c.trout

Karma: 161

Philosophy graduate interested in metaphysics, meta-ethics, AI safety and whole bunch of other things. Meta-ethical and moral theories of choice: neo-artistotelian naturalist realism + virtue ethics.

Unvarnished critical (but constructive) feedback is welcome.

https://www.ctrout.art/

[Out-of-date-but-still-sorta-representative-of-my-thoughts hot takes below]

Thinks longtermism rests on a false premise – some sort of total impartiality.

Thinks we should spend a lot more resources trying to delay HLMI – make AGI development uncool. Questions what we really need AGI for anyway. Accepts the epithet “luddite” so long as this is understood to describe someone who:

suspects that on net, technological progress yields diminishing returns in human flourishing.
OR believes workers have a right to organize to defend their interests (you know – what the original Luddites were doing). Fighting to uphold higher working standards is to be on the front lines fighting against Moloch (see e.g. Fleming’s vanishing economy dilemma and how decreased working hours offers a simple solution).
OR suspects that, with regards to AI, the Luddite fallacy may not be a fallacy: AI really could lead to wide-spread permanent technological unemployment, and that might not be a good thing.
OR considering the common-sensey thought that societies have a maxmimum rate of adaptation, suspects excessive rates of technological change can lead to harms, independent of how the technology is used. (This thought is more speculative/less researched – would love to hear evidence for or against).

c.trout Dec 7, 2022, 5:21 AM
1 point
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in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
Sorry, my first reply to your comment wasn’t very on point. Yes, you’re getting at one of the central claims of my post.
what I remain skeptical of is the idea that moral calculation mostly interferes with fellow-feeling
First, I wouldn’t say “mostly.” I think in excessive amounts it interferes. Regarding your skepticism: we already know that calculation (a maximizer’s mindset) in other contexts interferes with affective attachment and positive evaluations towards the choices made by said calculation (see references to psych litt). Why shouldn’t we expect the same thing to occur in moral situations, with the relevant “moral” affects? (In fact, depending on what you count as “moral,” the research already provides evidence of this).
If your skepticism is about the sheer possibility of calculation interfering with empathy/fellow-feeling etc, then any anecdotal evidence should do. See e.g. Mill’s autobiography. But also, you’ve never ever been in a situation where you were conflicted between doing two different things with two different people/groups, and too much back and forth made you kinda feel numb to both options in the end, just shrugging and saying “whatever, I don’t care anymore, either one”? That would be an example of calculation interfering with fellow-feeling.
Some amount of this is normal and unavoidable. But one can make it worse. Whether the LW/EA community does so or not is the question in need of data – we can agree on that! See my comment below for more details.

c.trout Dec 2, 2022, 9:15 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Jan_Kulveit’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
In my view, the neural-net type of processing has different strength and weaknesses from the explicit reasoning, and they are often complementary.
Agreed. As I say in the post:
Of course cold calculated reasoning has its place, and many situations call for it. But there are many more in which being calculating is wrong.
I also mention that faking it til you make it (which relies on explicit S2 type processing) is also justified sometimes, but something one ideally dispenses with.
“moral perception” or “virtues” …is not magic, bit also just a computation running on brains.
Of course. But I want to highlight something you might be have missed: part of the lesson of the “one thought too many” story is that sometimes explicit S2 type processing is intrinsically the wrong sort of processing for that situation: all else being equal you would be better person if you relied on S1 in that situation. Using S2 in that situation counted against your moral standing. Now of course, if your S1 processing is so flawed that it would have resulted in you taking a drastically worse action, then relying on S2 was overall the better thing for you to do in that moment. But, zooming out, the corollary claim here (to frame things another way) is that even if your S2 process was developed to arbitrarily high levels of accuracy in identifying and taking the right action, there would still be value left on the table because you didn’t develop your S1 process. There are a few ways to cash out this idea, but the most common is to say this: developing one’s character (one’s disposition to feel and react a certain way when confronted with a given situation – your S1 process) in a certain way (gaining the virtues) is constitutive of human flourishing – a life without such character development is lacking. Developing one’s moral reasoning (your S2 process) is also important (maybe even necessary), but not sufficient for human flourishing.
Regarding explanatory fundamentality:
I don’t think your analogy is very good. When you describe mechanical phenomena using the different frameworks you mention, there is no disagreement between them about the facts. Different moral theories disagree. They posit different assumptions and get different results. There is certainly much confusion about the moral facts, but saying theorists are confused about whether they disagree with each other is to make a caricature of them. Sure, they occasionally realize they were talking past each other, but that’s the exception not the rule.
We’re not going to resolve those disagreements soon, and you may not care about them, which is fine – but don’t think that they don’t exist. A closer analogy might be different interpretations of QM: just like most moral theorists agree on ~90% of all common sense moral judgments, QM theorists agree on the facts we can currently verify but disagree about more esoteric claims that we can’t yet verify (e.g. existence of other possible worlds). I feel like I need to remind EA people (which you may or may not be) that the EA movement is unorthodox, it is radical (in some ways – not all). That sprinkle of radicalism is a consequence of unwaveringly following very specific philosophical positions to their logical limits. I’m not saying here that being unorthodox automatically means you’re bad. I’m just saying: tread carefully and be prepared to course-correct.

