posted on July 14, 2022 01:35 PM by
u/warmupwarrior
173
u/julry114 pointsat 1657815728.000000
Most people see the fact “a pig is smarter than a baby” as an
argument for animal rights. Yud, in his infinite wisdom, knows that it
is actually an argument for infanticide! Can’t believe I didn’t think of
this before!
I agree with you, but I don't think most people in this sub do. I think the perspective here is: "pigs are smarter than babies but I don't care because I like bacon."
The attack on the logically-consistent psychopath should be from the logically-consistent vegan, but people don't want to face that.
Weird thing, but apparently bacon is super tasty, was part of a turn of [the century advertisement campaign](https://everything-pr.com/food-pr-bacon/).
I mean, I *think* it's intellectually honest at least? It also kinda highlights how coming to Y about literally every issue is stupid and a waste of time when there are relevant experts.
It's not even an issue of psychology primarily; it's a moral question. No degree of knowledge of developmental psychology will tell you what is meant by moral personhood, or what the criteria are for getting it.
Sometimes. It is also an expression of certainty. Given my experience with Yudkowsky's body of work, I'm comfortable that my reading of his statement is accurate.
As expected, Yudkowsky is about as effective at being pro choice as
he is at saving the world from AI.
Also unsurprisingly the way he uses words like “qualia” is exactly
the same way something like GPT3 uses words. See it in a context, drop
it into a similar context.
I have to say I’m not surprised to see yud handling such a sensitive,
nuanced issue as infant euthanasia-which touches on suffering brought on
by severe illness or disability balanced with concerns about creeping
eugenics and the value of even a limited or suffering-tinged life-with
the grace of a bowlegged gazelle in a ballpit. taking the view that it
makes sense to pop a bullet in a healthy 9 month old’s head instead of,
I don’t know, having an effective and humane foster care and adoption
system seems…..psychotic.
E: forgot to sneer at the way Caplan framed his question btw. [So
here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneer#/media/File:Expression_of_the_Emotions_Plate_IV_(sneering).png)
12 year old comment thread. That's a real deep cut, I'm impressed.
>Though I did at one point talk to someone who tried to convert me to vegetarianism by saying that if I was willing to eat pork, it ought to be okay to eat month-old infants too, since the pigs were much smarter. I'm pretty sure you can guess where that conversation went...
And that's when Yud started eating babies.
When I hear the phrase "haunted house", my brain defaults to picturing the kind with people in costumes and fog machines and whatnot, so when I read him say "I don't believe in haunted houses", my first thought was "Does yud have such a low opinion of the intelligence of others that he thinks the people who go to haunted houses think the ghosts are real, or does he think the haunted house industry itself is fake and some kind of front?"
What does probability even mean in this sentence? 50% of abortions
conducted at this point are murders, rather than livesaving emergency
surgeries, interventions to avoid destroying the lives of 10-year-old
rape victims, tragic decisions by hopeful future parents to start over
and try again for a child without severe developmental impairments? My
subjective personal confidence level is 50% that 100% of abortions at
this point are murders? Any given patient going in for an abortion at
this time point awaits a coin flip for the 50% chance that it will
become a murder?
Assume that it’s a determinable question without a yet determined answer, and that the likelihood of one answer being correct varies on a sliding scale according to the “age” of the baby/foetus/zygote/etc. from the point of conception.
With that in hand you can reconstruct the question as “the likelihood of a pregnancy termination counting as murder in the final determination of what is and is not murder increases from zero % prior to conception, to 100% at [chosen age]*: given what we currently know, at what age does the line cross the 50% mark?”
Knowing a thing or two about Caplan, that’s my most charitable reading of his incredibly stupid question.
*not necessarily linearly
Well, I’m going to have to ask Caplan to define what he means by murder here. Do we mean legally? Morally? If morally, what specifically does he define as a killing that is immoral enough to qualify a murder? Are we asking about sentience? Personhood? Something else?
This sounds like a pedantic point, but it really isn’t. Caplan is hiding the real question he is asking, and I’m not entirely sure what that question is. If he was just asking the legal question, it would be essentially a boring question. Abortion is murder if the law declares it to be so. Done. The moral question hinges on other things that Caplan is leaving undefined.
I understand Twitter is a place for spitballing hot takes, but I don’t think one then needs to be charitable to the question.
For what it’s worth, Caplan’s obviously asking the moral question, not the legal one, and the reason he’s asking is because he wants to know what people who vote in the poll think. I think it’s quite reasonable to assume, too, that his interpretation of the question is close to the one I’ve reconstructed above. If he has motives any more surreptitious than that, they’re disguised in the asking so subtly *that I doubt he knows what they are either*.
