From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2003 - 11:05:34 MDT
Robin Hanson wrote:
> I just came across this thought-provoking future speculation by
> Geoffrey Miller, author of "The Mating Mind":
> http://psych.unm.edu/faculty/moral_vision.htm
> There's something broken about this idea, but its hard to say
> exactly what it is.
The behaviors depicted are implausible because they don't occupy a local
memetic optimum and hence are not evolutionarily stable. If ethics as a
means of displaying status took off, it would short out on whichever
ethics were most faddishly popular and instinctively appealing, just as it
does today on ineffective Third World charities, environmentalism, charity
balls and so on. Watch the witch hunts for people insufficiently
supportive of the ethical fad of the month, ethics reality TV shows, etc.
Virtually all of the money would be wasted on the same popular failures
year-after-year, and the movement would sustain itself not on a tiny
handful of small successes and a big heaping handful of scapegoats.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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