suppose the world is populated by two groups of people, one just
wants to be left alone (labeled Jews), the other group hates the first
one with passion and want them dead (labeled Nazis).
What made you think those labels were a good idea? Their shock
value?
The second group is otherwise just as “good” as the first one (loves
their relatives, their country and is known to be in general quite
rational). They just can’t help but hate the other guys (this condition
is to forestall the objections like “Nazis ought to change their
terminal values”).
Why would you want to forstall those objections though? Like, okay, I
get it, it’s “a thought experiment” but still, like, yikes.
Fine then, not exterminating. Just send them all to concentration
camps, where they will suffer in misery and probably have a shorter
lifespan than they would otherwise.
> What made you think those labels were a good idea? Their shock value?
Math uses variables like X, Y, A, B, (Alice, Bob), but that simply isn't good rationalist training. A good rationalist detaches himself from the emotions and looks at the objective things which are said not how it makes them feel. This is why rationalism is better than math. /s (Seems im not the only one [noticing this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mfS9u858bge7gvdnG/jews-and-nazis-a-version-of-dust-specks-vs-torture#KFKrpdoqq6MLCdhSH) )
The troll in me loves shminux commitment btw. This is a very complex way of saying 'Hitler did nothing wrong', and all the lw'ers fell for it. (His other replies there just make shminux seem even more like a troll tbh, but he prob is completely honest, looking at the users post history)
> What is sometimes called "the 1000 Sadists problem" is a classic "problem" in utilitarianism; this post is another version of it.
the holocaust was a "problem".
(... why are they steelmanning the nazi's downthread? Not even the 'fictional thought experiment nazi's' but the actual nazis. Didn't LW have moderation? Edit: sorry, LW has moderation, it clearly bans the basilisk, but why doesn't moderation apply to restarting the holocaust from first principles. I would think nazism is a clear example of an infohazard).
in theory, the reverse of straw manning, aka, attacking the best version of somebodies argument.
In practice it often is just doing the hard work of the discussion yourself, and taking the offered argument way beyond the scope. Just as you can crush any argument by strawmanning it, you can also just create a super strong argument that is hard to defend against. That is how you can go from 'the holocaust is bad' to 'well, if you pick utilitarian ethics, and assume the nazis just really really really were distressed by the jewish people, it actually wasn't bad what they did. They reduced suffering in the world!'
Steelmanning is not a bad tool per se(*), but well it gets overused and misused, and it leads to dire results if you mix a group of 'rational' contrarians with crypto fascists. (that is why the rationalists all go 'well fascism isn't totally bad' but why they also still have not figured out what the 'sjws' mean when they talk about power (in regards to racism for example)). Right wing ideas get steelmanned and not attacked, and left wing ideas get strawmanned and attacked.
*: if you can fix the problem that everybody argues in good faith btw. So, we need a rationalist alignment project where we ensure people trying to make people think are doing this in good faith and no bad fascists (or fascist thinking) can slip in. :) (Im kidding here btw. And I think trying to save the rationalist project/principles is highly discouraged here in the sneerclub)
[Link to rationalwiki about the steelman](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning)
>Right wing ideas get steelmanned and not attacked
Mind you, if you try to *actually* steelman a [rightwing position,](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9kdkzo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_01/e7appnn/) you get downvoted because it's different from the arguments they're actually making.
That isn't a proper steelman, you need more 'I like beer'. ;)
(I have no knowledge of that al franken thing tbh. of the kavenough thing I only saw the hearing which I think made him look very suspicious and weird, like he was hiding something).
I think the point was more about distancing from the whole "killing is the ultimate sin" inkling. The argument still remains poor though, when you have so much premises that we could be talking about some silly b-movie plot.
Once I factor in I'm reading a person with pretty low "social awareness" (or empathy you could also say?) I don't have the impression this was made with the *intent* of shocking people. It was just out of making the "*contrast* of the point" as much stark as possible.. which is kind of adorkably anti-negationist if you think to it?
The top upvoted comment, unironically agreeing enthusiastically with
what might otherwise be viewed as a reductio ad absurdum of
Yudkowsky/LessWrong’s entire ideology, along with the many other
comments has to be seen to be believed.
This article is a followup to the below article by Yudkowsky which
along with all his other posts is pretty much just /r/iamverysmart (in
this case for knowing what Knuth up-arrow notation is, which practically
changes nothing in this thought experiment vs. just using another
arbitrary large number like 99^99 or 2^100 or what have you).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks
Do I understand correctly that the point of the original material was
that there is some number of people who could be trivially
inconvenienced such that their negative experience outweighed the person
being tortured?