c.trout Dec 2, 2022, 5:30 PM
1 point
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in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
… consequentialism judges the act of visiting a friend in hospital to be (almost certainly) good since the outcome is (almost certainly) better than not doing it. That’s it. No other considerations need apply. [...] whether there exist other possible acts that were also good are irrelevant.
I don’t know of any consequentialist theory that looks like that. What is the general consequentialist principle you are deploying here? Your reasoning seems very one off. Which is fine! That’s exactly what I’m advocating for! But I think we’re talking past each other then. I’m criticizing Consequentialism not just any old moral reasoning that happens to reference the consequences of one’s actions (see my response to npostavs)

c.trout Dec 2, 2022, 5:03 PM
2 points
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in reply to: npostavs’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
If our motivation is just to make our friend feel better is that okay?
Absolutely. Generally being mindful of the consequences of one’s actions is not the issue: ethicists of every stripe regularly reference consequences when judging an action. Consequentialism differentiates itself by taking the evaluation of consequences to be explanatorily fundamental – that which forms the underlying principle for their unifying account of all/a broad range of normative judgments. The point that Stocker is trying to make there is (roughly) that being motivated purely by intensely principled ethical reasoning (for lack of a better description) is ugly. Ethical principles are so general, so far removed, that they misplace our affect. Here is how Stocker describes the situation (NB: his target is both DE and Consequentialism):
But now, suppose you are in a hospital, recovering from a long illness. You are very bored and restless and at loose ends when Smith comes in once again. [...] You are so effusive with your praise and thanks that he protests that he always tries to do what he thinks is his duty, what he thinks will be best. You at first think he is engaging in a polite form of self-deprecation [...]. But the more you two speak, the more clear it becomes that he was telling the literal truth: that it is not essentially because of you that he came to see you, not because you are friends, but because he thought it his duty, perhaps as a fellow Christian or Communist or whatever, or simply because he knows of no one more in need of cheering up and no one easier to cheer up.
I should make clear (as I hope I did in the post): this is not an insurmountable problem. It leads to varying degrees of self-effacement. I think some theorists handle it better than others, and I think VE handles it most coherently, but it’s certainly not a fatal blow for Consequentialism or DE. It does however present a pitfall (internal moral disharmony) for casual readers/followers of Consequentialism. Raising awareness of that pitfall was the principle aim of my post.
Orthogonal point:
The problem is certainly not just that the sick friend feels bad. As I mention:
Pretending to care (answering your friend “because I was worried!” when in fact your motivation was to maximize the general good) is just as ugly and will exacerbate the self-harm.
But many consequentialists can account for this. They just need a theory of value that accounts for harms done that aren’t known to the one harmed. Eudaimonic Consequentialism (EC) could do this easily: the friend is harmed in that they are tricked into thinking they have a true, caring friend when they don’t. Having true, caring friends is a good they are being deprived of. Hedonistic Consequentialism (HC) on the other hand will have a much harder time accounting for this harm. See footnote 2.
I say this is orthogonal because both EC and HC need a way to handle internal moral disharmony – a misalignment between the reasons/justifications for an action being right and the appropriate motivation for taking that action. Prima facie HC bites the bullet, doesn’t self-efface, but recommends we become walking utility calculators/rule-worshipers. EC seems to self-efface: it judges that visiting the friend is right because it maximizes general human flourishing, but warns that this justification is the wrong motivation for visiting the friend (because having such a motivation would fail to maximize general human flourishing). In other words, it tells you to stop consulting EC – forget about it for a moment – and it hopes that you have developed the right motivation prior to this situation and will draw on that instead.
What links here?
- c.trout's comment on SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists by c.trout (Dec 2, 2022, 5:30 PM; 1 point)

