However, imagine if we ran two copies of Clippy in a grand paperclipping race: one that consumed entertainment by preference, and one that did not. The non-entertainment version would win every time.
This is proving the conclusion by assuming it.
Similarly, if you want to make the world a better place (whatever that means for you), every minute you spend on doing other things is a minute wasted (unless they are explicitly included in your goals). This includes watching TV, eating, sleeping, and being dead. Some (if not all) of such activities are unavoidable, but as I said, I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a feature.
The words make a perfectly logical pattern, but I find that the picture they make is absurd. The ontology has gone wrong.
Some businessman wrote a book of advice called “Never Eat Alone”, the title of which means that every meal is an opportunity to have a meal with someone to network with. That is what the saying “he who would be Pope must think of nothing else” looks like in practice. Not wearing oneself out like Superman in the SMBC cartoon, driven into self-imposed slavery by memetic immune disorder.
BTW, for what it’s worth, I do not watch TV. And now I am imagining a chapter of that book entitled “Never Sleep Alone”.
Some businessman wrote a book of advice called “Never Eat Alone”, the title of which means that every meal is an opportunity to have a meal with someone to network with. That is what the saying “he who would be Pope must think of nothing else” looks like in practice. Not wearing oneself out like Superman in the SMBC cartoon, driven into self-imposed slavery by memetic immune disorder.
Actually, I think that the world described in that SMBC cartoon is far preferable to the standard DC comics world with Superman. I do not think that doing what Superman did there is a memetic immune disorder, but rather a (successful) attempt to make the world a better place.
I definitely wouldn’t. A single tormented child seems to me like an incredibly good tradeoff for the number of very high quality lives that Omelas supports, much better than we get with real cities.
It sucks to actually be the person whose well-being is being sacrificed for everyone else, but if you’re deciding from behind a veil of ignorance which society to be a part of, your expected well being is going to be higher in Omelas.
Back when I was eleven or so, I contemplated this, and made a precommitment that if I were ever in a situation where I’m offered a chance to improve total wellfare for everyone at the cost of personal torment, I should take it immediately without giving myself any time to contemplate what I’d be getting myself into, so in that sense I’ve effectively volunteered myself to be the tormented child.
I don’t disagree with maximally efficient altruism, just with the idea that it’s sensible to judge entertainment only as an instrumental value in service of productivity.
It sucks to actually be the person whose well-being is being sacrificed for everyone else, but if you’re deciding from behind a veil of ignorance which society to be a part of, your expected well being is going to be higher in Omelas.
You’re assuming here that the “veil of ignorance” gives you exactly equal chance of being each citizen of Omelas, so that a decision under the veil reduces to average utilitarianism.
However, in Rawls’s formulation, you’re not supposed to assume that; the veil means you’re also entirely ignorant about the mechanism used to incarnate you as one of the citizens, and so must consider all probability distributions over the citizens when choosing your society. In particular, you must assign some weight to a distribution picked by a devil (or mischievous Omega) who will find the person with the very lowest utility in your choice of society and incarnate you as that person. So you wouldn’t choose Omelas.
This seems to be why Rawls preferred maximin decision theory under the veil of ignorance rather than expected utility decision theory.
In that case, don’t use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, it’s not the best mechanism for addressing the decision. A veil where you have an equal chance of your own child being the victim to anyone else’s (assuming you’re already too old to be the victim) is more the sort of situation anyone actually deciding whether or not to live in Omelas would face.
Of course, I would pick Omelas even under the Rawlsian veil, since as I’ve said I’m willing to be the one who takes the hit.
Ah, so you are considering the question “If Omelas already exists, should I choose to live there or walk away?” rather than the Rawlsian question “Should we create a society like Omelas in the first place?” The “veil of ignorance” meme nearly always refers to the Rawlsian concept, so I misunderstood you there.
Incidentally, I reread the story and there seems to be no description of how the child was selected in the first place or how he/she is replaced. So it’s not clear that your own child does have the same chance of being the victim as anyone else’s.
Well, as I mentioned in another comment some time ago (not in this thread,) I support both not walking away from Omelas, and also creating Omelases unless an even more utility efficient method of creating happy and functional societies is forthcoming.
Our society rests on a lot more suffering than Omelas, not just in an incidental way (such as people within our cities who don’t have housing or medical care,) but directly, through channels such as economic slavery where companies rely on workers, mainly abroad, who they keep locked in debt, who could not leave to seek employment elsewhere even if they wanted to and other opportunities were forthcoming. I can respect a moral code that would lead people to walk out on Omelas as a form of protest that would also lead people to walk out on modern society to live on a self sufficient seasteading colony, but I reject the notion that Omelas is worse than, or as bad as, our own society, in a morally relevant way.
