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I think for me what helped was taking an ethics class in college. I realized then what should have been obvious, that people who hold different beliefs from me
by elihu 10y ago
I think for me what helped was taking an ethics class in college. I realized then what should have been obvious, that people who hold different beliefs from me didn't arrive at those beliefs because their logic is somehow defective, but rather they have different priorities and care about different things.
I don't think my own error would have been corrected through programming; it might even have have led me somewhat to believe that political/religious/ethical problems can be approached the same way as writing software or formulating an equation, and they have answers that are objectively right or wrong in a way that any reasonably intelligent person would arrive at the same conclusion through the application of logic.
Which isn't to say that programming isn't a good way to treat certain kinds of unhelpful attitudes.
- traverseda 10y agoWell, the effective altruists believe that ethical problems can be approached using a lot of the techniques outlined in "measuring intangibles in business". That is, through proper analysis and approaching it like a programming/engineering problem. And according to Aumann's agreement theorem, if your priors are the same (such as preference utilitarianism) two people should agree. That is to say, I think it can work like that, as long as everyone involved agrees on an ethical framework and decision theory. And that everyone probably should do that.
- elihu 10y agoI think getting total agreement on what ethical framework to use is really hard. For most hard problems, you need all the help you can get, and turning away anyone who doesn't exactly fit your framework is counterproductive. It might work in cases where the group of people you're working with are determined by a common interest or a common worldview.
- jholman 10y agoThat's not what Aumann's agreement theorem says. First of all, it only applies to statistical reasoning about distributions of probabilities. It does not, for example, apply to "what should one do in this situation?". Preference utilitarianism is not a prior. A prior might be "there is a 5% chance that all cats are dogs". Next, it only applies to Bayesian agents, a subspecies of unicorn. Next, it only applies when all agents have perfect "common knowledge" of each others' posteriors, where "common knowledge" refers to a theoretical infinite transitive closure of meta-knowledge. I think it should be clear that a situation where two agents have common knowledge of each others posteriors is almost as rare as a state where two agents are both reasoning using nothing but Bayesian inference. And lastly, as with your confusion about priors, the agreement that results is not agreement about what to do, or what ought to be done, but is merely an agreement of posteriors. Do you find it rational to apply mathematical theorems about very specific impossible circumstances to unrelated domains, and do you find that the word "theorem" allows to manipulate the unwary?
- majewsky 10y agoInterestingly, I arrived at the same conclusion not by studying ethics, but by studying logic. Around the same time, I was watching Star Trek intensively and I noticed how comically wrong their depiction of Vulcan logic is: Since logic is the art of correct deduction, any action can never be "only logical" per se, it can only ever be logical given a certain (usually undisclosed) set of goals or values.
- elihu 10y agoQuite right. Perhaps the Vulcans can be assumed to have an agreed-upon set of goals or values? (Interestingly, a general theme of the textbook for the ethics class I took was that people develop their ability to make good ethical decisions largely through story-telling, since it provides an opportunity for people to imagine circumstances outside their immediate experience. If I remember correctly, a lot of the examples in the text were taken from Star Trek. It's interesting to think of Star Trek as not principally a science fiction show but rather a vehicle for exploring ethical dilemmas.)
- majewsky 10y agoScience fiction in general is a vehicle for exploring ethical dilemmas, and Star Trek just happens to be one of the most popular ones.