I agree the question is stupid and I don’t think he is being surreptitious. I just think he is being stupid.
I was more getting at *why* I think it’s stupid. Let's suppose that we define murder as the intentional, unjustified killing of another person.
Is Caplan asking at what gestational age the zygote/embryo/fetus is a person? Well, what’s your definition of what constitutes personhood?
Is Caplan asking whether the killing may or not be be justified? What would constitute whether it’s unjust or not?
What about intentionality? If there is only a chance that pregnancy constitutes a person, are you intentionally killing that person? If the mother or doctor believes that the, say, zygote is not a person, does that then preclude intentionality?
Asking the question with a percentage involved even muddies the water further. What does it even mean for the combination of these three things to have a probability exceeding 50%? At least if you simply asked “at what age do you believe abortion constitutes murder?”, you’d have a somewhat clearer question.
Well…the problem here is I think the answer is quite obvious: he’s asking at what point termination of a normal (for a suitably boring definition of “normal”) pregnancy is murder (taking into account, say, the usual caveats about viability) in the final determination of when that is
This usefully implies that he thinks the final determination of that question will include suitable conditions for what counts as “murder” - “did a person die?” being one likely such condition, “was it premeditated, and if so by whom?” being another - and because like the vast majority of people (right or wrong!) he thinks that it’s a determinable question, he assumes that he doesn’t need to relitigate what the word “murder” means simply for the purposes of raising a question he thinks has a knowable but not yet known answer (note that his poll is broad enough to accommodate the vast majority of people’s views on when that could be, including up to the day before birth)
I hate to defend Caplan, especially over a tweet that I’ve already said is stupid, which it is for a whole host of other reasons, many closely related to your queries, but you seem to be asking for a definition of the universe before we can ask whether no-bake is really cheesecake
I remember a post on LW by one of Bostrom's sidekicks, discussing what was the probability of nuclear war during the cold war.
The probability of a past possibility that didn't happen... that interesting concept does not trigger any sort of intellectual curiosity with regards to what such a thing would even *mean*. No, they just make up a number for it and then lumber on towards what ever "non political" political point they want to make.
edit: and it is a legitimately interesting question what the word "probability" can mean in a given context. Consider e.g. a die toss that landed 1. What was the probability of it not landing 1 ? Perhaps the way it was thrown, it was nearly guaranteed to land on that number; there was only a negligible chance for thermal noise to land it on another number. We know it landed on 1, we know it bounced 2 times, we know the amplification by each bounce was only this large...
Or perhaps this is subjective probabilities and we are asking what subjective probability we should have assigned, which would be 1/6 for each side, due to the symmetry of the die.
Or perhaps the priors are arbitrary and it could have been any number just as long as probabilities for sides sum to (almost) 1.
edit: or perhaps we are internet Bayesians and nothing needs to sum to 1. Maybe the probability of it landing 1 is 50%, landing 2 is 50%, landing 3 is 50%... anyhow the point being that even for something as straightforward as a die toss, "probability" can mean different things.
Yeah.
I think part of the issue is that normal people assign numerical probabilities to things when there exists some sort of argument for a specific number, like e.g. "a die is symmetrical as far as you know" leading to 1/number of facets probabilities getting assigned to each facet. You wouldn't say "this coin has a 0.2% probability of landing on the edge" without having either measurements or some theoretical calculation.
These people just make up a number, but then the words "x% probability" still carry the above connotation, as if they had a computer up their butt and when they pulled a number out of their ass the computer would ensure that the numbers sum to 1 across mutually incompatible propositions, make use of symmetries, etc etc.
Also interesting that none of his 4 options include the time period during which the vast majority of abortions occur, especially for non medical reasons (before end of first trimester)
Huh? What's confusing about it? At what point in development do you become >50% confident that abortion = murder. 50% = not confident at all.
50% means an all-knowing supercomputer from the year 2520 AD could deliver the truth to you, and regardless what the computer says it wouldn't surprise you. That's your 50%. But let's say the supercomputer said it's ok to kill 10 year-olds; that would presumably surprise you. That's because you're >50% confident that abortion after 10 years post-birth = murder.
How is a supercomputer going to deliver "the truth" about a moral question? There is no objectively correct answer. If the supercomputer said it's ok to kill 10 year-olds, I wouldn't be surprised or go "wow I would have thought that was wrong but I guess I should update my beliefs"; I would simply disregard what it has to say because it clearly has an incompatible set of values. The entire premise that there is a probability that an abortion is or isn't murder relies on some weird implicit unstated definition of murder.