A single tormented child seems to me like an incredibly good tradeoff for the number of very high quality lives that Omelas supports, much better than we get with real cities.
I cannot fathom why a comment like that would be upvoted by anyone but an unfeeling robot. This is not even the dust-specks-vs-torture case, given that the Omelas is not a very large city.
if I were ever in a situation where I’m offered a chance to improve total wellfare for everyone at the cost of personal torment, I should take it immediately
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice. Would you shrug and say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that your mommy/daddy can live a happy life”? I know what I would do.
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice. Would you shrug and say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that your mommy/daddy can live a happy life”?
I hope I would have the strength to say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that everyone in the city can live a happy life.” Doing it just for myself and my own social circle wouldn’t be a good tradeoff, but those aren’t the terms of the scenario.
Considering how many of our basic commodities rely on sweatshop or otherwise extremely miserable labor, we’re already living off the backs of quite a lot of tormented children.
The Babyeaters’ babies outnumber the adults; their situation is analogous, not to the city of Omelas, but to a utopian city built on top of another, even larger, dystopian city, on which it relies for its existence.
I would rather live in a society where people loved and cherished their children, but also valued their society, and were willing to shut up and multiply and take the hit themselves, or to their own loved ones, for the sake of a common good that really is that much greater, and I want to be the sort of person I’d want others in that society to be.
I’ve never had children, but I have been in love, in a reciprocated relationship of the sort where it feels like it’s actually as big a deal as all the love songs have ever made it out to be, and I think that sacrificing someone I loved for the sake of a city like Omelas is something I’d be willing to do in practice, not just in theory (and she never would have expected me to do differently, nor would I of her.) It’s definitely not the case that really loving someone, with true depth of feeling, precludes acknowledgment that there are some things worth sacrificing even that bond for.
I’m guessing that neither have most of those who upvoted you and downvoted me. I literally cannot imagine a worse betrayal than the scenario we’ve been discussing. I can imagine one kind-of-happy society where something like this would be OK, though.
I cannot fathom why a comment like that would be upvoted by anyone but an unfeeling robot.
Sounds like you need to update your model of people who don’t have children. Also, how aggressively do you campaign against things like sweatshop labor in third-world countries, which as Desrtopa correctly points out are a substantially worse real-world analogue? Do children only matter if they’re your children?
the real problem with omelas: It totally ignores the fact that there are children suffering literally as we speak in every city on the planet. Omelas somehow managed to get it down to one child. How many other children would you sacrifice for your own?
the real problem with omelas: It totally ignores the fact that there are children suffering literally as we speak in every city on the planet.
Unlike in the fictional Omelas, there is no direct dependence or direct sacrifice. Certainly it is possible to at least temporarily alleviate suffering of others in this non-hypothetical world by sacrificing some of your fortune, but that’s the difference between active and passive approach, there is a large gap there.
Related. Nornagest put their finger on this being a conflict between the consequentially compelling (optimizing for general welfare) and the psychologically compelling (not being confronted with knowledge of an individual child suffering torture because of you). I think Nornagest’s also right that a fully specified Omelas scenario would almost certainly feel less compelling, which is one reason I’m not much impressed by Le Guin’s story.
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice.
The situation is not analogous, since sacrificing one’s child would presumably make most parents miserable for the rest of their days. In Omelas, however, the sacrifice makes people happy, instead.
I don’t disagree with maximally efficient altruism, just with the idea that it’s sensible to judge entertainment only as an instrumental value in service of productivity.
As I said in previous comments, I am genuinely not sure whether entertainment is a good terminal goal to have.
By analogy, I absolutely require sleep in order to be productive at all in any capacity; but if I could swallow a magic pill that removed my need for sleep (with no other side-effects), I’d do so in a heartbeat. Sleep is an instrumental goal for me, not a terminal one. But I don’t know if entertainment is like that or not.
Thus, I’m really interested in hearing more about your thoughts on the topic.
I’m not sure that I would regard entertainment as a terminal goal, but I’m very sure I wouldn’t regard productivity as one. As an instrumental goal, it’s an intermediary between a lot of things that I care about, but optimizing for productivity seems like about as worthy a goal to me as paperclipping.
Right, agreed, but “productivity” is just a rough estimate of how quickly you’re moving towards your actual goals. If entertainment is not one of them, then either it enhances your productivity in some way, or it reduces it, or it has no effect (which is unlikely, IMO).
