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I feel like the person writing this is perhaps too arrogant. > In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure o

I feel like the person writing this is perhaps too arrogant. > In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure of how much society cares about something. > > This is a brutal yet obvious point, which many are motivated to deny. This is not a definition, and I don’t think it is obvious. What “society” are you talking about? Your national borders? Also, as a counterexample, society whatever it may be cares about motherhood, that doesn’t mean it pays money to mothers…

teekert 3y ago
Actually, some northern European countries have over a year of parenting leave to be distributed among 2 parents, one could argue that that is paying parents to be parents because society cares.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
polygamous_bat 3y ago
This is a common fallacy, since "society" doesn't care unless it is made to care by the people that makes it up. Unless there is combined social pressure to care, the most psychopathic among us will always delegate the social responsibility to those who are "soft-hearted" and choose to hoard their money or spend it in a self-centered way. The rationalists always make this mistake, intentionally or unintentionally, to take the average person and think that that's all there is in society.
bux93 3y ago
An arrogant writer? On lesswrong.com?
- timmytokyo 3y ago
  Not just any old writer, but Eliezer himself, the less wrongest of less wrongers. I can see why he wrote this. He founded the Singularity Institute for AI, which eventually became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which ultimately provides him with his sinecure. Despite producing no research of any value, MIRI has been funded with "units of caring" by people like Peter Thiel, Vitalik Buterin and Dustin Moskovitz. Now Eliezer has transformed fully into a modern Cassandra, prophesying imminent AI apocalypse from which there is no escape. Sadly, for him, there are not enough units of caring to save us.
PeterisP 3y ago
Almost every society in the world does literally pay money to mothers in the form of mandatory paid maternity leave. The only exceptions are the United States, Papua New Guinea, and a few island countries in the Pacific Ocean (namely the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Tonga), every other country in the world, no matter how poor they might be, do pay money to mothers.
mejutoco 3y ago
IMO, there is this common habit in lesswrong of creating new words that sound smart, as if they cannot "stop trying to make it a thing". If justified, I don't normally see a problem with that (like fractal, from Mandelbrot). It feels like it is not enough to talk about a concept, we need mega-utilons, or hyper-tail-distribution. As if they wanted to sell you a best-seller at an airport about this new concept. I have been disappointed in enough articles there that use these new concepts to hide flaws in argumentation, to not bother with lesswrong.
- inconceivable 3y ago
  they should just rename the site to iamverysmart.com
Sharlin 3y ago
> Also, as a counterexample, society whatever it may be cares about motherhood, that doesn’t mean it pays money to mothers… On the contrary, it's an example, not a counterexample. The fact that the US, almost alone in the world, doesn't have mandatory paid parental leave, absolutely says something about how much the American society cares about parenthood. Of course, you don't have to pay people to make future taxpayers if they're doing it for free – and indeed spending a lot of money raising said future taxpayers, so on an individual level Americans certainly seem to care about children. Of course there are also other ways than money to manipulate people into having more kids, such as poor sex education and making it socially frowned upon or even illegal to use contraception or have an abortion. In any case, having children is obviously an extreme edge case given that there's a couple billion years worth of genetic programming making us want to have them, or at the very least making us want to partake in the activity that's supposed to result in children. The article can be aptly summarized as: "Talk is cheap, show me the money". An individual or a society can virtue signal however much they like, but to find out what they really care about, take a look at where the money is going.

teekert 3y ago

Actually, some northern European countries have over a year of parenting leave to be distributed among 2 parents, one could argue that that is paying parents to be parents because society cares.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

polygamous_bat 3y ago

This is a common fallacy, since "society" doesn't care unless it is made to care by the people that makes it up. Unless there is combined social pressure to care, the most psychopathic among us will always delegate the social responsibility to those who are "soft-hearted" and choose to hoard their money or spend it in a self-centered way. The rationalists always make this mistake, intentionally or unintentionally, to take the average person and think that that's all there is in society.

bux93 3y ago

An arrogant writer? On lesswrong.com?

timmytokyo 3y ago
Not just any old writer, but Eliezer himself, the less wrongest of less wrongers. I can see why he wrote this. He founded the Singularity Institute for AI, which eventually became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which ultimately provides him with his sinecure. Despite producing no research of any value, MIRI has been funded with "units of caring" by people like Peter Thiel, Vitalik Buterin and Dustin Moskovitz. Now Eliezer has transformed fully into a modern Cassandra, prophesying imminent AI apocalypse from which there is no escape. Sadly, for him, there are not enough units of caring to save us.

PeterisP 3y ago

Almost every society in the world does literally pay money to mothers in the form of mandatory paid maternity leave. The only exceptions are the United States, Papua New Guinea, and a few island countries in the Pacific Ocean (namely the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Tonga), every other country in the world, no matter how poor they might be, do pay money to mothers.

mejutoco 3y ago

IMO, there is this common habit in lesswrong of creating new words that sound smart, as if they cannot "stop trying to make it a thing". If justified, I don't normally see a problem with that (like fractal, from Mandelbrot). It feels like it is not enough to talk about a concept, we need mega-utilons, or hyper-tail-distribution. As if they wanted to sell you a best-seller at an airport about this new concept. I have been disappointed in enough articles there that use these new concepts to hide flaws in argumentation, to not bother with lesswrong.

inconceivable 3y ago
they should just rename the site to iamverysmart.com

Sharlin 3y ago

> Also, as a counterexample, society whatever it may be cares about motherhood, that doesn’t mean it pays money to mothers… On the contrary, it's an example, not a counterexample. The fact that the US, almost alone in the world, doesn't have mandatory paid parental leave, absolutely says something about how much the American society cares about parenthood. Of course, you don't have to pay people to make future taxpayers if they're doing it for free – and indeed spending a lot of money raising said future taxpayers, so on an individual level Americans certainly seem to care about children. Of course there are also other ways than money to manipulate people into having more kids, such as poor sex education and making it socially frowned upon or even illegal to use contraception or have an abortion. In any case, having children is obviously an extreme edge case given that there's a couple billion years worth of genetic programming making us want to have them, or at the very least making us want to partake in the activity that's supposed to result in children. The article can be aptly summarized as: "Talk is cheap, show me the money". An individual or a society can virtue signal however much they like, but to find out what they really care about, take a look at where the money is going.