Sorry, since when are there no objectively correct answers to moral questions? And since when did people start upvoting that crap on here? The only place the now banned idiot above is actually wrong in this case is in assuming that a supercomputer can come up with a good answer to the question, and some very poor assumptions about probability distribution.
No, it does not. This doesn't rely on objective morality. You can simply modify what question you want the supercomputer to answer. Simply have the supercomputer give you an answer to what the most compelling answer is according to your moral framework and you're back on track. In other words, the supercomputer can run your preferred moral script, but it's just better at it than you are. If you're Will Smith the supercomputer will tell you not to slap Chris Rock before it happens, and before your post-slap clarity sets in.
So the supercomputer knows how to run your moral script really well, and it's always right, even when you're not. So when the scorecard rolls in, >50% would be the point where you'd start getting confident about alignment with the supercomputer. Like you'd be almost 100% aligned with the computer at age 10 because you're presumably very certain that murdering 10 year-olds is wrong. So the question is at what point in development would the respondent pass the 50% threshold.
> run your preferred moral script
> and it's always right
You can keep insisting on your ridiculous premise, and we'll just keep rejecting the gigantic amount of assumptions you're trying to smuggle in that way.
Yea, if you can't do this because a time traveling supercomputer keeps throwing you off, then maybe thinking just isn't your thing lmao. Thanks for being here tho
Gotta give it to you, conceding the "irrational" aspect of morality and still insisting the silicon oracle would be better at it is a take I hadn't seen before.
I like that he tried both options for “than” on for size and couldnt
be bothered to figure it out which one was correct before confidently
posting his idiotic opinion
Yes, it's a correct sentence, but phrased very awkwardly. He could be doing that because it makes him more difficult to understand, giving the illusion of cleverness, or simply because he can't write better.
Incidentally, I’ve heard it said that Peter Singer extends pro-choice
arguments to justify infanticide but I haven’t read what he’s written on
that topic and I don’t know whether that’s a correct characterization or
a distortion
When I hear someone say that Peter Singer justifies infanticide, I might think he argues that killing babies is always morally OK. His actual position is:
"Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies. My view is different from this, but only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support — which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection — but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely."
So yea, it's a mischaracterization.
It’s frustrating as fuck – these clowns don’t get what g is… I mean,
yes, there is no denying that Yud is extraordinarily intelligent. Good
for him! But g isn’t a super-power – g isn’t a get out of hard work free
card. For all of his hand-wringing and lamentation about nobody else
working at this enormously important problem, he couldn’t be arsed to
actually get qualified. He couldn’t, you know, go to school, and study.
Writing fanfic is great and all, but if this was such a deeply
motivating problem, why didn’t he actually do the relevant thing and get
educated? It’s easy to read what you want and vomit out opinions, it’s
another to have high-quality outside input on your thinking, knowledge,
and growth. High g is not a substitute for actual domain-specific
expertise.
The fundamental issue is he started with the idea of Seed AI and such a thing is fundamentally not possible in the way he envisoned it. Your Commodore 64 is not going to hack the entire internet and bootstrap to godhood. Even though, in theory, the C64 has 2^524288 potential states. An absolutely ridiculously huge number, it is limited by bandwidth, processing speed, and environmental perturbations. His Seed AI dies as soon as it hits an AES/RSA front end which is essentially the entire internet. He pressums the AI is god from the onset and it has solved all those things. And all we have to do is change a curve or lattice parameter and boom it's done. In reality intelligence is a far more complicated thing than simple utility functions and math.
We assume dolphins are highly intelligent, why didnt they breed land dwellers by selectively breeding dolphins that could survive beaching for longer and longer until boom they are land walkers again?
There was a post somewhere that nailed it. Apart from cult leader tendencies, he's just an average scifi nerd you would find at a scifi convention. He can read a popularization book and write his own popularization (further removed from the underlying field). That is it.
The smarts, what did he ever do with his life that required any non conman style smarts? Okay, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and all that, but these people also preach Bayesian statistics, and this would be precisely the case where you can have a well justified prior of say 10^-6 for him having some "one in a million intelligence".
Because those who bow down to the acausal robot god have received a divine revelation that education is useless. All useful knowledge is harvested directly from source material by those who actually possess enough g to be of any worth. The auto-didactic is the only person of value. All others shall be purged from the gene pool, one way or the other.
I see nothing wrong with this logic. You should be able to abort
until the end of the 5th trimester. That’s when it will finally
recognize itself in a mirror and become human.