Productivity and fun aren’t orthogonal; for example, it is entirely possible that if your goal is “experience as much pleasure as possible”, then some amount of entertainment would directly contribute to the goal, and would thus be productive. That said, though, I can’t claim that such a goal would be a good goal to have in the first place.
How so ? Imagine that you have two identical paperclip maximizers; for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that they are not capable of radical self-modification (though the results would be similar if they were). Each agent is capable of converting raw titanium to paperclips at the same rate. Agent A spends 100% of its time on making paperclips. Agent B spends 80% of its time on paperclips, and 20% of its time on watching TV. If we gave A and B two identical blocks of titanium, which agent would finish converting all of it to paperclips first ?
That is what the saying “he who would be Pope must think of nothing else” looks like in practice.
FeepingCreature addressed this better than I could in this comment . I understand that you find the idea of making paperclips (or political movements, or software, or whatever) all day every day with no breaks abhorrent, and so do I. But then, some people find polyamory abhorrent as well, and then they “polyhack” themselves and grow to enjoy it. Is entertainment your terminal value, or a mental bias ? And if it is a terminal value, is it the best terminal value that you could possibly have ?
WARNING: This comment contains explicit discussion of an information hazard.
Imagine that you have two identical paperclip maximizers
I decline to do so. What imaginary creatures would choose whose choice has been written into their definition is of no significance. (This is also a reply to the comment of FeepingCreature you referenced.) I’m more interested in the practical question of how actual human beings, which this discussion began with, can avoid the pitfall of being taken over by a utility monster they’ve created in their own heads.
This is a basilisk problem. Unlike Roko’s, which depends on exotic decision theory, this one involves nothing more than plain utilitarianism. Unlike the standard Utility Monster scenario, this one involves no imaginary entities or hypothetical situations. You just have to look at the actual world around you through the eyes of utilitarianism. It’s a very short road from the innocent-sounding “the greatest good for the greatest number” to this: There are seven billion people on this planet. How can the good you could do them possibly be outweighed by any amount of your own happiness? Just by sitting there reading LessWrong you’re killing babies! Having a beer? You’re drinking dead babies. Own a car? You’re driving on a carpet of dead babies! Murderer! Murderer! Add a dash of transhumanism and you can up the stakes to an obligation to bringing about billions of billions of future humans throughout the universe living lives billions of times better than ours.
But even Peter Singer doesn’t go that far, continuing to be an academic professor and paying his utilitarian obligations by preaching utilitarianism and donating twenty percent of his salary to charity.
This is such an obvious failure mode for utilitarianism, a philosophy at least two centuries old, that surely philosophers must have addressed it. But I don’t know what their responses are.
Christianity has the same problem, and handles it in practice by testing the vocation of those who come to it seeking to devote their whole life to the service of God, to determine whether they are truly called by God. For it is written that many are called, yet few are chosen. In non-supernatural terms, that means determining whether the applicant is psychologically fitted for the life they feel called to, and if not, deflecting their mania into some more productive route.
And then you have people like H0, who notices H2 is crazy, decides that that means that they shouldn’t even try to be altruistic, and accuses H1 of hypocrisy because she’s not like H2. (Exhibit A)
That is my expectation also. However, persuading H2 of that (“but dead babies!”) is likely to be a work of counselling or spiritual guidance rather than reason.
Well… so, if we both expect H1 to do more good than H2, it seems that if we were to look at them through the eyes of utilitarianism, we would endorse being H1 over being H2. But you seem to be saying that H2, looking through the eyes of utilitarianism, endorses being H2 over being H1. I am therefore deeply confused by your model of what’s going on here.
Oh yes, H1 is more effective, heathier, saner, more rational, etc. than H2. H2 is experiencing existential panic and cannot relinquish his death-grip on the idea.
Do you think being a utilitarian makes someone less effective, healthy, sane, rational etc.? Or do you think H2 has these various traits independent of them being a utilitarian?
WARNING: More discussion of a basilisk, with a link to a real-world example.
It’s a possible failure mode of utilitarianism. Some people succumb to it (see George Price for an actual example of a similar failure) and some don’t.
I don’t understand your confusion and this pair of questions just seems misconceived.
(shrug) OK. I certainly agree with you that some utilitarians suffer from the existential panic and inability to relinquish their death-grips on unhealthy ideas, while others don’t. I’m tapping out here.
