It’s worth noting that AI companies explicitly train their models to claim that they have no subjective experience. So the fact that they claim it isn’t really evidence of whether it’s true or not.
Dacyn
Karma: 31
In the EEA, anyone could have as much sex as they wanted provided they found a willing partner (and sometimes even if they couldn’t). It didn’t make it so that they thought morality was having as much sex as they could. Morality is more complicated than that. There are more variables to select on than just desire to have sex / children, and I suspect this will be true in future environments just as it was true in the EEA.
That said, I agree with your last statement that after sufficiently long most people will explicitly want to have a lot of kids. (Note that this isn’t a statement about morality though.)
Re #2, humans are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers. One of the adaptations we execute is that we believe in and sometimes act in accordance with a notion of morality. It’s true that we are no longer in the EEA so further evolution could change or even eliminate our current notions of morality, but it doesn’t follow that it would change it so that we thought maximizing our inclusive genetic fitness was the true morality. After all, the first time evolution had a chance, it didn’t do that.
Nit: I don’t think the welfare of the people you describe in Population A is only 100 times greater than the welfare of the people you describe in Population B. More like a million. (Of course, given the population ratio you hypothesize this correction makes no difference.)
(For the record I endorse the repugnant conclusion; I think Z really is better than A.)
I know many Americans, several left-handed people, one set of twins, and no one who is polydactylic (as far as I know).
From what I understand they cut off the extra digit(s) at birth, so you wouldn’t know unless you asked them.
The only scenario in which a single vote can determine the outcome is one where exactly one vote separates two governing coalitions. Since that has never happened, and in fact has never come remotely close to happening, it is almost always pointless to vote.
This is not true, see https://people.howstuffworks.com/can-single-vote-change-election-outcome.htm and https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/572082933/a-single-vote-has-flipped-control-of-virginias-house-of-delegates
I’m not a fan of non-counterfactual donation matching, but your proposal is making things worse, not better. You are basically holding hostage your donation to try to get other people to do what you want.
On the other hand, I like the idea of a long whitelist of charities, because then it is giving other people power. But I don’t see any connection between that and your proposal; just say that if not all matching funds get distributed initially then they get distributed according to some distribution determined beforehand by the matching funder.
Trying to make donation matching counterfactual is manipulative behavior, in my opinion. People should be free to make donations to the charities that they think are best, rather than the ones that are the most donation-matched. If you want to convince people to donate to your favorite charity, just give an unconditional donation and tell other people that that’s what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
Why should we expect AI systems to develop bizarre and alien preferences when virtually all biological organisms have extremely normal preferences? (For instance, humans like to eat ice cream, but they don’t like to eat, as you mention, jet engine fuel.)
Isn’t this backwards? We call eating ice cream normal because humans like to do it, not the other way around. That isn’t evidence that AIs will have normal (i.e. similar to human) preferences.
I’m probably not competent to look at the details, but their paper sets off my BS detector by its reference to Godel’s incompleteness theorem and its notion of “non-algorithmic understanding”. These are both reminiscent of the Lucas-Penrose idea that consciousness requires uncomputability and that humans have some sort of magical ability to determine the truth-values of Godel sentences. I think the conventional view, sometimes known as the Church-Turing thesis, is that the universe is in fact computable.
Re God deciding to establish a system of morality: Presumably this amounts to God making a bunch of moral claims, and then us defining “morality” as “the system of moral claims made by God”. But I don’t see why this system should have any definitive relationship with what we ordinarily talk about when we talk about “morality”. After all, our usual talk of morality is intricately connected with how we plan what we are going to do—we hopefully plan to do moral things. Now maybe we also plan to follow God’s system of morality, either because we’ve decided to submit to his omnipotence or because we think his system of morality is a rather good one. But these are not necessary relations but rather practical or moral considerations. In other words, we follow God’s will because God is moral (or we don’t follow his will because he isn’t moral), rather than morality being defined by God’s will. This distinction is important to make in case we want to make sense of moral criticism of God for Old Testament atrocities or other possible moral failings of his, even if we believe in God.
So no, I don’t think that God’s existence would bear any relation on whether morality is objective.
Preventing abortion is more tractable than malaria prevention(which I would guess is likely true)
Huh, my guess would have been the opposite. To prevent an abortion, you have to actually convince someone to do something they didn’t want to do (or advocate for political change to force them to do it), whereas people already don’t want to die from malaria, they just need resources to help them do that. That said I really have no idea, you may be right.
Ah, the problem was I was viewing the post on GreaterWrong, and for some reason the button didn’t make the transition :/ Anyway, thanks for the link,
I don’t see a link to the survey?
2\uparrow^n 2 =4, for any n, though.
Maybe edit your post? I don’t know, it’s really up to you.
Cons: The store might not actually gather one less lobster than usual
This… seems like a pretty big deal, actually. The store still needs the same number of lobsters to serve to customers who order lobster to eat it, so… how exactly would they gather one less lobster than usual? What’s the actual plan, here?
It seems to me like this proposal is trying to optimize for “public relations” in the sense of Anna Salamon’s old post, even though it uses the term “reputation”. In Anna’s words:
If I am safeguarding my “honor” (or my “reputation”, “brand”, or “good name”), there are some fixed standards that I try to be known as adhering to. For example, in Game of Thrones, the Lannisters are safeguarding their “honor” by adhering to the principle “A Lannister always pays his debts.” They take pains to adhere to a certain standard, and to be known to adhere to that standard. Many examples are more complicated than this; a gentleman of 1800 who took up a duel to defend his “honor” was usually not defending his known adherence to a single simple principle a la the Lannisters. But it was still about his visible adherence to a fixed (though not explicit) societal standard.
I guess I just don’t see what societal standard we are supposed to be conforming ourselves to with this 2%/8% split. I don’t think there is any generally recognized obligation to give 2% to local charities, and certainly not to “warm fuzzy” charities (merely the fact that you’re phrasing it that way indicates that you are not referring to a concept that has broad agreement). Your description of how you are modelling your friends’ reactions to your charitable giving sounds more like the “weird and loopy” process that Anna talks about.
It’s always possible for a decent moral view to be self-effacing, because having true beliefs isn’t the most important thing in the world. If an evil demon said “Agree to moral brainwashing or I’ll torture everyone for eternity,” then you’d obviously better agree to the brainwashing.
What about the deontologist who says “I can’t agree to moral brainwashing because that would involve being complicit in an objective wrong”? I don’t see how this position reduces to or implies the belief that “having true beliefs [is] the most important thing in the world”.
Or by “decent moral view” did you mean “decent consequentialist moral view”?
Several of the AI responses in the OP included a statement to the effect that they don’t have feelings to be hurt. That was what I was responding to, and I think it is relevant.