I remember when this was a bit from Christopher Titus. “You should be
able to abort up to the 22nd year…gotta know whether they can handle
their liquor first”
Saying “x is not a person” is not the same as advocating for killing
x. E.g. if I say “a book is not a person”, it doesn’t mean I am
advocating for burning books.
> Saying "x is not a person" is not the same as advocating for killing
If he'd said that in isolation, if the conversation wasn't whether it's murder to destroy x, then maybe you'd have a point. But you don't.
So, I was gonna say that one can believe killing babies is not murder and still oppose it for other reasons. E.g. Peter Singer opposes it because it would hurt parents' feelings.
But then I realized [Eliezer is willing to eat babies to prove his superior rationality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jko7pt7MwwTBrfG3A/undiscriminating-skepticism?commentId=aJoLeCBeqrJg3ZkZj), so yea, maybe I don't have a point.
Most people see the fact “a pig is smarter than a baby” as an argument for animal rights. Yud, in his infinite wisdom, knows that it is actually an argument for infanticide! Can’t believe I didn’t think of this before!
“I’m no developmental psychologist, but…”
I don’t know WTF I’m talking about, but here’s my unsupported, unresearched opinion anyhow.
you’d think that someone in yud’s line of work would eventually getting around to googling the term “qualia” to figure out what it means
As expected, Yudkowsky is about as effective at being pro choice as he is at saving the world from AI.
Also unsurprisingly the way he uses words like “qualia” is exactly the same way something like GPT3 uses words. See it in a context, drop it into a similar context.
I have to say I’m not surprised to see yud handling such a sensitive, nuanced issue as infant euthanasia-which touches on suffering brought on by severe illness or disability balanced with concerns about creeping eugenics and the value of even a limited or suffering-tinged life-with the grace of a bowlegged gazelle in a ballpit. taking the view that it makes sense to pop a bullet in a healthy 9 month old’s head instead of, I don’t know, having an effective and humane foster care and adoption system seems…..psychotic.
If Big Yud was a P-zombie, would it be OK to murder him?
Ah yes, the southpark 2000 joke (CW: southpark), repeated in 2022.
E: forgot to sneer at the way Caplan framed his question btw. [So here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneer#/media/File:Expression_of_the_Emotions_Plate_IV_(sneering).png)
You guys are late.
What does probability even mean in this sentence? 50% of abortions conducted at this point are murders, rather than livesaving emergency surgeries, interventions to avoid destroying the lives of 10-year-old rape victims, tragic decisions by hopeful future parents to start over and try again for a child without severe developmental impairments? My subjective personal confidence level is 50% that 100% of abortions at this point are murders? Any given patient going in for an abortion at this time point awaits a coin flip for the 50% chance that it will become a murder?
I like that he tried both options for “than” on for size and couldnt be bothered to figure it out which one was correct before confidently posting his idiotic opinion
qualia….lol. yawwwwwwn. yud is so silly
Incidentally, I’ve heard it said that Peter Singer extends pro-choice arguments to justify infanticide but I haven’t read what he’s written on that topic and I don’t know whether that’s a correct characterization or a distortion
It’s frustrating as fuck – these clowns don’t get what g is… I mean, yes, there is no denying that Yud is extraordinarily intelligent. Good for him! But g isn’t a super-power – g isn’t a get out of hard work free card. For all of his hand-wringing and lamentation about nobody else working at this enormously important problem, he couldn’t be arsed to actually get qualified. He couldn’t, you know, go to school, and study. Writing fanfic is great and all, but if this was such a deeply motivating problem, why didn’t he actually do the relevant thing and get educated? It’s easy to read what you want and vomit out opinions, it’s another to have high-quality outside input on your thinking, knowledge, and growth. High g is not a substitute for actual domain-specific expertise.
I see nothing wrong with this logic. You should be able to abort until the end of the 5th trimester. That’s when it will finally recognize itself in a mirror and become human.
He really wanted to hedge his bet on the correct spelling of “than”
I remember when this was a bit from Christopher Titus. “You should be able to abort up to the 22nd year…gotta know whether they can handle their liquor first”
Leave it to yud to be pro choice without being pro women.
Based Yud?!?!
I know he definitely didn’t intend to but what Yud actually just made here was one of the single best arguments for veganism
No option for, like, never? You’re all p-zombies, after all.
Saying “x is not a person” is not the same as advocating for killing x. E.g. if I say “a book is not a person”, it doesn’t mean I am advocating for burning books.
There are so many inside jokes. How did I end up here?
Rationalising yourself to a position more extreme than a religious zealot. Very apt.