One could reason that one is better placed to do good effectively when focussing on oneself, ones family, one’s community, etc, simply because one understands them better.
What imaginary creatures would choose whose choice has been written into their definition is of no significance.
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
Also, keep in mind that a goal like “make more paperclips” does leave a lot of room for other choices. The agent could spend its time studying metallurgy, or buying existing paperclip factories, or experimenting with alloys, or attempting to invent nanotechnology, or some combination of these and many more activities. It’s not constrained to just a single path.
Just by sitting there reading LessWrong you’re killing babies! … Add a dash of transhumanism and you can up the stakes to an obligation to bringing about billions of billions of future humans throughout the universe living lives billions of times better than ours.
On the one hand, I do agree with you, and I can’t wait to see your proposed solution. On the other hand, I’m not sure what this has to do with the topic. I wasn’t talking about billions of future humans or anything of the sort, merely about a single (semi-hypothetical) human and his goals; whether entertainment is a terminal or instrumental goal; and whether it is a good goal to have.
Let me put it in a different way: if you could take a magic pill which would remove (or, at the very least, greatly reduce) your desire for passive entertainment, would you do it ? People with extremely low preferences for passive entertainment do exist, after all, so this scenario isn’t entirely fantastic (other than for the magic pill part, of course).
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
What is written in to humans by evolution is hardly relevant. The point is that you can’t prove anything about humansby drawing a comparison with imaginary creatures that have had something potentially quite different written into them by their creator.
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
I have no idea what that even means.
On the one hand, I do agree with you, and I can’t wait to see your proposed solution.
My only solution is “don’t do that then”. It’s a broken thought process, and my interest in it ends with that recognition. Am I a soul doctor? I am not. I seem to be naturally resistant to that failure, but I don’t know how to fix anyone who isn’t.
Let me put it in a different way: if you could take a magic pill which would remove (or, at the very least, greatly reduce) your desire for passive entertainment, would you do it ?
What desire for passive entertainment? For that matter, what is this “passive entertainment”? I am not getting a clear idea of what we are talking about. At any rate, I can’t imagine “entertainment” in the ordinary meaning of that word being a terminal goal.
FWIW, I do not watch television, and have never attended spectator sports.
People with extremely low preferences for passive entertainment do exist, after all
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
I have no idea what that even means.
To rephrase: do you believe that all choices made by humans are completely under the humans’ conscious control ? If not, what proportion of our choices is under our control, and what proportion is written into our genes and is thus difficult, if not impossible, to change (given our present level of technology) ?
You objected to my using Clippy as an analogy to human behaviour, on the grounds that Clippy’s choices are “written into its definition”. My point is that a). Clippy is free to make whatever choices it wants, as long as it believes (correctly or erroneously) such choices would lead to more paperclips, and b). we humans operate in a similar way, only we care about things other than paperclips, and therefore c). Clippy is a valid analogy.
My only solution is “don’t do that then”.
Don’t do what ? Do you have a moral theory which works better than utilitarianism/consequentialism ?
What desire for passive entertainment? For that matter, what is this “passive entertainment”?
You don’t watch TV or attend sports, but do you read any fiction books ? Listen to music ? Look at paintings or sculptures (on your own initiative, that is, and not as part of a job) ? Enjoy listening to some small subclass of jokes ? Watch any movies ? Play video games ? Stare at a fire at night ? I’m just trying to pinpoint your general level of interest in entertainment.
At any rate, I can’t imagine “entertainment” in the ordinary meaning of that word being a terminal goal.
Just because you personally can’t imagine something, doesn’t mean it’s not true. For example, art and music—both of which are forms of passive entertainment—has been a part of human history ever since the caveman days, and continue to flourish today. There may be something hardcoded in our genes (maybe not yours personally, but on average) that makes us enjoy art and music. On the other hand, there are lots of things hardcoded in our genes that we’d be better off without...
To rephrase: do you believe that all choices made by humans are completely under the humans’ conscious control ? If not, what proportion of our choices is under our control, and what proportion is written into our genes and is thus difficult, if not impossible, to change (given our present level of technology) ?
The whole language is wrong here.
What does it mean to talk about a choice being “completely under the humans’ conscious control”? Obviously, the causal connections wind through and through all manner of things that are outside consciousness as well as inside. When could you ever say that a decision is “completely under conscious control”?
Then you talk as if a decision not “completely under conscious control” must be “written into the genes”. Where does that come from?
do you read any fiction books?
Why do you specify fiction? Is fiction “passive entertainment” but non-fiction something else?
