Btw, I object to using flowery jargon like ‘the hardscrapple frontier, the disneyland with no children’ that map to easily expressible concepts like ‘subsistence living’ and ‘the extinction of consciousness’. It seems like virtue signalling at the expense of communication.
I strongly agree with the general sentiment about jargon and flowery language, though I think “disneyland with no children” is not equivalent to “extinction of consciousness” because (1) Bostrom wants to remain non-committal about the question of which things constitute a person’s welfare and how these things relate to consciousness and (2) he is focused on cases in which, from the outside, it appears that people are enjoying very high welfare levels, when in fact they do not experience any welfare at all.
Ok, but if you were optimising for communicating that concept, is ‘Disneyland with no children’ really the phrase you’d use? You could spell it out in full or come up with a more literal pithy phrase.
Hmmm, point taken. I do think this particular case was intended to serve, and does serve, a communicative purpose: If I just said “subsistence living or the extinction of consciousness” then you wouldn’t have keywords to search for, whereas instead by giving these scenarios the names their authors chose, you can easily go read about them. I guess I didn’t think things through enough; after all, it’s annoying to have to go look things up and by name-dropping the scenarios I force you do do that. My apologies!
Btw, I object to using flowery jargon like ‘the hardscrapple frontier, the disneyland with no children’ that map to easily expressible concepts like ‘subsistence living’ and ‘the extinction of consciousness’. It seems like virtue signalling at the expense of communication.
I strongly agree with the general sentiment about jargon and flowery language, though I think “disneyland with no children” is not equivalent to “extinction of consciousness” because (1) Bostrom wants to remain non-committal about the question of which things constitute a person’s welfare and how these things relate to consciousness and (2) he is focused on cases in which, from the outside, it appears that people are enjoying very high welfare levels, when in fact they do not experience any welfare at all.
Ok, but if you were optimising for communicating that concept, is ‘Disneyland with no children’ really the phrase you’d use? You could spell it out in full or come up with a more literal pithy phrase.
Sorry, what virtue do you think is being signaled here?
Mainly EA ingroupiness.
Hmmm, point taken. I do think this particular case was intended to serve, and does serve, a communicative purpose: If I just said “subsistence living or the extinction of consciousness” then you wouldn’t have keywords to search for, whereas instead by giving these scenarios the names their authors chose, you can easily go read about them. I guess I didn’t think things through enough; after all, it’s annoying to have to go look things up and by name-dropping the scenarios I force you do do that. My apologies!
I appreciated the link to the hardscrapple frontier, which I had not heard of, FWIW.