c.trout Dec 2, 2022, 6:47 AM
1 point
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in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
Here is my prediction:
I claim that one’s level of engagement with the LW/EA rationalist community can weakly predict the degree to which one adopts a maximizer’s mindset when confronted with moral/normative scenarios in life, the degree to which one suffers cognitive dissonance in such scenarios, and the degree to which one expresses positive affective attachment to one’s decision (or the object at the center of their decision) in such scenarios.
More specifically I predict that, above a certain threshold of engagement with the community, increased engagement with the LW/EA community correlates with an increase in the maximizer’s mindset, increase in cognitive dissonance, and decrease in positive affective attachment in the aforementioned scenarios.
The hypothesis for why that correlation will be there is mostly in this section and at the end of this section.
On net, I have no doubt the LW/EA community is having a positive impact on people’s moral character. That does not mean there can’t exist harmful side-effects the LW/EA community produces, identifiable as weak trends among community goers that are not present among other groups. Where such side-effects exist shouldn’t they be curbed?
What links here?
- c.trout's comment on SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists by c.trout (Dec 7, 2022, 5:21 AM; 1 point)

c.trout Dec 2, 2022, 6:41 AM
1 point
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in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
It’s better when we have our heart in it, and my point is that moral reasoning can help us do that.
My bad, I should have been clearer. I meant to say “isn’t it better when we have our heart in it, and we can dispense with the reasoning or the rule consulting?”
I should note, you would be in good company if you answered “no.” Kant believed that an action has no moral worth if it was not motivated by duty, a motivation that results from correctly reasoning about one’s moral imperatives. He really did seem to think we should be reasoning about our duties all the time. I think he was mistaken.

c.trout Dec 2, 2022, 5:21 AM
1 point
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in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
Regarding moral deference:
I agree that moral deference as it currently stands is highly unreliable. But even if it were, I actually don’t think a world in which agents did a lot of moral deference would be ideal. The virtuous agent doesn’t tell their friend “I deferred to the moral experts and they told me I should come see you.”
I do emphasize the importance of having good moral authorities/exemplars help shape your character, especially when we’re young and impressionable. That’s not something we have much control over – when we’re older, we can somewhat control who we hang around and who we look up to, but that’s about it. This does emphasize the importance of being a good role model for those around us who are impressionable though!
I’m not sure if you would call it deference, but I also emphasize (following Martha Nussbaum and Susan Feagin) that engaging with good books, plays, movies, etc. is critical for practicing moral perception, with all the appropriate affect, in a safe environment. And indeed, it was a book (Marmontel’s Mimoires) that helped J.S. Mill get out of his internal moral disharmony. If there are any experts here, it’s the creators of these works. And if they have claim to moral expertise it is an appropriately humble folk expertise which, imho, is just about as good as our current state-of-the-art ethicists’ expertise. Where creators successfully minimize any implicit or explicit judgment of their characters/situations, they don’t even offer moral folk expertise so much as give us complex detailed scenarios to grapple with and test our intuitions (I would hold up Lolita as an example of this). That exercise in grappling with the moral details is itself healthy (something no toy “thought experiment” can replace).
Moral reasoning can of course be helpful when trying to become a better person. But it is not the only tool we have, and over-relying on it has harmful side-effects.
Regarding my critique of consequentialism:
Something I seem to be failing to do is make clear when I’m talking about theorists who develop and defend a form of Consequentialism and people who have, directly or indirectly, been convinced to operate on consequentialist principles by those theorists. Call the first “consequentialist theorists” and the latter “consequentialist followers.” I’m not saying followers dance around the problem of self-effacement – I don’t even expect many to know what that is. It’s a problem for the theorists. It’s not something that’s going to get resolved in a forum comment thread. I only mentioned it to explain why I was singling out Consequentialism in my post: because I happen to know consequentialist theorists struggle with this more than VE theorists. (As far as I know DE theorists struggle with it to, and I tried to make that clear throughout the post, but I assume most of my readers are consequentialist followers and so don’t really care). I also mentioned it because I think it’s important for people to remember their “camp” is far from theoretically airtight.
Ultimately I encourage all of us to be pluralists about ethics – I am extremely skeptical that any one theorist has gotten it all correct. And even if they did, we wouldn’t be able to tell with any certainty they did. At the moment, all we can do is try and heed the various lessons from the various camps/theorists. All I was just trying to do was pass on a lesson one hears quite loudly in the VE camp and that I suspect many in the Consequentialism camp haven’t heard very often or paid much attention to.