There may be something hardcoded in our genes (maybe not yours personally, but on average) that makes us enjoy art and music.
What is this “us” that is separate from and acted upon by our genes? Mentalistic dualism?
My only solution is “don’t do that then”.
Don’t do what ? Do you have a moral theory which works better than utilitarianism/consequentialism ?
Don’t crash and burn. I have no moral theory and am not impressed by anything on offer from the philosophers.
To sum up, there’s a large and complex set of assumptions behind everything you’re saying here that I don’t think I share, but I can only guess at from glimpsing the shadowy outlines. I doubt further discussion will get anywhere useful.
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
I think Bugmaster is equating being “written in” in the sense of a stipulation in a thought experiment with being “written in” in the sense of being the outcome of an evolutionary process.
This is proving the conclusion by assuming it.
The words make a perfectly logical pattern, but I find that the picture they make is absurd. The ontology has gone wrong.
Some businessman wrote a book of advice called “Never Eat Alone”, the title of which means that every meal is an opportunity to have a meal with someone to network with. That is what the saying “he who would be Pope must think of nothing else” looks like in practice. Not wearing oneself out like Superman in the SMBC cartoon, driven into self-imposed slavery by memetic immune disorder.
BTW, for what it’s worth, I do not watch TV. And now I am imagining a chapter of that book entitled “Never Sleep Alone”.
Actually, I think that the world described in that SMBC cartoon is far preferable to the standard DC comics world with Superman. I do not think that doing what Superman did there is a memetic immune disorder, but rather a (successful) attempt to make the world a better place.
You would, then, not walk away from Omelas?
I definitely wouldn’t. A single tormented child seems to me like an incredibly good tradeoff for the number of very high quality lives that Omelas supports, much better than we get with real cities.
It sucks to actually be the person whose well-being is being sacrificed for everyone else, but if you’re deciding from behind a veil of ignorance which society to be a part of, your expected well being is going to be higher in Omelas.
Back when I was eleven or so, I contemplated this, and made a precommitment that if I were ever in a situation where I’m offered a chance to improve total wellfare for everyone at the cost of personal torment, I should take it immediately without giving myself any time to contemplate what I’d be getting myself into, so in that sense I’ve effectively volunteered myself to be the tormented child.
I don’t disagree with maximally efficient altruism, just with the idea that it’s sensible to judge entertainment only as an instrumental value in service of productivity.
You’re assuming here that the “veil of ignorance” gives you exactly equal chance of being each citizen of Omelas, so that a decision under the veil reduces to average utilitarianism.
However, in Rawls’s formulation, you’re not supposed to assume that; the veil means you’re also entirely ignorant about the mechanism used to incarnate you as one of the citizens, and so must consider all probability distributions over the citizens when choosing your society. In particular, you must assign some weight to a distribution picked by a devil (or mischievous Omega) who will find the person with the very lowest utility in your choice of society and incarnate you as that person. So you wouldn’t choose Omelas.
This seems to be why Rawls preferred maximin decision theory under the veil of ignorance rather than expected utility decision theory.
In that case, don’t use a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, it’s not the best mechanism for addressing the decision. A veil where you have an equal chance of your own child being the victim to anyone else’s (assuming you’re already too old to be the victim) is more the sort of situation anyone actually deciding whether or not to live in Omelas would face.
Of course, I would pick Omelas even under the Rawlsian veil, since as I’ve said I’m willing to be the one who takes the hit.
Ah, so you are considering the question “If Omelas already exists, should I choose to live there or walk away?” rather than the Rawlsian question “Should we create a society like Omelas in the first place?” The “veil of ignorance” meme nearly always refers to the Rawlsian concept, so I misunderstood you there.
Incidentally, I reread the story and there seems to be no description of how the child was selected in the first place or how he/she is replaced. So it’s not clear that your own child does have the same chance of being the victim as anyone else’s.
Well, as I mentioned in another comment some time ago (not in this thread,) I support both not walking away from Omelas, and also creating Omelases unless an even more utility efficient method of creating happy and functional societies is forthcoming.
Our society rests on a lot more suffering than Omelas, not just in an incidental way (such as people within our cities who don’t have housing or medical care,) but directly, through channels such as economic slavery where companies rely on workers, mainly abroad, who they keep locked in debt, who could not leave to seek employment elsewhere even if they wanted to and other opportunities were forthcoming. I can respect a moral code that would lead people to walk out on Omelas as a form of protest that would also lead people to walk out on modern society to live on a self sufficient seasteading colony, but I reject the notion that Omelas is worse than, or as bad as, our own society, in a morally relevant way.
