Okay, guess it falls on me to bring out a party hat for the monster.
I don’t really want to get into the details; there’s a thread for that and it isn’t this one. But I’ll just briefly note that “Specks” is nothing more or less than what you get when you actually take utilitarianism (or some of its relatives) seriously. It breaks if you don’t treat all discomfort as a single moral evil (or if a dust speck doesn’t register as discomfort), or if you don’t treat everyone’s discomfort as commensurate, but that’s precisely what utilitarianism does—and as a serious ethical theory it’s much older than LW.
The dilemma’s ill-posed in several ways, yes; it’s been proven many times over to mindkill people; and in any crowd other than this one it’d be a reductio of utilitarianism. But the logic does make sense to me; I just don’t buy the premises.
(Incidentally, I’m still not sure whether Eliezer was going for a positive answer. Hardline utilitarianism seems at odds with what he’s written elsewhere on the subject of suffering, particularly in Three Worlds Collide—and note that he never takes an explicit position, he just says that it’s obvious.)
It might be the culty-est moment of LW. Blindly justifying utter nonsense in the mind of the hive.
I feel that dubious honor goes to the moment when we elected to use an invented word for “cult” in order to decrease the search engine presence of “Less Wrong” + “cult”.
Okay, guess it falls on me to bring out a party hat for the monster.
I don’t really want to get into the details; there’s a thread for that and it isn’t this one. But I’ll just briefly note that “Specks” is nothing more or less than what you get when you actually take utilitarianism (or some of its relatives) seriously. It breaks if you don’t treat all discomfort as a single moral evil (or if a dust speck doesn’t register as discomfort), or if you don’t treat everyone’s discomfort as commensurate, but that’s precisely what utilitarianism does—and as a serious ethical theory it’s much older than LW.
The dilemma’s ill-posed in several ways, yes; it’s been proven many times over to mindkill people; and in any crowd other than this one it’d be a reductio of utilitarianism. But the logic does make sense to me; I just don’t buy the premises.
(Incidentally, I’m still not sure whether Eliezer was going for a positive answer. Hardline utilitarianism seems at odds with what he’s written elsewhere on the subject of suffering, particularly in Three Worlds Collide—and note that he never takes an explicit position, he just says that it’s obvious.)
I feel that dubious honor goes to the moment when we elected to use an invented word for “cult” in order to decrease the search engine presence of “Less Wrong” + “cult”.