I would like this to be true, but in my personal experience, it is not. Whenever I go try things, the result is the same. Waste of time, waste of time, waste of time and bus fare.
PlaidX
Karma: 858
It wasn’t just one person, it was three or four. And it wasn’t just that they INVOKED torture, it was that they clung to it like a life preserver, like it was the magic ingredient for winning the argument.
This is so far outside the bounds of civil discourse, and yet it’s routine in this community. I don’t think it’s unwarranted to be generally concerned.
In the last meetup I went to, there was an obnoxious guy who was dominating the conversation, and somehow got into a relativism-based defense of something, I think just to be contrary.
Several other people jumped on him at this point, and soon the argument swung around to “what about torture? what if you were being tortured?” and he came up with rationalizations about how what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, it’d be a great story, etc. etc., and so they kept piling on qualifications, saying “they torture you for 50 years and then execute you and you have no hope of rescue and blah blah blah”, trying to nail down boards over every possible ray of sunshine.
And of course even then, rationalizations were found, and his girlfriend took up the contrarian standard and soliloquized about how she was a survivor of a suicide attempt and believed it was always better to choose life, no matter how painful, and the other participants responded by cranking up the torture even further.
Did anything remotely productive come out of this? No, of course not. It was ugly, it was pointless, and frankly it was embarrassing to be a part of. I left.
I question whether I’m the screwed up one for not swallowing my alienation to this kind of behavior.
I see your point, but I guess my problem is that I don’t see why constructing these tradeoffs is productive in the first place. It just seems like a party game where people ask what you’d do for a million dollars.
Like, in the situation here, with uploading, why does immortality even need to be part of equation? All he’s really saying is “intuitively, it doesn’t seem like an upload would ‘really’ be me”. What happens to the upload, and what happens to the original, is just a carnival of distractions anyway. We can easily swap them around and see that they have no bearing on the issue.
I think part of what bothers me about these things is I get the impression the readers of lesswrong are PICKING UP these neuroses from each other, learning by example that this is how you go about things.
Need to clarify an ethical question, or get an intuitive read on some esoteric decision theory thing, or just make a point? Add torture! If yudkowsky does it, it must be a rational and healthy way to think, right?
I wonder if that’s really what it is, just the writer attempting to make people take his position more seriously by crudely leveraging a sensationalized example.
I don’t think so. I think it’s more like the outward manifestation of some neurosis.
In this particular case, what is gained by inserting a thousand years of agony into the situation? How is this a critical test of anything besides the reader’s tolerance for tasteless hyperbole?
Why do people feel the need to discuss “huge relative disutilities”? What’s the difference between that and being obnoxiously hyperbolic?
In the current example, I’m not even sure what kind of point he’s trying to make. It sounds like he’s saying “Some people like bagels. But what if someone poisoned your bagel with a poison that made your blood turn into fire ants?”
Is this an autism thing? There were people doing this at the meetup I went to as well.
Why does every other hypothetical situation on this site involve torture or horrible pain? What is wrong with you people?
Edit: I realize I’ve been unduly inflammatory about this. I’ll restrict myself in the future to offering non-torture alternative formulations of scenarios when appropriate.
People on average increase in societal value from conception to childhood, and then it gets more complicated from there depending on how they turn out. And yes, typically their value declines as they become elderly.
But, as in your example with your adopted friend, even a baby that starts out unwanted, if society invests a bit in its welfare, will soon become part of the social fabric and so on and thereby become valued.
Certainly there are some people who literally nobody likes, but even then, there’s still reason B.
As it happens, my best friend was adopted as well. But I hardly think the limiting factor in the number or quality of my friends is society’s production of babies.
Yeah, this is more or less what I meant by B, with the caveat that alice and bob may fundamentally disagree on who’s better off dead.
Let me turn your question around. If your utility function puts value in the mere existence of people, regardless of how they interact with the larger world, doesn’t that mean having babies is as wonderful as killing people is terrible? Is somebody with 12 kids a hero?
Well, sure he’s valuable NOW, but that’s after years and years of investment. It’s not that being unwanted takes a baby from super valuable to negative, babies are just not very valuable regardless.
Killing adults is less reversible in the sense that if you kill comedian carlos mencia, you can’t get a new carlos mencia if you change your mind. In contrast, babies are basically fungible.
I’d just send her a link to the harvey birdman episode. At least it’s amusing.
http://video.adultswim.com/harvey-birdman-attorney-at-law/evolutionary-war.html
I think the basic stumbling block in the typical abortion dialog isn’t the criteria of personhood, it’s that people don’t like to deal with the real, practical reasons why you shouldn’t kill people.
The basic reasons why murder is illegal are:
A. In general, people are much more valuable to society alive than dead. This does not apply to unwanted babies.
and
B. Attempts to legally identify the people who would be better off dead are prone to dangerous corruption and irreversible error, the costs of which far exceed the benefits. Again, this does not apply to unwanted babies.
Abortion is ALSO frowned on because
C. It denies someone their potential life. But why is denying an actual person their potential life worse than denying a potential person their potential life? They would both end up as real people, with real lives. Why is one life more valuable? If this makes abortion evil, why isn’t contraception evil?
Finally there is
D. Dying hurts. This isn’t necessarily true, and even if it was, dying hurts a heck of a lot less than living. This objection is rarely explicitly voiced, because it’s very weak.
I’ll come as long as that obnoxious objectivist guy isn’t there. Haw haw! Just kidding, I’ll be there regardless.
Why WOULDN’T moore’s law type growth end completely? Are you saying the speed of light is unbreakable but the planck limit isn’t?
I love this article, but I disagree with the conclusion. You’re essentially saying that a post-singularity world would be too impatient to explore the stars. I grant you that thinking a million times faster would make someone very impatient, but living a million times longer seems likely to counterbalance that.
Back in the days of cristopher columbus, what stopped people from sailing off and finding new continents wasn’t laziness or impatience, it was ignorance and a high likelihood of dying at sea. If you knew you could build a rocket and fly it to mars or alpha centauri, and that it was 100% guaranteed to get there, and you’d have the mass and energy of an entire planet at your disposal once you did, (a wealth beyond imagining in this post-singularity world), I really doubt that any amount of transit time, or the minuscule resources necessary to make the rocket, would stand in anyone’s way for long.
ESPECIALLY given the increased diversity. Every acre on earth has the matter and energy to go into space, and if every one of those 126 billion acres has its own essentially isolated culture, I’d be very surprised if not a single one ever did, even onto the end of the earth.
Honestly I’d be surprised if they didn’t do it by tuesday. I’d expect a subjectively 10 billion year old civilization to be capable of some fairly long-term thinking.
I believe I bought it from amazon. It’s for people driving long distances.
Classes, lectures, trying new food, going on dates… it’s not that these things are ever huge letdowns, I’m just not glad I did them.
One of my biggest problems is making new friends. I try sometimes, despite my better judgment, but the amount of time and effort necessary to forge a friendship worth having, or perhaps to reformat the person in question into someone worth having for a friend, seems astronomical. It feels like I only managed to make the friends I have because when I started I had no friends and it was the only option, the way kids are forced by the world to learn a language.