I basically agree with you, though I’m not sure the legal distinction between “theft” and “breach of contract” is meaningful in this context. As far as I know there’s no law that says you have to tip at all. So from a technical legal perspective, failing to tip is neither theft nor breach of contract nor any other offense.
smoofra
Karma: 241
It may not be legal theft, but it’s still moral theft. You sat down and ate with the mutual understanding that you would tip. The only reason the waiter is bringing you food is because of the expectation that you will tip. If you announced your intention not to tip, he would not serve you, he would tell you to fuck off. The tip is a payment for a service, it is not a gift. The fact that the agreement to pay is implicit, the fact that the precise amount of the payment is left partially unspecified are merely technicalities that do not change the basic fact that the tip is a payment, not a gift.
You don’t tip in order to be altruistic, you tip because you informally agreed to tip by eating in a restaurant in the first place. If you don’t tip (assuming the service was acceptable), you aren’t being virtuous, you’re being a thief.
Perhaps you should say the correct moral move is to tip exactly 15%.
I believe EY has already explained that he’s trying to make more rationalists, so they can go and solve FAI.
If I think I know a more efficient way to make a widget, I still need to convince somebody to put up the capital for my new widget factory.
But if results depend on my ability to convince rich people, that’s not prediction market!
what!? Why not?
I guess it depends on how you define bullet-biting. Let me be more specific: voted up for accepting an ugly truth instead of rationalizing or making excuses.
Voted up for bullet-biting.
Arbitrage, in the broadest sense, means picking up free money—money that is free because of other people’s preferences
except, finding exploitable inconsistencies in other peoples preferences that haven’t yet been destroyed by some other arbitrageur actually requires a fair bit of work and/or risk.
Do you vote?
Well, no.
Status is a informal, social concept. The legal system doesn’t have much to do with “awarding” it.
In my experience, children are cruel, immoral, egotistical, and utterly selfish. The last thing they need is to have their inflated sense of self worth and entitlement stroked by the sort of parenting you seem to be advocating. Children ought to have fundamentally lower status, not just because they’re children per se, but because they’re stupid and useless. They should indeed be grateful that anyone would take the trouble to feed and care for someone as stupid and useless as they, and repay the favor by becoming stronger.
an other example: cox’s theorem.
“The truly fast way to produce a human-relative ideal moral agent is to create an AI with the interim goal of inferring the “human utility function” (but with a few safeguards built in, so it doesn’t, e.g., kill off humanity while it solves that sub-problem),”
That is three-laws-of-robotics-ism, and it won’t work. There’s no such thing as a safe superintelligince that doesn’t already share our values.
it’s perfectly possible for one twin to get fat while the other doesn’t. If it doesn’t happen often, it’s because features like willpower are more controlled by genes than we think, not because staying thin doesn’t depend on willpower.
I figured it out! Roger Penrose is right about the nature of the brain!
just kidding.
Yes, I think it will change the decision. You need a very large number of minuscule steps to go from specs to torture, and at each stage you need to decimate the number of people affected to justify inflicting the extra suffering on the few. It’s probably fair to assume the universe can’t support more than say 2^250 people, which doesn’t seem nearly enough.
These thought experiments all seem to require vastly more resources than the physical universe contains. Does that mean they don’t matter?
seems to me that ESR is basically right, except, I’m not sure Dennet would even disagree. Maybe he’ll reply in a comment?
I suggest you run an experiment. Go try to eat at a restaurant and explicitly state your intention not to tip. I predict the waiter will tell you to fuck off, and if the manager gets called out, he’ll tell you to fuck off too.