Suppose I have a choice to make, and my moral intuition is throwing error codes. I have two axiomations of morality that are capable of examining the choice, but they give opposite answers.
If you’re not sure which of two options is better, the only thing that will help is to think about it for a long time. (Note: if you “have two axiomatizations of morality”, and they disagree, then at most one of them accurately describes what you were trying to get at when you attempted to axiomatize morality. To work out which one is wrong, you need to think about them for ages until you notice that one of them says something wrong.)
In a universe that contains a neurotypical human and clippy, and they’re staring at eachother, is there an asymmetry?
Yes, the human is better. Why? Because the human cares about what is better. In contrast to clippy, who just cares about what is paperclippier.
Indeed. However, a) betterness is obviously better than clippiness, and b) if dspeyer is anything like a typical human being, the implicit question behind “is there an asymmetry?” was “is one of them better?”
What is your evidence for stating that human-betterness is “obviously better” than clippy-betterness? Your comment reads to me you’re either arguing that 3 > Potato or that there exists a universally compelling argument. I could however be wrong.
“Human-betterness” and “clippy-betterness” are confused terminology. There’s only betterness and clippiness. Clippiness is not a type of betterness. Humans generally care about betterness, paperclippers care about clippiness. You can’t argue a paperclipper into caring about betterness.
I said that betterness is better than clippiness. This should be obvious, since it’s a tautology.
I certainly agree with you that you can’t argue a paperclipper into caring about what you call betterness.
I do however think that “betterness is better than clippiness” is not a tautology, rather it is vacuous.
It has as much meaning as “3 is greater than potato” and invokes the same reaction in me as “comparing apples and oranges”.
At best, if you ranked UberClippy (the most Clippy of all Paperclippers) and UberHuman (the best possible human) on all of the criteria that is important to humans then UberHuman would naturally rate higher, that is a tautology. And if you define better to mean that then I would absolutely concede that (and I assume that you do). However i would also say that it is just as valid to define better such that it applies to all of the criteria that is important to Paperclippers.
To state it a different way, To me your first paragraph leads to the conclusion “Paperclippers cannot do better because clippiness is not a type of betterness” which seems to me like you’re pulling a fast one on the meaning of “better”.
To me it seems that you are mixing together “better” in “morally better”, and “better” as “more efficient”. If we replace the second one with “more efficient”, we get:
Betterness (moral) is more efficient measure of being better (morally).
Clippiness is more efficient measure of being clippy.
I guess we (and Clippy) could agree about this. It is just confusing to write the latter sentence as “clippiness is better than betterness, with regards to being clippy”, because the two different meanings are expressed there by the same word “better”. (Why does this even happen? Because we use “better” as universal applause lights.)
EDIT: More precisely, the moral “better” also means more efficient, but at reaching some specific goals, such as human happiness, etc. So the difference is between “more efficient (without goals being specified)” and “more efficient (at this specific set of goals)”. Clippiness is more efficient at making paperclips, but is not more efficient at making humans happy.
This. “Good” can refer to either a two-place function ‘goodness(action, goal_system)’ (though the second argument can be implicit in the context) or to the one-place function you get when you curry the second argument of the former to something like ‘life, consciousness, etc., etc. etc.’. EY is talking specifically about the latter, but he isn’t terribly clear about that.
EDIT: BTW, the antonym of the former is usually “bad”, whereas the antonym of the latter is usually “evil”.
EDIT 2: A third meaning is the two-place function with the second argument curried to the speaker’s terminal values, so that I could say “good” to mean ‘good for life, consciousness, etc.’ and Clippy could say “good” to mean ‘good for making paperclips’, and this doesn’t mean one of us is mistaken about what “good” means, any more than the fact that we use “here” to refer to different places means one of us is mistaken about what “here” means.
It could be valid to define “better” any way you like. But the definition most consistent with normal usage includes all and only criteria that matter to humans. This is why people say things like “but is it truly, really, fundamentally better?” Because people really care about whether A is better than B. If “better” meant something else (other than better), such as produces more paperclips, then people would find a different word to describe what they care about.
Hrrm ok. That is a different way of looking at it.
My take on the word is that the normal usage of better is by itself a context free comparator. The context of the comparison comes from the things around it (implicitly or explicitly) thus “UberClippy is better than Clippy” (implied: At being a Paperclipper), Manchester United is better than Leeds (implied: At playing football), or even “Betterness is better for humans than clippiness”. I have no problem with “Betterness is more humane than clippiness”.
Note that I don’t think i’m disagreeing with Eliezer here. Fundamentally you are processing the logical concept with a static context, i process it with a local context. Either way it’s highly unlikely that the context you hold or that i would derive would be the same as the paperclipper versions of ourselves (or indeed any given brain in potential brain space).
I am confused by what you mean by “better” here. Your statement makes sense to me if i replace better with “humanier”(more humanly? more human-like? Not humane… too much baggage). Is that what you mean?
Perhaps it would help to taboo “symmetry”, or at least to say what kind of… uhm, mapping… do we really expect here. Just some way to play with words, or something useful? How specifically useful?
Saying “humans : better = paperclips maximizers : more clippy” would be a correct answer in a test of verbal skills. Just be careful not to add a wrong connotation there.
Because saying ”...therefore ‘better’ and ‘more clippy’ are just two different ways of being better, for two different species” would be a nonsense, exactly like saying ”...therefore ‘more clippy’ and ‘better’ are just two different ways of being more clippy, for two different species”. No, being better is not a homo sapiens way to produce the most paperclips. And being more clippy is not a paperclip maximizer way to produce the most happiness (even for the paperclip maximizers).
