How does adding factual knowledge get rid of people’s desire to hurt someone else out of revenge?
“If we knew better” is an ambiguous phrase, I probably should have used Eliezer’s original: “if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together”. That carries a lot of baggage, at least for me.
I don’t experience (significant) desires of revenge, so I can only extrapolate from fictional evidence. Say the “someone” in question killed a loved one, and I wanted to hurt them for that. Suppose further that they were no longer able to kill anyone else. Given the time and the means to think about it clearly, I coud see that hurting them would not improve the state of the world for me, or for anyone else, and only impose further unnecessary suffering.
The (possibly flawed) assumption of CEV, as I understood it, is that if I could reason flawlessly, non-pathologically about all of my desires and preferences, I would no longer cleave to the self-undermining ones, and what remains would be compatible with the non-self-undermining desires and preferences of the rest of humanity.
Caveat: I have read the original CEV document but not quite as carefully as maybe I should have, mainly because it carried a “Warning: obsolete” label and I was expecting to come across more recent insights here.
“If we knew better” is an ambiguous phrase, I probably should have used Eliezer’s original: “if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together”. That carries a lot of baggage, at least for me.
I don’t experience (significant) desires of revenge, so I can only extrapolate from fictional evidence. Say the “someone” in question killed a loved one, and I wanted to hurt them for that. Suppose further that they were no longer able to kill anyone else. Given the time and the means to think about it clearly, I coud see that hurting them would not improve the state of the world for me, or for anyone else, and only impose further unnecessary suffering.
The (possibly flawed) assumption of CEV, as I understood it, is that if I could reason flawlessly, non-pathologically about all of my desires and preferences, I would no longer cleave to the self-undermining ones, and what remains would be compatible with the non-self-undermining desires and preferences of the rest of humanity.
Caveat: I have read the original CEV document but not quite as carefully as maybe I should have, mainly because it carried a “Warning: obsolete” label and I was expecting to come across more recent insights here.