posted
That is actually pretty neat, but it still does not get at what I am trying to say. Instead you simply created a defintion of coolness, that is that cool must somehow not be cheap. What is cool? Expensive then? Obviously not telling someone that you are cool. (note, the example had nothing to do with trying to date the girl or impress her lol)
Anyhow, still pretty cool KOM. I am not trying to down economics, if I wasn't stuck in my current majors I would probably at least minor in econ.
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posted
Yes, but I don't think that encapsulates what "cool" is. Not to mention I've always thought that what makes someone uncool for saying they are cool is certain self-centered thinking and lack of confidence. That is a cool person would never have to say they were cool, they just would be. To express your cool almost never involves saying your cool, but performing the fact that your cool.
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posted
Further clarification: Understanding WHY coolness matters for dating purposes in the first place falls more under things like biological science. I think economics merely explains how things relate to each other, not why the things matter in the first place.
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quote:If we eliminate death, we will have to eliminate birth as well and (at least in my mind) that's too high a price to pay.)
And others would say that sacrificing life in order to gain reproduction is too high a price to pay.
How's this for satisfying both groups, should indefinite life extension become feasible and overpopulation a threat: a system in which each individual can choose either to live on indefinitely, or to reproduce. But not both: if they reproduce, then they must precommit to dying once their child reaches a certain age, say 50. When humanity gains resources, such as a new habitable planet, such that it can support a higher population than it currently has, then we can hold lotteries for the opportunity to reproduce without having to sacrifice one's own life.
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Of course, this will put disproportionate power into the hands of those who choose not to have children.
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Because they would, on average, be older and have more life experience/wisdom? Or because they would have more accumulated power, i.e. in the form of financial resources? Because if the main problem is the latter, then that should be remedied fairly easily: simply have each parent pass on all of their resources to their child upon dying.
That still leaves a problem: as time goes on, the gap of age between the longest lived humans and the newest humans would increase. We'd have to find some way to prime newborns with enough information that they could interact meaningfully with adults. Even so, society would probably stratify by age to some degree, but would that be a huge problem? As time advances, the proportional difference in age between the generations would decrease: you being a thousand years older than me is a big deal when I'm a newborn, but not when you're 10,000 and I'm 9,000. So each new generation would assimilate eventually. Also, people won't get to live literally forever... accidental death would get everyone after some millions, right? So the age gap would stop growing at some point.
This is fun to think about.
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quote:That still leaves a problem: as time goes on, the gap of age between the longest lived humans and the newest humans would increase. We'd have to find some way to prime newborns with enough information that they could interact meaningfully with adults.
posted
Yup, just much larger scale. Currently, people spend 1/4 or more of their lives maturing into adulthood. If the average lifespan became, say, 1 million years, I wouldn't want it to take 250,000 years to reach adulthood (which wouldn't be defined by physical maturity but by "ability to communicate as equals with the older part of the population" or something like that). It's not some kind of totally new and unprecedented problem though, of course. We'd have to rearrange society a lot to accommodate indefinite life extension, but it seems doable.
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quote:Originally posted by sinflower: Yup, just much larger scale. Currently, people spend 1/4 or more of their lives maturing into adulthood. If the average lifespan became, say, 1 million years, I wouldn't want it to take 250,000 years to reach adulthood (which wouldn't be defined by physical maturity but by "ability to communicate as equals with the older part of the population" or something like that). It's not some kind of totally new and unprecedented problem though, of course. We'd have to rearrange society a lot to accommodate indefinite life extension, but it seems doable.
The question then becomes, as technology gets better, what happens to the length of time to maturity? Does technology keep it the same length as it is now, or even make it shorter, through enhancing people's intelligence genetically, and also through more efficient teaching methods (and also through being taught the actual truth, versus successively more complex theoretical models that never quiiiiiite equal the truth)?
However, maybe the time to maturity gets unavoidably longer, due to the tremendous mass of information that a member of a very high-tech starfaring species has to know/learn, to be a fully functional member of the society.
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quote:Because they would, on average, be older and have more life experience/wisdom? Or because they would have more accumulated power, i.e. in the form of financial resources? Because if the main problem is the latter, then that should be remedied fairly easily: simply have each parent pass on all of their resources to their child upon dying.
