wuwei

Karma: 273

wuwei 3 Jun 2010 23:18 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Hacking the CEV for Fun and Profit
CEV is not preference utilitarianism, or any other first-order ethical theory. Rather, preference utilitarianism is the sort of thing that might be CEV’s output.

wuwei 4 May 2010 5:08 UTC
0 points
in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: Human values differ as much as values can differ
Matt Simpson was talking about people who have in fact reflected on their values a lot. Why did you switch to talking about people who think they have reflected a lot?

What “someone actually values” or what their “terminal values” are seems to be ambiguous in this discussion. On one reading, it just means what motivates someone the most. In that case, your claims are pretty plausible.

On the other reading, which seems more relevant in this thread and the original comment, it means the terminal values someone should act on, which we might approximate as what they would value at the end of reflection. Switching back to people who have reflected a lot (not merely think they have), it doesn’t seem all that plausible to suppose that people who have reflected a lot about their “terminal values” are often the most confused about them.

For the record, I’m perfectly happy to concede that in general, speaking of what someone “actually values” or what their present “terminal values” are should be reserved for what in fact most motivates people. I think it is tempting to use that kind of talk to refer to what people should value because it allows us to point to existing mental structures that play a clear causal role in influencing actions, but I think it is ultimately only confusing because it is the wrong mental structures to point to when analyzing rightness or shouldness.

wuwei 27 Apr 2010 0:40 UTC
21 points
on: Only humans can have human values
I suppose I might count as someone who favors “organismal” preferences over confusing the metaphorical “preferences” of our genes with those of the individual. I think your argument against this is pretty weak.

You claim that favoring the “organismal” over the “evolutionary” fails to accurately identify our values in four cases, but I fail to see any problem with these cases.
- I find no problem with upholding the human preference for foods which taste fatty, sugary and salty. (Note that consistently applied, the “organismal” preference would be for the fatty, sugary and salty taste and not foods that are actually fatty, sugary and salty. E.g. We like drinking diet Pepsi with Splenda almost as much as Pepsi and in a way roughly proportional to the success with which Splenda mimics the taste of sugar. We could even go one step further and drop the actual food part, valuing just the experience of [seemingly] eating fatty, sugary and salty foods.) This doesn’t necessarily commit me to valuing an unhealthy diet all things considered because we also have many other preferences, e.g. for our health, which may outweigh this true human value.
- The next two cases (fear of snakes and enjoying violence) can be dealt with similarly.
- The last one is a little trickier but I think it can be addressed by a similar principle in which one value gets outweighed by a different value. In this case, it would be some higher-order value such as treating like cases alike. The difference here is that rather than being a competing value that outweighs the initial value, it is more like a constitutive value which nullifies the initial value. (Technically, I would prefer to talk here of principles which govern our values rather than necessarily higher order values.)
I thought your arguments throughout this post were similarly shallow and uncharitable to the side you were arguing against. For instance, you go on at length about how disagreements about value are present and intuitions are not consistent across cultures and history, but I don’t see how this is supposed to be any more convincing than talking about how many people in history have believed the earth is flat.

Okay, you’ve defeated the view that ethics is about the values all humans throughout history unanimously agree on. Now what about views that extrapolate not from perfectly consistent, unanimous and foundational intuitions or preferences, but from dynamics in human psychology that tend to shape initially inconsistent and incoherent intuitions to be more consistent and coherent—dynamics, the end result of which can be hard to predict when iteratively applied and which can be misapplied in any given instance in a way analogous to applications of the dynamic over beliefs of favoring the simplest hypothesis consistent with the evidence.

By the way, I don’t mean to claim that your conclusion is obviously wrong. I think someone favoring my type of view about ethics has a heavy burden of proof that you hint at, perhaps even one that has been underappreciated here. I just don’t think your arguments here provide any support for your conclusion.

It seems to me that when you try to provide illustrative examples of how opposing views fail, you end up merely attacking straw men. Perhaps you’d do better if you tried to establish that any opposing views must have some property in common and that such a property dooms those views to failure. Or that opposing views must go one of two mutually exclusive and exhaustive routes in response to some central dilemma and both routes doom them to failure.

I really would like to see the most precise and cogent version of your argument here as I think it could prompt some important progress in filling in the gaps present in the sort of ethical view I favor.

wuwei 17 Apr 2010 5:02 UTC
11 points
on: Attention Lurkers: Please say hi
Hi.

I’ve read nearly everything on less wrong but except for a couple months last summer, I generally don’t comment because a) I feel I don’t have time, b) my perfectionist standards make me anxious about meeting and maintaining the high standards of discussion here and c) very often someone has either already said what I would have wanted to say or I anticipate from experience that someone will very soon.
What links here?
- arbimote's comment on Attention Lurkers: Please say hi by Kevin (17 Apr 2010 18:00 UTC; 8 points)

wuwei 22 Jan 2010 23:58 UTC
2 points
on: That Magical Click

There’s the consequentialist/utilitarian click, and the intelligence explosion click, and the life-is-good/death-is-bad click, and the cryonics click.