c.trout Dec 2, 2022, 3:45 AM
1 point
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in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
Regarding feelings about disease far away:
I’m glad you have become concerned about these topics! I’m not sure virtue ethicists couldn’t also motivate those concerns though. Random side-note: I absolutely think consequentialism is the way to go when judging public/corporate/non-profit policy. It makes no sense to judge the policy of those entities the same way we judge the actions of individual humans. The world would be a much better place if state departments, when determining where to send foreign aid, used consequentialist reasoning.
Regarding feelings toward your friend:
I’m glad to hear that moral reasoning has helped you there too! There is certainly nothing wrong with using moral reasoning to cultivate or maintain one’s care for another. And some days, we just don’t have the energy to muster an emotional response and the best we can do is just follow the rules/do what you know is expected of you to do even if you have no heart in it. But isn’t it better when we do have our heart in it? When we can dispense with the reasoning, or the rule consulting?

c.trout Dec 2, 2022, 2:50 AM
1 point
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in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
I agree that, among ethicists, being of one school or another probably isn’t predictive of engaging more or less in “one thought too many.” Ethicists are generally not moral paragons in that department. Overthinking ethical stuff is kind of their job though – maybe be thankful you don’t have to do it?
That said, I do find that (at least in writing) virtue ethicists do a better job of highlighting this as something to avoid: they are better moral guides in this respect. I also think that they tend to muster a more coherent theoretical response to the problem of self-effacement: they more or less embrace it, while consequentialists try to dance around it.

c.trout Dec 2, 2022, 2:32 AM
1 point
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in reply to: gwern’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
Great question! Since I’m not a professional ethicist, I can’t say: I don’t follow this stuff closely enough. But if you want a concrete falsifiable claim from me, I proposed this to a commenter on the EA forum:
I claim that one’s level of engagement with the LW/EA rationalist community can weakly predict the degree to which one adopts a maximizer’s mindset when confronted with moral/normative scenarios in life, the degree to which one suffers cognitive dissonance in such scenarios, and the degree to which one expresses positive affective attachment to one’s decision (or the object at the center of their decision) in such scenarios.
More specifically I predict that, above a certain threshold of engagement with the community, increased engagement with the LW/EA community correlates with an increase in the maximizer’s mindset, increase in cognitive dissonance, and decrease in positive affective attachment in the aforementioned scenarios.
The hypothesis for why I think this correlation exists is mostly here and here.
What links here?
- SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists by c.trout (Dec 1, 2022, 4:18 AM; 36 points)

c.trout Dec 1, 2022, 8:30 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
I agree with both of you that the question for consequentialists is to determine when and where an act-consequentialist decision procedure (reasoning about consequences), a deontological decision procedure (reasoning about standing duties/rules), or the decision procedure of the virtuous agent (guided by both emotions and reasoning) are better outcome producers.
But you’re missing part of the overall point here: according to many philosophers (including sophisticated consequentialists) there is something wrong/ugly/harmful about relying too much on reasoning (whether about rules or consequences). Someone who needs to reason their way to the conclusion that they should visit their sick friend in order to motivate themselves to go, is not as good a friend as the person who just feels worried and goes to visit their friend.
I am certainly not an exemplar of virtue: I regularly struggle with overthinking things. But this is something one can work on. See the last section of my post.

c.trout Dec 1, 2022, 3:01 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Rana Dexsin’s comment on: SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists
lol. Fixed, thanks!

SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists

c.troutDec 1, 2022, 4:18 AM

36 points

30 comments16 min readLW link

c.trout’s Shortform

c.troutNov 4, 2022, 9:30 PM

2 points

0 comments LW link

For ELK truth is mostly a distraction

c.troutNov 4, 2022, 9:14 PM

44 points

0 comments21 min readLW link

c.trout Nov 2, 2022, 3:38 AM
3 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Legal Brief: Plurality Voting is Unconstitutional
Agreed. Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are generally considered center-right.
In addition, Chief Justice Roberts made it clear on multiple occasions he is concerned with public confidence in the court. This would give them a chance to prove they are non-partisan, on an issue that literally pits the people against incumbent major parties. And as I point out in my case, allowing greater freedom of expression on the ballot that translates into more representative elected officials should help with public trust in general.

c.trout Oct 24, 2022, 12:31 AM
1 point
−2
in reply to: deathspiral’s comment on: Legal Brief: Plurality Voting is Unconstitutional
I think that’s a bit reductionist. There are a number of ideologies/theories regarding how law should be interpreted and what role courts are meant to play etc. Parties certainly pick justices who have legal ideologies that favor the outcomes parties want, regarding current political issues. But I think those legal ideologies are more stable in the justices than their tendency to rule the way desired by the party which appointed them.

c.trout Oct 23, 2022, 9:36 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Legal Brief: Plurality Voting is Unconstitutional
I am painfully aware of this. I’ve been doubting myself throughout, and for awhile just left the idea in the drawer precisely out of fear of its naïvety.
Ultimately I did write it up and post, for three reasons: (1) to avoid getting instantly dismissed, to get my idea properly assessed by a legal expert in the first place, I needed to lay things out clearly; (2) I think it’s at least possible that our voting system has largely become invisible, and that many high-powered legal experts are focused on other things (of course there are die-hard voting reform activists, but how much do those two groups overlap?); (3) I really do think the evidence has changed, slowly mounting against plurality voting. E.g. before the modern rediscovery of approval voting in the 70s and its subsequent study in the following decades, their would not have been enough evidence to support the case. Much of my argument turns on just how easy it would be for states to adopt approval voting.
So like… maybe now is the time, and I just happened to stumble on the idea? It’s not exactly clever. And it’s not like it somehow overturns some long-time legal precedent – as far as I know, voting methods have just never even been tried in court. I’m really just asking: why not?
(OK, there is one wild section about Rational Basis review that would significantly alter a long-time precedent, and that’s the weakest section of the post. But the Anderson test shouldn’t devolve into RB review anyway.)

c.trout Oct 23, 2022, 3:41 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Legal Brief: Plurality Voting is Unconstitutional
Trying to! Any guidance would be welcome. So far I’ve only sent it to the First Amendment Lawyers Association because it seemed like they would be receptive to it. Should I try the ACLU? Was also thinking of the Institute for Free for Free Speech, though they seem to lean conservative which might make them less receptive. I wonder if there is a high power libertarian leaning firm that specializes in constitutional law… ideally we’re looking for lawyers who are receptive to the case, but who also would not be looked upon by the Court as judicial activists (who the conservative judges will be biased against).
Or should I not be thinking about political leanings? Sadly, I fear I must.

c.trout Oct 21, 2022, 2:02 PM
3 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Legal Brief: Plurality Voting is Unconstitutional
Agreed, but that doesn’t make for a legal case today. The Originalism many on today’s Court subscribe to does not take into consideration the intent of lawmakers (in this case the framers), but instead simply asks: what would reasonable persons living at the time of its adoption have understood the ordinary meaning of the text to be? This is original meaning theory, in contrast with original intent theory.

c.trout

SBF’s com­ments on ethics are no sur­prise to virtue ethicists

c.trout’s Shortform

For ELK truth is mostly a distraction

SBF’s comments on ethics are no surprise to virtue ethicists