It's much more than that.
Right now, no matter how entrenched a group in power is, they've got to grow old and die eventually. Sure, they can try to pass that power on to their heirs (literally or otherwise), but that's never as successful as just staying in power.
For example, throughout the course of one's career, it is normal for one to climb the corporate ladder, to one extent or another, as time goes on. One of the biggest reasons for this is that the people who have been in the company the longest keep retiring, creating vacancies for their underlings to move up.
If a significant group of the population never retired, they wouldn't automatically vacate their positions of power. The breeding population would, in general, be relegated to the lower echelons while policy would be largely dictated by the immortals already in power.
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Of course, this would still be a problem even if the entire population became immortal -- those in power would stay in power. Forever. If you're at the bottom of the ladder, you'd tend to stay there. Forever.
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But we already have that problem; the entire banking system is being run by thousand-year-old vampires. :nods:
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quote:If a significant group of the population never retired, they wouldn't automatically vacate their positions of power. The breeding population would, in general, be relegated to the lower echelons while policy would be largely dictated by the immortals already in power.
"Immortal" is a bit of a misnomer. The long lived portions of the population won't live literally forever, they'll just live for a long amount of time. They won't age, and presumably they will obtain protections against accidental death, but they'll still die eventually. So they'll still retire. Just...after a very long time.
When you say the "breeding population," you seem to be suggesting that the population will split into two separate groups, one of which reproduces and one of which doesn't. So the children of "breeders" (people who voluntarily suicided in order to reproduce early, rather than waiting for their chance in the lottery) would also become, with few exceptions, breeders. But I don't think that's very likely; for one thing, it necessitates that the two groups are almost entirely socially separated, so that memes like "living a long time without giving birth is good" don't travel between them.
Here's a scenario that I consider more likely: most people choose to wait until they win the reproduction lottery to reproduce. Some people precommit to suicide because they can't bear to wait that long to reproduce, but those people are fairly evenly distributed across the population, rather than being concentrated into one separate, clearly defined underclass.
As for the scenario where everyone is immortal, I don't see why that would create a rigid, unchanging social hierarchy either. Assuming there are enough resources for everyone, and some fairly efficient system is created to distribute them, there's no need for such a hierarchy, is there? Personally, after a few thousand years of being mighty god-king, I'd get bored and quit to become an artisan or something. No need to chop off my head.
Longer life spans also mean that people have time to try out many different lifestyles. There'll be no more "I can't become a nature poet because even though I could be highly successful, I could also fail miserably and live in poverty for my whole life. I only have one go at this--might as well do something safe, like accounting."
quote: Assuming there are enough resources for everyone, and some fairly efficient system is created to distribute them, there's no need for such a hierarchy, is there?
Are there enough resources for everybody in America? Could we easily come up with a fairly efficient system to distribute them? And yet do we still feel the need for hierarchical organizations?
posted
Of course we have hierarchical structures, but I was referring to "rigid, unchanging" hierarchies specifically, which we don't have even now. And once people are immortal, it'll only take them a small proportion of their lives to become financially and socially secure, and then exploration/variety of experiences will become a priority. So yes, there will be hierarchical structures, obviously, but they'd be fairly fluid, because people would change their careers and interests. I'd like to think that a race of extremely long lived and intelligent people would manage to create more enlightened and effective social structures than we have now, too, but perhaps that's just wishful thinking.
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I have a question regarding the actual implementation of immortality techniques. Is it hypothesized that the shift will be something like [Average Lifespan 100]->[Average Lifespan 10000000], or is it considered more likely to be gradual, such as [Average Lifespan 100]->[Average Lifespan 500]...->[Average Lifespan 100000]?
Because if its the latter, then we don't even need to worry about a lot of the stuff thats being remarked in this thread. When the average lifespan was 40 people didn't worry about the changes needed to a society when the lifespan would be 70, so wouldn't a gradual increase to immortality be the same?
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Good point! The gradual extension seems more intuitively likely to me, but I don't know enough about the field to say. One situation I can think of off the top of my head where life spans would increase dramatically at once is mind uploading.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Cool, in this case, means "having that quality that makes girls want to date you".
Which girls? "Girls" are far from some homogeneous groups. That quality which makes some girls want to date you, will make other wish you'd choke to death on your lunch.
