I don’t think this works, because “fairness” is not defined as “divide up food equally” (or even “divide up resources equally”). It is the algorithm that, among other things, leads to dividing up the pie equally in the circumstances described in the original post—i.e., “three people exactly simultaneously spot a pie which has been exogenously generated in unclaimed territory.” But once you start tampering with these conditions—suppose that one of them owned the land, or one of them baked the pie, or two were well-fed and one was on the brink of starvation, etc. -- it would at least be controversial to say “duh, divide equally, that’s just what ‘fairness’ means.” And the fact of that controversy suggests most of are using “fairness” to point to an algorithm more complicated than “divide up resources equally.”
More generally, fairness—like morality itself—is complicated. There are basic shared intuitions, but there’s no easy formula for popping out answers to “fair: yes or no?” in intricate scenarios. So there’s actually quite a bit of value in using words like “fair,” “right,” “better,” “moral,” “good,” etc., instead of more concrete, less controversial concepts like “equal division,”—if you can show that even those broad, complicated concepts can be derived from physics+logic, then it’s that much more of an accomplishment, and that much more valuable for long-term rationalist/reductionist/transhumanist/friendly-ai-ist/whatever goals.
At least, that’s how I under this component of Eliezer’s project, but I welcome correction if he or others think I’m misstating something.
I don’t think this works, because “fairness” is not defined as “divide up food equally” (or even “divide up resources equally”). It is the algorithm that, among other things, leads to dividing up the pie equally in the circumstances described in the original post
Yes; I meant for the phrase “divide up food equally” to be shorthand for something more correct but less compact, like “a complicated algorithm whose rough outline includes parts like, ‘...When a group of people are dividing up resources, divide them according to the following weighted combination of need, ownership, equality, who discovered the resources first, …’”
I don’t think this works, because “fairness” is not defined as “divide up food equally” (or even “divide up resources equally”). It is the algorithm that, among other things, leads to dividing up the pie equally in the circumstances described in the original post—i.e., “three people exactly simultaneously spot a pie which has been exogenously generated in unclaimed territory.” But once you start tampering with these conditions—suppose that one of them owned the land, or one of them baked the pie, or two were well-fed and one was on the brink of starvation, etc. -- it would at least be controversial to say “duh, divide equally, that’s just what ‘fairness’ means.” And the fact of that controversy suggests most of are using “fairness” to point to an algorithm more complicated than “divide up resources equally.”
More generally, fairness—like morality itself—is complicated. There are basic shared intuitions, but there’s no easy formula for popping out answers to “fair: yes or no?” in intricate scenarios. So there’s actually quite a bit of value in using words like “fair,” “right,” “better,” “moral,” “good,” etc., instead of more concrete, less controversial concepts like “equal division,”—if you can show that even those broad, complicated concepts can be derived from physics+logic, then it’s that much more of an accomplishment, and that much more valuable for long-term rationalist/reductionist/transhumanist/friendly-ai-ist/whatever goals.
At least, that’s how I under this component of Eliezer’s project, but I welcome correction if he or others think I’m misstating something.
Yes; I meant for the phrase “divide up food equally” to be shorthand for something more correct but less compact, like “a complicated algorithm whose rough outline includes parts like, ‘...When a group of people are dividing up resources, divide them according to the following weighted combination of need, ownership, equality, who discovered the resources first, …’”