From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 17 2003 - 14:17:45 MDT
I said before that I thought this discussion was bogging down, so I paused
for a while. I think I'll mainly now respond to direct questions left
hanging.
On AM 7/12/2003, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
>"How Evolution Deceives You To Prevent You From Living Up To Your Ideals."
>Implicit assumptions in that title:
>1: "You" are identified with your ideals. ...
The key question here has been your point number 1. No strong arguments
have been offered on it either way so far.
>>>... any particular area or result of which you worry I am ignorant?
>>In economics it goes by the name of "social welfare analysis".
>Do you mean social choice theory?
No, not particularly.
>>I had in mind examples that look much less like deliberate deception. A
>>corporation (or non-profit org) can start out with principles that it
>>declares, and that the top individuals in it believe it follows, but
>>market selection pressures can end up making it violate those principles. ...
>
>This organizational pathology sounds like something entirely separate from
>human self-deception, operating through different mechanisms to produce
>results with surface similarity. If I were analyzing the two systems I
>would be very careful to do so separately, to avoid fearsome confusion and
>dismay.
It doesn't seem so different from human self-deception to me. At it allows
us to consider various alternative scenarios and ask what the company
"really wants" in such situations. If you reject the idea that companies
want things because they have complex components, you may well not be able
to say that our descendants want things, as they may well also have such
complex components.
>Who says that what *does in fact* make people happier, that is, which
>physical events will in fact put their brains into a state bearing
>happiness, is the metric of what they really want right now?
This is one of the two standard metrics used by philosophers and
economists, when trying to decide what actions will benefit a person. Of
course being standard doesn't make it right.
On 14 July 2003, Dan Fabulich wrote:
>So, would you agree that, if I am right that most people who
>make a briefly informed betrayal would be miserable, your happiness metric
>would, at least, be in contradiction with the "informed choice" metric in
>those cases?
Yes.
>... Eliezer claims that he can't think of anybody who has been
>informed of their programming and hasn't tried to shake it off; ...
A lot of people are "shocked, just shocked", and go through a few cheap
motions of concern, but almost all then quickly forget about the issue and
go on as before. Almost no one actually spends much effort trying to shake
it off.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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