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quote:Because if its the latter, then we don't even need to worry about a lot of the stuff thats being remarked in this thread. When the average lifespan was 40 people didn't worry about the changes needed to a society when the lifespan would be 70, so wouldn't a gradual increase to immortality be the same?
Failure to worry about those gradual changes is part of the reason why Social Security is failing.
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quote:Which girls? "Girls" are far from some homogeneous groups. That quality which makes some girls want to date you, will make other wish you'd choke to death on your lunch.
I think we are all aware that the subjects of guys, girls, communication and dating are all extremely compex, nuanced and varied. But for sake of argument, I actually think "cool" here is mostly a synonym for "confident" which is generally an attractive trait for most people.
Certain types of people who imagine themselves at the top of the social hierarchy conflate "coolness" with other things (wearing certain clothes/hairstyles, participating in certain activities, NOT participating in certain other activities). When in fact, in any given population, there are people who simply have the confidence to do whatever they want and look attractive while doing so. And they are surrounded by people who see that the cool people have higher status, without really understanding why. So many (most?) people try to emulate the various other things the cool kids are doing, missing the fact that the confidence was what made that cool in the first place.
The result is a bunch of interconnected but largely independent social hierarchies. Doing everything "right" in the jock hierarchy won't make you cooler in an abstract absolute sense, but it'll make you more attractive to that football player or cheerleader who you had your eye on, which will reinforce the belief that copying certain activities/trends is the best way to become "cool."
Then if you go and try to work your charms on the cute goth girl, you will find that you still are as ultimately uncool as before, and the social currency you built up in Jock-slavia is meaningless in the People's Republic of Gothika.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Cool, in this case, means "having that quality that makes girls want to date you".
Which girls? "Girls" are far from some homogeneous groups. That quality which makes some girls want to date you, will make other wish you'd choke to death on your lunch.
Granted, but due to the vagaries of language, it's not too unlikely that they would all refer to whatever quality they want as "being cool", and the analysis of how uncool it is to proclaim your coolness would hold for them all.
On another subject, I think the deep pondering of the implications of life-extension is rather missing the point. Certainly, solving the problem of old age will lead to new problems; so has every other technology. But that doesn't hold water as a real objection to pursuing such a technique, because when push comes to shove, nobody is going to be persuaded by such arguments that they, personally, ought not to take their medicine. Consider: If there existed a therapy that would stave off old age and (keeping to what's realistic for the next century) allow you to live to 120 with the body and mind of a healthy 80-year-old, are you really, truly going to refuse it out of concern for creating a rigid social hierarchy? I think not. Similarly for all the other long-term things that have been raised. If you had the choice between death and life, would you choose your own personal death in order to conserve the carbon reserves of the Universe? Colour me skeptical.
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I think that even in our society today there is a large drift occurring in how "mature" some adults are. That is that some people simply mature and gain knowledge at a higher rate than others. That simply means that if you greatly increase the average lifespan as well as increasing the functional lifespan you will start to see a serious stratification of maturity and knowledge within age groups. Basically you will end up with some 200 year old idiots no where near the maturity of the majority of 50 year olds.
So my prediction is that as average lifespans increase the actual age of the person will have less to do with their status in society then it does today.
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quote:So my prediction is that as average lifespans increase the actual age of the person will have less to do with their status in society then it does today.
Interesting notion. Not sure if I 100% agree on your premise (namely, I'm not certain that we're seeing any more variation in "maturity" now than we have in earlier years, and if so, I think it has more to do with changing norms than changing lifespans).
I think your conclusion is likely true, but it probably has more to do with the accompanying changing norms.
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Below are some more or less random thoughts I've had while reading this thread.
1. The argument about using up every carbon atom in the Universe is an example of "Reductio ad absurdum", i.e. following the logical implications of "immortality" to an absurd conclusion. The point of which was not to make people worry about using up every carbon atom in the Universe. It was to point out that being "immortal" is fundamentally different than living a really really long but finite time and requires looking at things in a fundamentally different way. If you truly contemplate what it would mean to live forever, the line of thought leads to all kinds of absurd conclusions which logically implies that it is absurd to want to live forever. When Lesswrong says things like "linear growth is manageable", it's evident he's still ignoring the implications of an infinite lifespan. Growth at any rate is not sustainable forever in a finite universe. Like most people, Lesswrong seems to intuit that infinite is somehow similar to some really really big finite number and it just isn't. If we are talking about living forever, it is irrational to argue "the consequences of X is so far in the future we can ignore it". If you are going to live forever you will live a finite time before the bill comes due, and an infinite length of time after. Ignoring that is irrational.
