If the hostage crisis is a good analogy for your internal self, what is to stop “system 1” from breaking its promises or being clever?
There are problems to every approach. Talk about your commitment to others, they will remind you. I’m not saying this whole strategy always works, but I’m quite sure there are many people for whom it is the best idea to try.
Regarding the “utility quota”, what I mean by “personal moral expecations”: Basically, this just makes the point that it is useless to beat yourself up over things you cannot change. And yet we often do this, feel sad about things we probably couldn’t have done differently. (One interesting hypothesis for this reaction is described here.)
People are great at creating disagreements over nothing, and ethics is complex enough to be opaque, so we would expect moral disagreement in both worlds with a single coherent morality for humanity and worlds without one.
Note that if this were true, you still need reasons why you expect there to be just one human morality. I know what EY wrote on the topic, and I find it question-begging and unconvincing. What EY is saying is that human utility-function_1s are complex and similar. What I’m interested in, and what I think you and EY should also be interested in, are utility-function_2s. But that’s another discussion, I’ve been meaning to write up my views on the topic of metaethics and goal-uncertainty, but I expect it’ll take me at least a few months until I get around to it.
This doesn’t really prove my case by itself, but it’s an awesome quote nevertheless, so I’m including it here (David Hume, Enquiry):
“It might reasonably be expected in questions which have been canvassed and disputed with great eagerness, since the first origin of science and philosophy, that the meaning of all the terms, at least, should have been agreed upon among the disputants; and our enquiries, in the course of two thousand years, been able to pass from words to the true and real subject of the controversy. For how easy may it seem to give exact definitions of the terms employed in reasoning, and make these definitions, not the mere sound of words, the object of future scrutiny and examination? But if we consider the matter more narrowly, we shall be apt to draw a quite opposite conclusion. From this circumstance alone, that a controversy has been long kept on foot, and remains still undecided, we may presume that there is some ambiguity in the expression, and that the disputants affix different ideas to the terms employed in the controversy.”
Why not do this publicly? Why not address the thought experiment I proposed?
Lack of time, given that I’ve already written a lot of text on the topic. And because I’m considering to publish some of it at some point in the future, I’m wary of posting long excerpts of it online.
Those things are less straightforward than string theory, in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity. The fact that we can compress those queries into sentences which are simpler to introduce one to than algebra is testimony to how similar humans are.
Isn’t the whole point of string theory that it is pretty simple (in terms of Kolmogorov complexity that is, not in whether I can understand it)? If anything, this would be testimony to how good humans are at natural speech as opposed to math. Although humans aren’t that good at natural speech, because they often don’t notice when they’re being confused or talking past each other. But this is being too metaphorical.
I don’t really understand your point here. Aren’t you presupposing that there is one answer people will converge on with these cases? I’ve talked to very intelligent people about these sorts of questions, and we’ve narrowed down all the factual disagreements we could think of. Certainly it is possible that I and the people I was talking to (who disagreed with my views), were missing something. But it seems more probable that answers just don’t always converge.
And all your experience has had the constant factor of being pitched by you, someone who believes “optimising for EA” being tiring and draining is all part of the plan.
What, I thought you were saying that, at least more so than I’m saying it.
You’re telling people not to try to optimise their full lives to EA right now. If that is what they were trying before, then you are arguing for people to stop trying, QED.
Differentiate between 1) “ways of trying to accomplish a goal, e.g. in terms of decisional algorithms or habits” and 2) “pursuing a goal by whichever means are most effective”. I did not try to discourage anyone from 2), and that’s clearly what is relevant. I’m encouraging people to stop trying a particular variant of 1) because I believe that particular variant of 1) works for some people (to some extent), but not for all of them. It’s a spectrum of course, not just two distinct modes of going about the problem.
Considering you use a gendered pronoun to refer to unspecified people of any gender as well (“she”), I’m confused why you would wrongly ‘correct’ someone out like that.
Let’s not get into this, this discussion is already long enough. I can say that I see the point of your last remark, I did not mean to imply that Williams himself, given the time the text was written, was being sexist.
There are problems to every approach. Talk about your commitment to others, they will remind you. I’m not saying this whole strategy always works, but I’m quite sure there are many people for whom it is the best idea to try.
Regarding the “utility quota”, what I mean by “personal moral expecations”: Basically, this just makes the point that it is useless to beat yourself up over things you cannot change. And yet we often do this, feel sad about things we probably couldn’t have done differently. (One interesting hypothesis for this reaction is described here.)
Note that if this were true, you still need reasons why you expect there to be just one human morality. I know what EY wrote on the topic, and I find it question-begging and unconvincing. What EY is saying is that human utility-function_1s are complex and similar. What I’m interested in, and what I think you and EY should also be interested in, are utility-function_2s. But that’s another discussion, I’ve been meaning to write up my views on the topic of metaethics and goal-uncertainty, but I expect it’ll take me at least a few months until I get around to it.
This doesn’t really prove my case by itself, but it’s an awesome quote nevertheless, so I’m including it here (David Hume, Enquiry):
Lack of time, given that I’ve already written a lot of text on the topic. And because I’m considering to publish some of it at some point in the future, I’m wary of posting long excerpts of it online.
Isn’t the whole point of string theory that it is pretty simple (in terms of Kolmogorov complexity that is, not in whether I can understand it)? If anything, this would be testimony to how good humans are at natural speech as opposed to math. Although humans aren’t that good at natural speech, because they often don’t notice when they’re being confused or talking past each other. But this is being too metaphorical.
I don’t really understand your point here. Aren’t you presupposing that there is one answer people will converge on with these cases? I’ve talked to very intelligent people about these sorts of questions, and we’ve narrowed down all the factual disagreements we could think of. Certainly it is possible that I and the people I was talking to (who disagreed with my views), were missing something. But it seems more probable that answers just don’t always converge.
What, I thought you were saying that, at least more so than I’m saying it.
Differentiate between 1) “ways of trying to accomplish a goal, e.g. in terms of decisional algorithms or habits” and 2) “pursuing a goal by whichever means are most effective”. I did not try to discourage anyone from 2), and that’s clearly what is relevant. I’m encouraging people to stop trying a particular variant of 1) because I believe that particular variant of 1) works for some people (to some extent), but not for all of them. It’s a spectrum of course, not just two distinct modes of going about the problem.
Let’s not get into this, this discussion is already long enough. I can say that I see the point of your last remark, I did not mean to imply that Williams himself, given the time the text was written, was being sexist.