I can find a number of blog posts from you clearly laying out the arguments in favor of each of those clicks except the consequentialism/utilitarianism one.

What do you mean by “consequentialism” and “utilitarianism” and why do you think they are not just right but obviously right?

wuwei 3 Dec 2009 4:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Yorick_Newsome’s comment on: Open Thread: December 2009
d) should be changed to the sparseness of intelligent aliens and limits to how fast even a superintelligence can extend its sphere of influence.

wuwei 21 Nov 2009 3:27 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: A Less Wrong singularity article?
Interesting, what about either of the following:

A) If X should do A, then it is rational for X to do A.

B) If it is rational for X to do A, then X should do A.

wuwei 21 Nov 2009 1:29 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: A Less Wrong singularity article?
I’m a moral cognitivist too but I’m becoming quite puzzled as to what truth-conditions you think “should” statements have. Maybe it would help if you said which of these you think are true statements.

1) Eliezer Yudkowsky should not kill babies.

2) Babyeating aliens should not kill babies.

3) Sharks should not kill babies.

4) Volcanoes should not kill babies.

5) Should not kill babies. (sic)

The meaning of “should not” in 2 through 5 are intended to be the same as the common usage of the words in 1.

wuwei 18 Nov 2009 4:20 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: A Less Wrong singularity article?

I don’t think we anticipate different experimental results.

I find that quite surprising to hear. Wouldn’t disagreements about meaning generally cash out in some sort of difference in experimental results?

wuwei 18 Nov 2009 4:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: A Less Wrong singularity article?
On your analysis of should, paperclip maximizers should not maximize paperclips. Do you think this is a more useful characterization of ‘should’ than one in which we should be moral and rational, etc., and paperclip maximizers should maximize paperclips?

wuwei 12 Nov 2009 4:24 UTC
4 points
on: Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions
Do you think that morality or rationality recommends placing no intrinsic weight or relevance on either a) backwards-looking considerations (e.g. having made a promise) as opposed to future consequences, or b) essentially indexical considerations (e.g. that I would be doing something wrong)?

wuwei 3 Aug 2009 17:59 UTC
4 points
on: Pain
Its painfulness.

After some medical procedure, there have been some patients for whom pain is not painful. When asked whether their pain is still there, they will report that the sensation of pain is still there just as it was before, but that they simply don’t mind it anymore.

That feature of pain that their pain now lacks is what I am calling its painfulness and that is what is bad about pain.

wuwei 21 Jul 2009 3:40 UTC
4 points
in reply to: 110phil’s comment on: Joint Distributions and the Slow Spread of Good Ideas
Yes. And since being a maverick has a similar negative expectation for most working people, it seems well-placed to explain the slow spread of good ideas more generally as well.

wuwei 21 Jul 2009 2:45 UTC
1 point
on: Outside Analysis and Blind Spots
Great post.

I agree that you identify a very good reason to take care in the use of gender-specific pronouns or anything else that is likely to create in-group, out-group effects.

I also think there probably was a fair amount of attitude polarization on the question of how acceptable it was to make the statement in question.

wuwei 20 Jul 2009 3:30 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Sayeth the Girl
Under what conditions do you normally find it necessary to attempt to fully describe a goal?

wuwei 20 Jul 2009 0:58 UTC
7 points
on: Sayeth the Girl
Upvoted because I appreciate Alicorn’s efforts and would like to hear additional rational presentations of views in the same neighborhood as her’s.

I would bet I also upvoted some of the comments Alicorn is referring to as comments that perpetuate the problem.

wuwei 20 Jul 2009 0:40 UTC
1 point
in reply to: SoullessAutomaton’s comment on: Sayeth the Girl
disregard for the autonomy of people =/= thinking of someone in a way that doesn’t include respect for his goals, interests, or personhood

I am reading the latter rather literally in much the same way RobinHanson seems to and as I think the author intended.

wuwei 19 Jul 2009 3:18 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists
Nice. Tying the usage of words to inferences seems to be a generally useful strategy for moving semantic discussions forward.

wuwei 19 Jul 2009 2:55 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists

I had negative associations attached to Roko’s comment because I started imagining myself with my preferences adopting Roko’s suggestions.

This sentence was meant to explain why I was momentarily off-put. I did not mean to imply that I have any ethical problems with the desires mentioned (I don’t), though now that you mention it, I wouldn’t be too surprised if I do retain some knee-jerk ethical intuitions against them.

wuwei 19 Jul 2009 2:34 UTC
0 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Absolute denial for atheists
Have you tried programming in a language with an interactive interpreter, extensive documentation and tutorials, and open source code?