2. Resource limitations aren't just an abstract hypothetical argument. Right now, this planet is facing imminent crisis. We currently have a billion human beings living in abject poverty. Fossil fuel resources are being rapidly depleted. We are exceeding the ability of the earth to absorb the waste we produce which is resulting in unprecedented changes in the atmosphere and climate of the planet. It isn't rational or ethical to consider whether we want to extend the human life span at this point in history, without talking about the implications that will have. Rationality necessarily implies logical consideration of the most likely results of your choices. Would you want to live to the age of 200 if doing so would mean an additional million people would starve to death? Would you want to live to the age of 200 if doing so would result in wars that took millions of lives? Would you want to live to 200 if it meant living in a house half the size of your current home? Never traveling further than you could go by bicycle? Never eating meat? Would you want to live to 200 hundred if it meant destruction of every last bit of the world's wilderness? Would you want to live to 200 if it meant extinction of 1/2 the world's species?
KoM, you are unarguably wrong when you say no one would find those arguments convincing. I and many people I know do find them convincing. In fact, I think if those arguments don't at least give you pause, something's wrong with your moral compass.
3. The increases in life expectancy which science has wrought thus far are fundamentally different from technology that would increase the human life span. What we have done thus far is to increase the average life span by curing diseases and reducing the accidents that lead to premature death. The maximum life span hasn't changed at all and the rate of aging hasn't changed appreciably (it may actually have increased over the past century). Increasing the natural maximum lifespan will undoubtably have different consequences. If we are seriously considering whether we want to extend the human life span, rationality demand we consider what those consequences might be. At a very minimum these considerations should direct what kind of research we do in this area.
4. Our biology is currently tuned to a life span of ~80 years. As children, our brains are optimized for learning language and memory. We start to loose those abilities at puberty. Abstract reasoning skills develop in the teenage years. The judgement centers of the brain don't mature until our twenties. Speed and strength peak somewhere in our twenties, endurance continues to increase into our forties. Other skills like compassion, empathy, ability to comprehend complexity, etc. continue to improve into our old age. In Hindu culture, a person's life divides into four phases each of about 20 years. The first ~20 years are childhood where one devotes ones self to learning, the second ~20 years are parenthood where one devotes oneself to children and family, the third ~20 years are citizenship where one devotes ones life to community and the final ~20 years one is to devote to spiritual/metaphysical pursuits. Science is finding that our biology is tuned to this kind of rhythm. If we were to double our lifespan, what parts of that sequence would you want to lengthen? If we were to be immortal, at what equivalent mortal age would we want to be suspended?
These are not intended as arguments against life extension, just things worth considering as part of the question. It's also worth noting that when I was twenty, I would likely have believed I wanted to stay forever in my twenties, but now I think I'd rather be forty than 25.
5. We use the word "want" to include too many things that are highly dissimilar neurologically. If you think you want to do things like eat, sleep, mate, be attractive to the opposite sex, have friends, fall in love, have children etc for some set of logical reasons, you are deluding yourself. Those desires arise in the primitive instinctive parts of our brain we have in common with all vertebrate animals. The aren't conscious choices, they are biological drives. They are fundamentally different from wanting a well manicured lawn or a Ph.D. As human beings, we are driven by instinct but we are also able to consciously consider the longer term consequences of our actions. We don't really understand how that conscious process arises from our biology but we do know that it's physiology is very different from our instinctive drives. We also know what its like to have conscious thoughts and that some things (like writing an internet post) are impossible without conscious thought. Because we are capable of conscious thought, we are able to weigh our options and override our instinctive drives when they conflict with outcomes we desire in the long term. The problem is that we have a nearly unavoidable tendency to rationalize following our instincts. The stronger our drives our, the harder it is to avoid defending them. It's very easy to persuade ourselves that we want to take a nap for some set of very logical well thought out reasons, when the real truth that our biological drive to sleep has been triggered by the drop in pressure associated with the storm front that's moving in. It would behoove anyone striving to be rational, to approach any reasoning presented in defense of a basic biological drive with extreme skepticism. It is in our nature to be biased in favor of our biological drives and therefore often very difficult to see the flaws in the reasons we construct to defend it.