I cannot fathom why a comment like that would be upvoted by anyone but an unfeeling robot. This is not even the dust-specks-vs-torture case, given that the Omelas is not a very large city.
Imagine that it is not you, but your child you must sacrifice. Would you shrug and say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that your mommy/daddy can live a happy life”? I know what I would do.
I hope I would have the strength to say “sorry, my precious girl, you must suffer until you die so that everyone in the city can live a happy life.” Doing it just for myself and my own social circle wouldn’t be a good tradeoff, but those aren’t the terms of the scenario.
Considering how many of our basic commodities rely on sweatshop or otherwise extremely miserable labor, we’re already living off the backs of quite a lot of tormented children.
And there I thought that Babyeaters lived only in the Eliezer’s sci-fi story...
The Babyeaters’ babies outnumber the adults; their situation is analogous, not to the city of Omelas, but to a utopian city built on top of another, even larger, dystopian city, on which it relies for its existence.
I would rather live in a society where people loved and cherished their children, but also valued their society, and were willing to shut up and multiply and take the hit themselves, or to their own loved ones, for the sake of a common good that really is that much greater, and I want to be the sort of person I’d want others in that society to be.
I’ve never had children, but I have been in love, in a reciprocated relationship of the sort where it feels like it’s actually as big a deal as all the love songs have ever made it out to be, and I think that sacrificing someone I loved for the sake of a city like Omelas is something I’d be willing to do in practice, not just in theory (and she never would have expected me to do differently, nor would I of her.) It’s definitely not the case that really loving someone, with true depth of feeling, precludes acknowledgment that there are some things worth sacrificing even that bond for.
I’m guessing that neither have most of those who upvoted you and downvoted me. I literally cannot imagine a worse betrayal than the scenario we’ve been discussing. I can imagine one kind-of-happy society where something like this would be OK, though.
Sounds like you need to update your model of people who don’t have children. Also, how aggressively do you campaign against things like sweatshop labor in third-world countries, which as Desrtopa correctly points out are a substantially worse real-world analogue? Do children only matter if they’re your children?
the real problem with omelas: It totally ignores the fact that there are children suffering literally as we speak in every city on the planet. Omelas somehow managed to get it down to one child. How many other children would you sacrifice for your own?
Unlike in the fictional Omelas, there is no direct dependence or direct sacrifice. Certainly it is possible to at least temporarily alleviate suffering of others in this non-hypothetical world by sacrificing some of your fortune, but that’s the difference between active and passive approach, there is a large gap there.
Related. Nornagest put their finger on this being a conflict between the consequentially compelling (optimizing for general welfare) and the psychologically compelling (not being confronted with knowledge of an individual child suffering torture because of you). I think Nornagest’s also right that a fully specified Omelas scenario would almost certainly feel less compelling, which is one reason I’m not much impressed by Le Guin’s story.
The situation is not analogous, since sacrificing one’s child would presumably make most parents miserable for the rest of their days. In Omelas, however, the sacrifice makes people happy, instead.
And I thought that the Babyeaters only existed in Eliezer’s fiction...
As I said in previous comments, I am genuinely not sure whether entertainment is a good terminal goal to have.
By analogy, I absolutely require sleep in order to be productive at all in any capacity; but if I could swallow a magic pill that removed my need for sleep (with no other side-effects), I’d do so in a heartbeat. Sleep is an instrumental goal for me, not a terminal one. But I don’t know if entertainment is like that or not.
Thus, I’m really interested in hearing more about your thoughts on the topic.
I’m not sure that I would regard entertainment as a terminal goal, but I’m very sure I wouldn’t regard productivity as one. As an instrumental goal, it’s an intermediary between a lot of things that I care about, but optimizing for productivity seems like about as worthy a goal to me as paperclipping.
Right, agreed, but “productivity” is just a rough estimate of how quickly you’re moving towards your actual goals. If entertainment is not one of them, then either it enhances your productivity in some way, or it reduces it, or it has no effect (which is unlikely, IMO).
Productivity and fun aren’t orthogonal; for example, it is entirely possible that if your goal is “experience as much pleasure as possible”, then some amount of entertainment would directly contribute to the goal, and would thus be productive. That said, though, I can’t claim that such a goal would be a good goal to have in the first place.
How so ? Imagine that you have two identical paperclip maximizers; for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that they are not capable of radical self-modification (though the results would be similar if they were). Each agent is capable of converting raw titanium to paperclips at the same rate. Agent A spends 100% of its time on making paperclips. Agent B spends 80% of its time on paperclips, and 20% of its time on watching TV. If we gave A and B two identical blocks of titanium, which agent would finish converting all of it to paperclips first ?