Not just some number, a massive amount of people. More people than stars in the sky! amounts of people.
Imagine how mindbogglingly big the universe is. Like how massive huge it is, and how small we all are in comparison. That size. Times two, that is how many people get sand in their eyes.
>Not just some number, a massive amount of people. More people than stars in the sky! amounts of people.
>
>Imagine how mindbogglingly big the universe is. Like how massive huge it is, and how small we all are in comparison. That size. Times two, that is how many people get sand in their eyes.
Okay. So,
1. Obviously it's still the dust, right? Like there's no huge enough number. Suffering is not computable or comparable or scalable in the way that he's trying to do. It has a qualitative aspect. Like are you joking?
2. How does this dumbfuck restating the trolley problem think he's come up with something new and clever?
1. yeah I agree, the whole thing falls apart due to the assumption of 'you can compute, compare and scale this' (which is needed of course for the grand project (safe AI)) an assumption which is dubious at best
2. Somebody else said it already : [The good bits are not original and the original bits are not good.](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong#The_bad)
They're coming at this from a much, much dumber angle. Saying outrageous, morally reprehensible things is the whole point.
Their doctrine is already reliant on the firm belief that there is only one true moral principle, a strictly quantitative utilitarianism, because otherwise the whole thing falls apart.
So, when they pose moral quandaries, it's never ever based around questioning that. Instead, it's about showing off - coming up with the most vile, heinous things that they can think of that would be "justified" by their doctrine, and announcing how this heinous result is Absolute Moral Truth, and their acceptance of it is "proof" of how objective and rational (and faithful to their doctrine) they are. Dissent is harshly shamed - you MUST accept this, or else you're just too dumb/irrational/etc.
To use their own lingo... it's lack-of-virtue signaling.
> They're coming at this from a much, much dumber angle. Saying outrageous, morally reprehensible things is the whole point.
i have long thought they need to allow for the suffering they cause all the bullets they keep biting
This isn't a restatement of the trolley problem. I expect plenty of people who would pull the lever in the trolley problem wouldn't choose the torture in this problem.
This is prima facie sneerworthy, but I took a moment to actually take
their shitty utilitarianism seriously. Why on earth do they think that
utilons are things that add linearly, as if they were apples or oranges?
Why do they think that arithmetic, defined over utilons, is the same as
for the natural numbers? It’s not! The idea of diminishing returns on
utility is Econ 101.
No, there is no amount of “inconvenience” that could be added up to
equal the suffering from even one death, dumbasses.
> Why on earth do they think that utilons are things that add linearly, as if they were apples or oranges? Why do they think that arithmetic, defined over utilons, is the same as for the natural numbers?
Because utilitarianism isn't the actual core of their philosophy. *Reductionism* is. Oversimplification.
Uh wat? I've taken econ 101 (and quite a few beyond) and never came across a concept of decreasing returns on utility.
Usually you have diminishing returns to **something else** when measured in utility, e.g. money or consumption of a good.
And economists talk about trading off convenience and death all the time. There's a dollar value various federal agencies have put on human lives to determine what amount of spending to save lives is worth it.
I like how you went into a tizzy because I didn't say 'marginal utility,' even though 'diminishing returns' is quite common, but you seem to have understood what I was trying to say regardless. The point is, utilons often stop accumulating linearly. You have, presumably, heard of the diamond-water paradox?
> I've taken econ 101 (and quite a few beyond)
> And economists talk about trading off convenience and death all the time.
I guess none of your vast econ experience was enough to show you that this sub was about rationalists, not economists.
Come on, show us an example of a federal agency making a trade-off as vapid as the one between dust specks and actual death. Go on.
Philosophers and economists take these ideas seriously, unlike you. Asserting that it's just nonsense, when the experts are taking it seriously, isn't a good sneer.
E.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2961948. Over a hundred citations and predates Big Yud's post by a decade.
If you don’t have jstor, here is the pdf: [Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives](https://spot.colorado.edu/~norcross/Comparingharms.pdf)
And if you’re not inclined to take it seriously because it assumes consequentialism, here is an article I liked by a deontologist that gives a nice explanation of the problem in deontological terms: [Aggregation, Beneficence, and Chance](http://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/download/73/64)
I don't need to accept the terms of a debate from someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic. They're the ones asserting that philosophers and economists are dumbasses, not me.