The desire to live and fear of death are instinctive biological drives that have served us very well from an evolutionary perspective. From the perspective of evolution, it seems completely natural that older people would be less likely to see living forever as desirable. Once you have passed on your genes and helped to ensure the survival of your children and grandchildren, there is no evolutionary advantage to staying alive. In fact, death is an essential element of the evolutionary process. (Whether or not continued biological evolution is a good thing or absence their of a bad thing is another question certainly worthy of debate).
6. The more I read Lesswrong the more he irritates me. He is very articulate in describing rationalism and identifying the major caveats humans face when striving to be rational. Despite that, he is seems oblivious to his own logical errors which are rampant. He is frequently as guilty of those logical fallacies as anyone I've read. As a rationalist, he should be aware that the only reliable way to combat personal bias is to devote oneself to disproving ones own position, yet he does exactly the opposite. His arguments in favor of immortality have logical holes you could drive a bus through. I read one of his essays in which he attempts to explain what the younger Lesswrong believed about morality versus what the new improved Lesswrong believes. It made me want to tear my eyes out. How could anyone so self obsessed be so completely lacking in self awareness?
[ August 27, 2010, 02:40 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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You know, the fear of embarrassment is very closely tied to our fear of ostrasizement, exile, and death. Which makes sense, as our ancestors involved in an environment where exile like did mean death.
Some people, including myself when I lived in the city, maintain their lawns not so much because they want a beautiful lawn, but because they're afraid of what the neighbors will think if they don't. Because of that fear of ostracization, which in many ways, is really a fear of death.
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quote:You know, the fear of embarrassment is very closely tied to our fear of ostrasizement, exile, and death. Which makes sense, as our ancestors involved in an environment where exile like did mean death
Oh absolutely. We have evolved as social animals because being an accepted part of the community greatly improved our chances of survival as individuals. Hence we have a biological drive for friendship and a biological drive to avoid rejection by our community. We probably also have a biological drive to reject those who don't adhere to community norms because free loaders and misfits threaten the well being of the community.
In the selfish gene, Dawkins argues that competition always wins out over cooperation but he's simply wrong. Both intra- and inter-species cooperation are the rule in nature not the exception. One look at human intestinal bacteria (for example) will show you that there are millions of species that have thrived based on cooperation with humans and only a handful that have made it as our competitors.
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quote:In the selfish gene, Dawkins argues that competition always wins out over cooperation but he's simply wrong
I haven't actually read the book (on my to-do list) but this seems like such an obviously wrong statement that I have a hard time believing he said it in such a simple form. I don't s'pose there's a place online that showcases his argument in a bit more context?
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quote:6. The more I read Lesswrong the more he irritates me. He is very articulate in describing rationalism and identifying the major caveats humans face when striving to be rational. Despite that, he is seems oblivious to his own logical errors which are rampant. He is frequently as guilty of those logical fallacies as anyone I've read. As a rationalist, he should be aware that the only reliable way to combat personal bias is to devote oneself to disproving ones own position, yet he does exactly the opposite. His arguments in favor of immortality have logical holes you could drive a bus through. I read one of his essays in which he attempts to explain what the younger Lesswrong believed about morality versus what the new improved Lesswrong believes. It made me want to tear my eyes out. How could anyone so self obsessed be so completely lacking in self awareness?
Brief note: my understanding is that Less Wrong is the name of the community. Eliezer is the name of the guy you're presumably talking about. He uses the pen name Less Wrong when writing the Harry Potter fic but I think that's the only place he actually uses it, and there it's mostly because he intends the work to be kind of an advertisement for the Less Wrong site.
I haven't read enough things that he's written on the main site to get a feel for how often I disagree with him. I largely agree with you on about the issues you present with immortality. But so far I've read plenty of good stuff as well. The majority of his advice has been pretty mind opening for me, even if he doesn't actually follow that advice very well.