FeepingCreature addressed this better than I could in this comment . I understand that you find the idea of making paperclips (or political movements, or software, or whatever) all day every day with no breaks abhorrent, and so do I. But then, some people find polyamory abhorrent as well, and then they “polyhack” themselves and grow to enjoy it. Is entertainment your terminal value, or a mental bias ? And if it is a terminal value, is it the best terminal value that you could possibly have ?
WARNING: This comment contains explicit discussion of an information hazard.
I decline to do so. What imaginary creatures would choose whose choice has been written into their definition is of no significance. (This is also a reply to the comment of FeepingCreature you referenced.) I’m more interested in the practical question of how actual human beings, which this discussion began with, can avoid the pitfall of being taken over by a utility monster they’ve created in their own heads.
This is a basilisk problem. Unlike Roko’s, which depends on exotic decision theory, this one involves nothing more than plain utilitarianism. Unlike the standard Utility Monster scenario, this one involves no imaginary entities or hypothetical situations. You just have to look at the actual world around you through the eyes of utilitarianism. It’s a very short road from the innocent-sounding “the greatest good for the greatest number” to this: There are seven billion people on this planet. How can the good you could do them possibly be outweighed by any amount of your own happiness? Just by sitting there reading LessWrong you’re killing babies! Having a beer? You’re drinking dead babies. Own a car? You’re driving on a carpet of dead babies! Murderer! Murderer! Add a dash of transhumanism and you can up the stakes to an obligation to bringing about billions of billions of future humans throughout the universe living lives billions of times better than ours.
But even Peter Singer doesn’t go that far, continuing to be an academic professor and paying his utilitarian obligations by preaching utilitarianism and donating twenty percent of his salary to charity.
This is such an obvious failure mode for utilitarianism, a philosophy at least two centuries old, that surely philosophers must have addressed it. But I don’t know what their responses are.
Christianity has the same problem, and handles it in practice by testing the vocation of those who come to it seeking to devote their whole life to the service of God, to determine whether they are truly called by God. For it is written that many are called, yet few are chosen. In non-supernatural terms, that means determining whether the applicant is psychologically fitted for the life they feel called to, and if not, deflecting their mania into some more productive route.
Consider two humans, H1 and H2, both utilitarians.
H1 looks at the world the way you describe Peter Singer here.
H2 looks at the world “through the eyes of utilitarianism” as you describe it here.
My expectation is that H1 will do more good in their lifetime than H2.
What’s your expectation?
And then you have people like H0, who notices H2 is crazy, decides that that means that they shouldn’t even try to be altruistic, and accuses H1 of hypocrisy because she’s not like H2. (Exhibit A)
That is my expectation also. However, persuading H2 of that (“but dead babies!”) is likely to be a work of counselling or spiritual guidance rather than reason.
Well… so, if we both expect H1 to do more good than H2, it seems that if we were to look at them through the eyes of utilitarianism, we would endorse being H1 over being H2.
But you seem to be saying that H2, looking through the eyes of utilitarianism, endorses being H2 over being H1.
I am therefore deeply confused by your model of what’s going on here.
Oh yes, H1 is more effective, heathier, saner, more rational, etc. than H2. H2 is experiencing existential panic and cannot relinquish his death-grip on the idea.
You confuse me further with every post.
Do you think being a utilitarian makes someone less effective, healthy, sane, rational etc.?
Or do you think H2 has these various traits independent of them being a utilitarian?
There’s a lot of different kinds of utilitarian.
WARNING: More discussion of a basilisk, with a link to a real-world example.
It’s a possible failure mode of utilitarianism. Some people succumb to it (see George Price for an actual example of a similar failure) and some don’t.
I don’t understand your confusion and this pair of questions just seems misconceived.
(shrug) OK.
I certainly agree with you that some utilitarians suffer from the existential panic and inability to relinquish their death-grips on unhealthy ideas, while others don’t.
I’m tapping out here.
One could reason that one is better placed to do good effectively when focussing on oneself, ones family, one’s community, etc, simply because one understands them better.
(Warning: replying to discussion of a potential information hazard.)
