Who can argue against gathering more evidence? I can. Evidence is often costly, and worse, slow, and there is certainly nothing virtuous about refusing to integrate the evidence you already have. You can always change your mind later.”
This is often not true, though, for example with regard to whether or not it’s ethical to have kids. So how to make these sorts of decisions?
I don’t have a good answer for this. I sort of think that there are certain superhuman forces or drives that “win out.” The drive to win, to pursue curiosity, to achieve goals, to speak and use your intelligence and influence to sway other people. The force of natural selection. Entropy.
The limit, maybe, of a person is to align themselves with the drives and forces that they have faith in. I think we might eventually come up with a good account that explains that everything is just politics in the end, including philosophy and ethics, and figure out a way perhaps to reconcile this perspective with the feeling that we need to be able to appeal to something timeless and beyond human affairs.
Eliezer’s post on motivated stopping contains this line:
Who can argue against gathering more evidence? I can. Evidence is often costly, and worse, slow, and there is certainly nothing virtuous about refusing to integrate the evidence you already have. You can always change your mind later.”
This is often not true, though, for example with regard to whether or not it’s ethical to have kids. So how to make these sorts of decisions?
I don’t have a good answer for this. I sort of think that there are certain superhuman forces or drives that “win out.” The drive to win, to pursue curiosity, to achieve goals, to speak and use your intelligence and influence to sway other people. The force of natural selection. Entropy.
The limit, maybe, of a person is to align themselves with the drives and forces that they have faith in. I think we might eventually come up with a good account that explains that everything is just politics in the end, including philosophy and ethics, and figure out a way perhaps to reconcile this perspective with the feeling that we need to be able to appeal to something timeless and beyond human affairs.
If you will get more evidence, whether you want it or not, is there a way you can do something with that?
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