I found the extensive "look at how stupid Eliezer-1991 was" series to be particularly interesting. Partly because it really made me stop and think about what biases I currently have. Partly because there was a sort of... I guess Inception-like ending, wherein I lack the knowledge to evaluate his more recent positions on my own and he just outlined extensively how a supposedly rational person can be very wrong, so how do I know whether to take his current position as any more valid?
The truly frightening thing facing me right now is the discussions about how rarely people actually chang their minds. I know that I have a lot of core beliefs that have remained unchanged for over a decade, despite me putting a lot of time and thought into trying to analyze them. ("Doubt: - noun- the method Descarte used to produce the exact same beliefs he had in the first place").
Since officially adopting a position of skepticism about 8 years ago I've made an effort not to commit to beliefs so that I don't become too attached to them, but I wonder how many beliefs it's already too late for me to change, no matter how rational I try to be.
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: ... I don't s'pose there's a place online that showcases his argument in a bit more context?
Not from my reading of it. The book spends a lot of time explaining why altruism and co-operation are superior strategies in a world with selfish genes. In fact, thats why an alternative title was 'The Cooperative Gene'
quote:When Lesswrong says things like "linear growth is manageable", it's evident he's still ignoring the implications of an infinite lifespan. Growth at any rate is not sustainable forever in a finite universe.
When people, including Eliezer, talk about "infinite" lifespans, they don't generally mean literally infinite lifespans, they're using the word as a substitute for "really, really, almost unconceivably long" lifespans. I think they just use the concept of infinity to test the breaking points of their theoretical models.
quote:5. We use the word "want" to include too many things that are highly dissimilar neurologically. If you think you want to do things like eat, sleep, mate, be attractive to the opposite sex, have friends, fall in love, have children etc for some set of logical reasons, you are deluding yourself.
This is your most interesting point, and a lot of people on LessWrong must agree, because they've written a ton of articles discussing the nature of value and of wanting, how to distinguish instrumental from terminal values, how to protect human value, and so on. I think part of why they're so obsessed with it is because many of them work in the field of artificial intelligence, and they want to figure out how to program ethical systems from scratch. I can't find all the articles, but a quick search yields an interesting article that relates to the difference between wanting/liking
And here is an article addressing the "eternal boredom" problem, and which parts of the human psyche we can't discard without losing value (so that we don't end up as, for instance, paperclip maximizers.) This gets into your question about how we should adapt the human mind to longer lifespans, too.
quote:When people, including Eliezer, talk about "infinite" lifespans, they don't generally mean literally infinite lifespans, they're using the word as a substitute for "really, really, almost unconceivably long" lifespans. I think they just use the concept of infinity to test the breaking points of their theoretical models.
That's a really really lame excuse for flawed reasoning. It begs the question two really critical questions "How long is long enough?" and "How can one rationally want something they consider inconceivable?"
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posted
Why do you see it as an excuse? I see it as realism. I mean, heat death of the universe and all.
The answer to the first question is "we should strive to keep living for as long as we can." The limits are in our ability to keep on living, not in how much we should want to keep on living.
As for the second question. Because of scope insensitivity ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/ ) it's hard for human brains to "conceive" of the difference between, say, saving the lives of 2000 and 20,000 birds. However, that doesn't mean I can't rationally have a want like "save as many birds as possible," I just have to wrestle with my hardware a bit to realize this want. Similarly, I can rationally have the want "live as long as possible," as long as I hold that 1) being alive is good and 2) being alive doesn't stop being good at any specific age.
Although a modification of the want to "live as long as possible unless an evil genius has me trapped and plans to torture me for the rest of my life" might be better. Posts: 241 | Registered: Nov 2009
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Claims of the form "X shows very bad reasoning" are usually all the better for some specific examples. Otherwise people might think that the actual case is "X annoys me", which is orthogonal to whether he's right or not.
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posted
Scope insensitivity for the most part only really matters when you start looking at moral and ethics from a utilitarian lens. If you come from many other, and I would personally say better, moral and ethical systems it is not the number that matters so much as what the event is.