Gung’f na rknttrengvba (tvira gung ng gung cbvag lbh unqa’g nqqrq zragvbarq genafuhznavfz lrg) -- nf bs abj, vg’f rfgvzngrq gb gnxr zber guna gjb gubhfnaq qbyynef gb fnir bar puvyq’f yvsr jvgu Tvirjryy’f gbc-engrq punevgl. (Be vf ryrpgevpvgl naq orre zhpu zber rkcrafvir jurer lbh’er sebz?)
Infohazard reference with no warning sign. Edit and reply to this so I can restore.
Done. Sorry this took so long, I’ve been taken mostly offline by a biohazard for the last week.
Are you saying that human choices are not “written into their definition” in some measure ?
Also, keep in mind that a goal like “make more paperclips” does leave a lot of room for other choices. The agent could spend its time studying metallurgy, or buying existing paperclip factories, or experimenting with alloys, or attempting to invent nanotechnology, or some combination of these and many more activities. It’s not constrained to just a single path.
On the one hand, I do agree with you, and I can’t wait to see your proposed solution. On the other hand, I’m not sure what this has to do with the topic. I wasn’t talking about billions of future humans or anything of the sort, merely about a single (semi-hypothetical) human and his goals; whether entertainment is a terminal or instrumental goal; and whether it is a good goal to have.
Let me put it in a different way: if you could take a magic pill which would remove (or, at the very least, greatly reduce) your desire for passive entertainment, would you do it ? People with extremely low preferences for passive entertainment do exist, after all, so this scenario isn’t entirely fantastic (other than for the magic pill part, of course).
What is written in to humans by evolution is hardly relevant. The point is that you can’t prove anything about humansby drawing a comparison with imaginary creatures that have had something potentially quite different written into them by their creator.
I have no idea what that even means.
My only solution is “don’t do that then”. It’s a broken thought process, and my interest in it ends with that recognition. Am I a soul doctor? I am not. I seem to be naturally resistant to that failure, but I don’t know how to fix anyone who isn’t.
What desire for passive entertainment? For that matter, what is this “passive entertainment”? I am not getting a clear idea of what we are talking about. At any rate, I can’t imagine “entertainment” in the ordinary meaning of that word being a terminal goal.
FWIW, I do not watch television, and have never attended spectator sports.
Quite.
To rephrase: do you believe that all choices made by humans are completely under the humans’ conscious control ? If not, what proportion of our choices is under our control, and what proportion is written into our genes and is thus difficult, if not impossible, to change (given our present level of technology) ?
You objected to my using Clippy as an analogy to human behaviour, on the grounds that Clippy’s choices are “written into its definition”. My point is that a). Clippy is free to make whatever choices it wants, as long as it believes (correctly or erroneously) such choices would lead to more paperclips, and b). we humans operate in a similar way, only we care about things other than paperclips, and therefore c). Clippy is a valid analogy.
Don’t do what ? Do you have a moral theory which works better than utilitarianism/consequentialism ?
You don’t watch TV or attend sports, but do you read any fiction books ? Listen to music ? Look at paintings or sculptures (on your own initiative, that is, and not as part of a job) ? Enjoy listening to some small subclass of jokes ? Watch any movies ? Play video games ? Stare at a fire at night ? I’m just trying to pinpoint your general level of interest in entertainment.
Just because you personally can’t imagine something, doesn’t mean it’s not true. For example, art and music—both of which are forms of passive entertainment—has been a part of human history ever since the caveman days, and continue to flourish today. There may be something hardcoded in our genes (maybe not yours personally, but on average) that makes us enjoy art and music. On the other hand, there are lots of things hardcoded in our genes that we’d be better off without...
The whole language is wrong here.
What does it mean to talk about a choice being “completely under the humans’ conscious control”? Obviously, the causal connections wind through and through all manner of things that are outside consciousness as well as inside. When could you ever say that a decision is “completely under conscious control”?
Then you talk as if a decision not “completely under conscious control” must be “written into the genes”. Where does that come from?
Why do you specify fiction? Is fiction “passive entertainment” but non-fiction something else?
What is this “us” that is separate from and acted upon by our genes? Mentalistic dualism?
Don’t crash and burn. I have no moral theory and am not impressed by anything on offer from the philosophers.
To sum up, there’s a large and complex set of assumptions behind everything you’re saying here that I don’t think I share, but I can only guess at from glimpsing the shadowy outlines. I doubt further discussion will get anywhere useful.
I think Bugmaster is equating being “written in” in the sense of a stipulation in a thought experiment with being “written in” in the sense of being the outcome of an evolutionary process.
If he is, he shouldn’t. These are completely different concepts.
That has no relevance to morality. Morality is not winning, is not efficiently fulfilling an arbitrary UF.