From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jun 17 2003 - 08:20:32 MDT
Brett Paatsch wrote:
> Dan Fabulich writes:
>
>>In particular, I consider it a fact of ethical logic that,
>> for any X, we shouldn't believe the claim *:
>>
>> (*) Although X is false, we should believe X anyway.
>
> What about where X = "This drug will relieve your illness"
>
> When
>
> (1) The drug is a placebo and no real medication is available.
>
> (2) 40% of patients with the particular illness have improved
> as a result of the placebo effect in the past.
Perhaps the phrase "fact of ethical logic" was badly chosen - few indeed
are the ethical heuristics that apply to all possible universes. Would
Dan Fabulich concede that his heuristic holds true only of non-maxentropy
universes, or perhaps even - to be conservative - that we know the
heuristic to hold true only for Earth, and we would have to determine
whether it holds true of other interstellar species by examining their
individual cases? If we find that it holds true of all species
encountered, we could try generalizing from there.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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