That and I've noticed that a lot of the survey data that has been used on less wrong for one purpose or another has problems in how it takes it data. For example you have to look at other considerations taken into account when you look at data along these lines. Mainly that the moral action or the supposed ability to see the scope of a moral action may not be the limiting factor in donating assistance etc. Instead it can be anything from financial ability, plain arbitrary numbers pulled out of the blue.
For example, if I pay someone a tip at a restaurant there is a generally accepted range in the United States for doing so. People generally have no problem giving "appropriate" tips. Should a German come to the states the servers will be angry as in Germany tips are called Trinkgeld (drink money) and are generally only a dollar or two more than the cost of the meal. Their cultural scale does not match to the United States and they would be frowned on by the wait staff.
All I mean to show through that example is when you have a cultural wide system of approaching something like generosity it is not universal. When people do not have an established scale of sorts they tend to give low arbitrary amounts to help people.
Anyhow, most of these conversations on Hatrack tend to degenerate into competitions instead of conversations. At least fall semester starts soon.
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quote:Originally posted by Black Fox: Scope insensitivity for the most part only really matters when you start looking at moral and ethics from a utilitarian lens. If you come from many other, and I would personally say BETTER, moral and ethical systems it is not the number that matters so much as what the event is.
Better from what universally-accepted viewpoint?
I would humbly submit that any other viewpoint besides a utilitarian or pragmatic one could/will never be universally accepted. The only way to make some other viewpoint universally accepted is through force or lies, and neither of those last forever, realistically.
Pragmatism/utilitarianism are the natural result of knowledge/awareness. The more knowledge you have in a given area, the more you move inexorably toward those points of view in that given area, IMHO.
So, to sum up, my thoughts on your "BETTER" are, "prove it". If you have a problem with proving it, then, rest assured, convincing me will be very difficult.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Anyhow, most of these conversations on Hatrack tend to degenerate into competitions instead of conversations. At least fall semester starts soon.
This is a phenomenon I've been pondering for a while (specifically due to events on Hatrack, but also because I've read some extensive things about it on lesswrong that made me think a bit). While I happen to be generally utilitarian I think I a) agree with you in certain ways, and b) after seeing a some complex issues that don't seem to be adequately addressed by any form of ethics (without arbitrarily handwaving a million individual cases), I'm at a point in my life where I'm willing to re-evaluate my ethical framework. So there is a slightly higher than average chance that I will benefit from discussion from this and (I'd like to think) higher than average chance that someone who disagrees with me would benefit also.
First off, I'll note that I don't think ethics has any inherent value. Any form of ethics is only meaningful insofar as it is useful to someone. For most of history than meant "useful for humans" (and more specifically, humans in power). We're approaching a point where we're considering the moral relevance of non-human sentients. I strongly believe this is a good thing, but I can't necessarily prove it. (I could throw out some arguments, but I'm pretty sure someone could easily shoot them down).
(Just got a mental image of "argument skeet shooting", heh)
I think that any moral framework is ultimately a form of utilitarianism. If you believe that people have fundamental rights such as liberty, freedom of religion, survival, procreation, etc - no matter what those rights or obligations are, there will come times when you are forced to make hard choices weighing one person's Right X vs 100 people's Right Y.
Given that not everyone can even agree what the rights/obligations ARE, any system designed to encompass all of humanity (let alone all sentient life) is, as steven says, going to have to either force everyone to value the same things, or make various compromises, and ultimately the starting premise "let everyone be as happy as possible" is the only one that has a shot of satisfying everyone's desires.
I do think there are qualitative differences between kinds of happiness (and actions that affect it). I don't *want* to believe Eliezer when he states that it's better for one person to be tortured for 50 years than a million bajillion quintillion people to get a dust speck in their eye, because there is a qualitative difference between being tortured and getting a dust speck in your eye. But throw enough dust specks in people's eyes over and over and eventually it becomes a form of torture in and off itself and I can't come up with a compelling reason to pick one specific point dividing "torture" from "not-torture".
This sort of concern is not unique to utilitarianism. Most (all?) ethical systems are designed to be effective based on the types of problems that people are used to dealing with on a regular basis. They all break down when faced with decisions that they weren't designed to handle. It's only in the last few centuries that we're starting to realize the magnitude of how many different problems we might have to face someday, and how complex the numbers involved with those problems might be. I think utilitarianism collapses when you reach the ability to generate bio(cyber?) engineered pleasure centers whose capacity for happiness grossly outproduces anything traditional human activity could produce. But I don't think other forms of morality can solve that other than slapping arbitrary "we don't like that, so don't do it" stickers on everything controversial.