> Uh wat? I've taken econ 101 (and quite a few beyond) and never came across a concept of decreasing returns on utility.
> Usually you have diminishing returns to something else when measured in utility, e.g. money or consumption of a good.
You're correct. I assume that /u/zhezhijian meant to say that dust specks have diminishing marginal (dis)utility, which seems quite plausible to me.
It seems plausible if it's across a single person who gets acclimated, but across multiple people it should be cumulative.
The concept of utility gets complicated at those levels though, and the intuitions used to argue for a framework won't apply more broadly when dealing with human populations many orders of magnitude greater than have ever existed. Hence repugnant conclusion paradoxes.
It seems plausible because if dust specks have diminishing marginal utility across lives, then how bad it is that one person is being dust specked can depend on how many other people are already being dust specked. This is a little weird.
Like, if we discover that there is a nearby inhabited planet that’s very dusty, should we suddenly care less about getting dust specks in our eyes?
> Like, if we discover that there is a nearby inhabited planet that’s very dusty, should we suddenly care less about getting dust specks in our eyes?
No, "diminishing" doesn't mean "zero." It just means that if someone proposes to murder another person because too many eyes got dusty, we shouldn't take them up on that.
Funny story, the original dust specks vs torture article was one of
the things that stopped me from getting in deeper into the Yud bj
fanclub, because it was…just a stupid argument. I actually rationalized
the opposite of this way - if Nazis we’re inconvenienced (and I was and
am strictly in the Nazis r bad camp, because the other camp is full of
people who want to murder me), would there be a trade-off in terms of
causing someone else’s suffering? And the answer was obviously, no, fuck
fascists.
It’s a bad sign if you feel your argument requires violating Godwin’s
Law in order to be effective, no?
Galaxy Brains, represent!
Sir, how dare you bring up actual historical genocides in our merely
theoretical discussion of abstract genocide in general? This is a grave
violation of debate club ethics!
I want to know: does it count as a sneer if I’m deeply grossed out at
a psychological and physical level? Why is the distance between techbro
rationalism and full Nazism quite this small?
What made you think those labels were a good idea? Their shock value?
Why would you want to forstall those objections though? Like, okay, I get it, it’s “a thought experiment” but still, like, yikes.
Isn’t this the same thing, just with more steps?
The top upvoted comment, unironically agreeing enthusiastically with what might otherwise be viewed as a reductio ad absurdum of Yudkowsky/LessWrong’s entire ideology, along with the many other comments has to be seen to be believed.
This article is a followup to the below article by Yudkowsky which along with all his other posts is pretty much just /r/iamverysmart (in this case for knowing what Knuth up-arrow notation is, which practically changes nothing in this thought experiment vs. just using another arbitrary large number like 99^99 or 2^100 or what have you). https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks
Wow, thats the legit title, I thought it was a sneer
deleted ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^0.9654 [^^^What ^^^is ^^^this?](https://pastebin.com/FcrFs94k/86278)
Do I understand correctly that the point of the original material was that there is some number of people who could be trivially inconvenienced such that their negative experience outweighed the person being tortured?
There’s a special kind of stupid where you think you’re really smart. That Peggy Hill kind of stupid.
This is that on bath salts.
This is prima facie sneerworthy, but I took a moment to actually take their shitty utilitarianism seriously. Why on earth do they think that utilons are things that add linearly, as if they were apples or oranges? Why do they think that arithmetic, defined over utilons, is the same as for the natural numbers? It’s not! The idea of diminishing returns on utility is Econ 101.
No, there is no amount of “inconvenience” that could be added up to equal the suffering from even one death, dumbasses.
Funny story, the original dust specks vs torture article was one of the things that stopped me from getting in deeper into the Yud bj fanclub, because it was…just a stupid argument. I actually rationalized the opposite of this way - if Nazis we’re inconvenienced (and I was and am strictly in the Nazis r bad camp, because the other camp is full of people who want to murder me), would there be a trade-off in terms of causing someone else’s suffering? And the answer was obviously, no, fuck fascists.
Galaxy Brains, represent!
Sir, how dare you bring up actual historical genocides in our merely theoretical discussion of abstract genocide in general? This is a grave violation of debate club ethics!
Why???? Why???
Why??????????????????????????????
Mask is literally off. This guy is clearly a nazi.
I want to know: does it count as a sneer if I’m deeply grossed out at a psychological and physical level? Why is the distance between techbro rationalism and full Nazism quite this small?