in-forest-did-it-make-a-sound question. The expected value was negative, the outcome was positive, “good choice” can mean either assessment, distinguish them, mystery dissolved.
‘expected value’ is typically defined in reference to a specific set of information and intelligence rather than an objective truth about the world.
Expected value is subjectively objective. It depends on the knowledge one has, but what knowledge one has is also an objective fact about the world.
After all, if there is any sort of free will, perhaps we have the ability to make decisions that are sub-optimal by our expected value functions. Perhaps we commonly do so (else it wouldn’t be much in the sense of ‘free’ will.)
Is this Sartre’s concept of free will as actions coming out of nowhere, free of all considerations of what would actually be a good idea, with suicide as the ultimate free act? Eliezer has provided the answer to the Problem of Free Will here.
Yes. “Good” can mean desirable outcomes, or responsible decision making. The first obviously matches consequentialism. It appears not to be obvious to Lesswrongians that the second matches deontology. When we judge whether someone behaved culpably or not, we want to know whether they applied the rules and heuristic appropriate to their reference class (doctor, CEO, ships captain...). The consequences of their decision may have landed them in a tribunal, but we don’t hold people to blame for applying the rules and getting the wrong results.
Perhaps I have misunderstood consequentialism and deontology, but my impression was that (many forms of) consequentialism prefers that people optimize expected utility, while deontology does not (it would consider other things, like ‘not lying’, as considerably more important). My impression was that this was basically the main differentiating factor.
Agree about the tribunal situation. From a consequentialist viewpoint it would seem like we would want to judge people formally (in tribunals) according to how well they made an expected value decision, rather than on the outcome. For one, because otherwise we would have a lot more court cases (anything causally linked to a crime is responsible)
You need rules and heuristics to calculate expected value. How does that differ from deontology? The rules are not absolutes? But then it is still a compromise between D and C.
This looks like a tree-falls-in-forest-did-it-make-a-sound question. The expected value was negative, the outcome was positive, “good choice” can mean either assessment, distinguish them, mystery dissolved.
Expected value is subjectively objective. It depends on the knowledge one has, but what knowledge one has is also an objective fact about the world.
Is this Sartre’s concept of free will as actions coming out of nowhere, free of all considerations of what would actually be a good idea, with suicide as the ultimate free act? Eliezer has provided the answer to the Problem of Free Will here.
Yes. “Good” can mean desirable outcomes, or responsible decision making. The first obviously matches consequentialism. It appears not to be obvious to Lesswrongians that the second matches deontology. When we judge whether someone behaved culpably or not, we want to know whether they applied the rules and heuristic appropriate to their reference class (doctor, CEO, ships captain...). The consequences of their decision may have landed them in a tribunal, but we don’t hold people to blame for applying the rules and getting the wrong results.
Perhaps I have misunderstood consequentialism and deontology, but my impression was that (many forms of) consequentialism prefers that people optimize expected utility, while deontology does not (it would consider other things, like ‘not lying’, as considerably more important). My impression was that this was basically the main differentiating factor.
Agree about the tribunal situation. From a consequentialist viewpoint it would seem like we would want to judge people formally (in tribunals) according to how well they made an expected value decision, rather than on the outcome. For one, because otherwise we would have a lot more court cases (anything causally linked to a crime is responsible)
You need rules and heuristics to calculate expected value. How does that differ from deontology? The rules are not absolutes? But then it is still a compromise between D and C.
Freedom of a kind worth having would consist in being able to choose one’s values, not in being able to go against them.