Also: I'm vaguely aware that there's a difference between utilitarianism and consequentialism but I'm not sure what it is. A while ago I read about a few different modern ethics approaches that were supposed to be different but all seemed effectively the same to me.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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quote:Scope insensitivity for the most part only really matters when you start looking at moral and ethics from a utilitarian lens.
Sure. But Rabbit questioned whether I could rationally have a want like "live as long as possible" despite scope insensitivity to the value of such a long life, and I think the bird example illustrates why I can have this want within a consistent ethical system. I probably lean towards ethical egoism more than agent-blind utilitarianism anyway, and it's still a consistent want.
By the way, what ethical system do you think is best?
quote: I think utilitarianism collapses when you reach the ability to generate bio(cyber?) engineered pleasure centers whose capacity for happiness grossly outproduces anything traditional human activity could produce. But I don't think other forms of morality can solve that other than slapping arbitrary "we don't like that, so don't do it" stickers on everything controversial.
Preference utilitarianism, maybe? Preference utilitarianism holds that the right action is the one that satisfies people's preferences or desires. If I prefer not to experience pleasure except as a reward for completing a challenging task, for example, then it would be wrong to force me to experience pleasure in any other situation.
The advantage of preference utilitarianism is that you don't have to create a universal guideline for what "happiness" is, since every person's definition of that is bound to vary. The disadvantage, of course, is that it's hard to figure out people's actual preferences; self reports can be incomplete.
posted
I would just like to note to Rabbit that the "Theory of Fun" sequence explores what the "maximum life expectancy" for a true immortal is before running out of fun, factoring in the amount of atoms necessary for a brain to experience said fun over time. It includes musings on the answer if we are not changing our brains at all, if we are gradually increasing our brain capacity over time biologically, or installing ourselves on computer systems that don't hinge on biology.
He makes an important note that he prefers to altering environments before altering minds, since it's a lot easier to screw up when you're altering the latter. If we ARE altering minds, one thing he explores is the "ideal" rate to improve our intelligence/rate-of-data-processing, such that we get to appreciate each additional increase for as long as possible and maximize the satisfaction we get from solving increasingly complex mysteries.
I haven't got to the end and I don't now if he had a final conclusion, but he clearly has given a lot of thought to all the points you raise.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
Awww nuts. I knew I shouldn't have read this thread. It got me thinking about my own mortality and how everything I do really doesn't mean anything in the whole grand scheme of things. I'm going to have to plot world domination in order to be remembered. I'm thinking the "Hatrack Empire" would be a good name.
That brings up another good question though. If I want to do something to be remembered by, why? If I die and ceast to exist, I won't care if I am remembered or not. This makes our lives completely trivial. What point is there to anything we do? To progressing through life? Working, reproducing, having fun, if it doesn't really matter, why do we do it? Happiness wouldn't matter if we just cease to exist when we die.
Goodness, I just realized that I sound suicidal. Don't worry, I'm not!
I'd live forever if I could. I'd rather go the cyborg route. I would let them freeze me though if they thawed me out when the giant mutated insects invade earth. (Blue Gender reference there)
Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006
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quote:Do you want to live forever, Harry?" [said Dumbledore, incredulously]
"Yes, and so do you," said Harry. "I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers. If you don't want to die, it means you want to live forever. If you don't want to live forever, it means you want to die. You've got to do one or the other... I'm not getting through here, am I."
Harry is making the wrong inference here, based on his assumptions. The correct conclusion would be "Every day you are living you want to live at least one more day". That is different from saying you want to live forever. Sort of like how you might want another potato chip after each time you eat a potato chip, but you simultaneously don't want to eat an infinite number of potato chips. The mistaken assumption is "If I want X, and if X implies Y, then I want Y" which is not a true assumption in many cases.
And that makes it an excellent example of why people should never get arrogant about their beliefs in the name of "Rationality". Rationality is a tricky thing that inevitably relies on countless subtle assumptions. It's easy to "rationally" conclude almost whatever you want by overlooking even just a few small details or assumptions.
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