If you’re not sure which of two options is better, the only thing that will help is to think about it for a long time. (Note: if you “have two axiomatizations of morality”, and they disagree, then at most one of them accurately describes what you were trying to get at when you attempted to axiomatize morality. To work out which one is wrong, you need to think about them for ages until you notice that one of them says something wrong.)
Yes, the human is better. Why? Because the human cares about what is better. In contrast to clippy, who just cares about what is paperclippier.
And the clippy is clippier. Why? Because the clippy cares about what is clippier. In contrast to the human, who just cares about what is better.
Indeed. However, a) betterness is obviously better than clippiness, and b) if dspeyer is anything like a typical human being, the implicit question behind “is there an asymmetry?” was “is one of them better?”
And clippiness is obviously more clipperific. That doesn’t actually answer the question.
What is your evidence for stating that human-betterness is “obviously better” than clippy-betterness? Your comment reads to me you’re either arguing that 3 > Potato or that there exists a universally compelling argument. I could however be wrong.
“Human-betterness” and “clippy-betterness” are confused terminology. There’s only betterness and clippiness. Clippiness is not a type of betterness. Humans generally care about betterness, paperclippers care about clippiness. You can’t argue a paperclipper into caring about betterness.
I said that betterness is better than clippiness. This should be obvious, since it’s a tautology.
I certainly agree with you that you can’t argue a paperclipper into caring about what you call betterness.
I do however think that “betterness is better than clippiness” is not a tautology, rather it is vacuous. It has as much meaning as “3 is greater than potato” and invokes the same reaction in me as “comparing apples and oranges”.
At best, if you ranked UberClippy (the most Clippy of all Paperclippers) and UberHuman (the best possible human) on all of the criteria that is important to humans then UberHuman would naturally rate higher, that is a tautology. And if you define better to mean that then I would absolutely concede that (and I assume that you do). However i would also say that it is just as valid to define better such that it applies to all of the criteria that is important to Paperclippers.
To state it a different way, To me your first paragraph leads to the conclusion “Paperclippers cannot do better because clippiness is not a type of betterness” which seems to me like you’re pulling a fast one on the meaning of “better”.
To me it seems that you are mixing together “better” in “morally better”, and “better” as “more efficient”. If we replace the second one with “more efficient”, we get:
Betterness (moral) is more efficient measure of being better (morally).
Clippiness is more efficient measure of being clippy.
I guess we (and Clippy) could agree about this. It is just confusing to write the latter sentence as “clippiness is better than betterness, with regards to being clippy”, because the two different meanings are expressed there by the same word “better”. (Why does this even happen? Because we use “better” as universal applause lights.)
EDIT: More precisely, the moral “better” also means more efficient, but at reaching some specific goals, such as human happiness, etc. So the difference is between “more efficient (without goals being specified)” and “more efficient (at this specific set of goals)”. Clippiness is more efficient at making paperclips, but is not more efficient at making humans happy.
This. “Good” can refer to either a two-place function ‘goodness(action, goal_system)’ (though the second argument can be implicit in the context) or to the one-place function you get when you curry the second argument of the former to something like ‘life, consciousness, etc., etc. etc.’. EY is talking specifically about the latter, but he isn’t terribly clear about that.
EDIT: BTW, the antonym of the former is usually “bad”, whereas the antonym of the latter is usually “evil”.
EDIT 2: A third meaning is the two-place function with the second argument curried to the speaker’s terminal values, so that I could say “good” to mean ‘good for life, consciousness, etc.’ and Clippy could say “good” to mean ‘good for making paperclips’, and this doesn’t mean one of us is mistaken about what “good” means, any more than the fact that we use “here” to refer to different places means one of us is mistaken about what “here” means.
It could be valid to define “better” any way you like. But the definition most consistent with normal usage includes all and only criteria that matter to humans. This is why people say things like “but is it truly, really, fundamentally better?” Because people really care about whether A is better than B. If “better” meant something else (other than better), such as produces more paperclips, then people would find a different word to describe what they care about.
Hrrm ok. That is a different way of looking at it.
My take on the word is that the normal usage of better is by itself a context free comparator. The context of the comparison comes from the things around it (implicitly or explicitly) thus “UberClippy is better than Clippy” (implied: At being a Paperclipper), Manchester United is better than Leeds (implied: At playing football), or even “Betterness is better for humans than clippiness”. I have no problem with “Betterness is more humane than clippiness”.
Note that I don’t think i’m disagreeing with Eliezer here. Fundamentally you are processing the logical concept with a static context, i process it with a local context. Either way it’s highly unlikely that the context you hold or that i would derive would be the same as the paperclipper versions of ourselves (or indeed any given brain in potential brain space).
It is, in Eliezer’s sense of the word. So is “clippiness is clippier than betterness”, though.
He/she is using the built-in human betterness module to make a judgement between human-betterness and clippy-betterness.
There exist no universal compelling arguments about physical things either, but that doesn’t stop us from calling things true.
I am confused by what you mean by “better” here. Your statement makes sense to me if i replace better with “humanier”(more humanly? more human-like? Not humane… too much baggage). Is that what you mean?
Ah, but Clippy is far more clipperific, and so will do more clippy things. Better is not clippy, why should it matter?
Perhaps it would help to taboo “symmetry”, or at least to say what kind of… uhm, mapping… do we really expect here. Just some way to play with words, or something useful? How specifically useful?
Saying “humans : better = paperclips maximizers : more clippy” would be a correct answer in a test of verbal skills. Just be careful not to add a wrong connotation there.
Because saying ”...therefore ‘better’ and ‘more clippy’ are just two different ways of being better, for two different species” would be a nonsense, exactly like saying ”...therefore ‘more clippy’ and ‘better’ are just two different ways of being more clippy, for two different species”. No, being better is not a homo sapiens way to produce the most paperclips. And being more clippy is not a paperclip maximizer way to produce the most happiness (even for the paperclip maximizers).