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Yeah, he leaves the original post ambiguous, but if you dig into the comments, he clarifies that his stance is that torture is the right option. I'm going to tr

Yeah, he leaves the original post ambiguous, but if you dig into the comments, he clarifies that his stance is that torture is the right option. I'm going to try to find the link. EDIT: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs-dust-specks?commentId=XkDoPE3wCtwByTjLh https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs... > I'll go ahead and reveal my answer now: Robin Hanson was correct, I do think that TORTURE is the obvious option, and I think the main instinct behind SPECKS is scope insensitivity. When you find yourself writing "torture is the obvious option", you should realize that something has gone deeply wrong with the way you view the world. It's no wonder that death cults have sprung out of this philosophy.

fc417fc802 2y ago
I feel like this is missing the point. Trolley problems are absurd hypotheticals with no direct bearing on reality. Their usefulness is as thought experiments. If you don't pull the lever the trolley kills one person. If you pull it N people lose a single limb. At what value of N does your ethical framework place the crossover point and why?
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  I don't agree that they're absurd. They have widespread popularity because they capture the kind of cost dilemmas that crop up all the time, eg 'if we build this refinery we can predict that an additional 20 people will get cancer over the next decade, but otoh we might achieve a 2% reduction in the cost of gasoline for everyone in our state over the same period.' The main intellectual error of utilitarianism is the assumption of perfect foreknowledge, and the justification of conclusions as if those predictions were facts. But just because trolley problems are stark oversimplifications does not make them useless as ethical reasoning tools; studying them helps you recognize messy ethical dilemmas as such rather than being seduced by the alleged upsides of a policy proposal.
  - atombender 2y ago
    Just to be a little pedantic: Your refinery example isn't a trolley problem, because there are more than two choices, and one of the possible choices is "don't build it in the first place". The refinery example allows foresight, which the trolley problem doesn't. "I would build the tracks differently" isn't a possible answer to the trolley problem. The whole point is that it's too late to make any other decision than "kill few" or "kill many".
pas 2y ago
That comment is from 2007-10-31, and it's at least a tiny bit comforting to see that in almost a year his thinking got a bit more humane. 2008-10-14 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...

fc417fc802 2y ago

I feel like this is missing the point. Trolley problems are absurd hypotheticals with no direct bearing on reality. Their usefulness is as thought experiments. If you don't pull the lever the trolley kills one person. If you pull it N people lose a single limb. At what value of N does your ethical framework place the crossover point and why?

anigbrowl 2y ago
I don't agree that they're absurd. They have widespread popularity because they capture the kind of cost dilemmas that crop up all the time, eg 'if we build this refinery we can predict that an additional 20 people will get cancer over the next decade, but otoh we might achieve a 2% reduction in the cost of gasoline for everyone in our state over the same period.' The main intellectual error of utilitarianism is the assumption of perfect foreknowledge, and the justification of conclusions as if those predictions were facts. But just because trolley problems are stark oversimplifications does not make them useless as ethical reasoning tools; studying them helps you recognize messy ethical dilemmas as such rather than being seduced by the alleged upsides of a policy proposal.
- atombender 2y ago
  Just to be a little pedantic: Your refinery example isn't a trolley problem, because there are more than two choices, and one of the possible choices is "don't build it in the first place". The refinery example allows foresight, which the trolley problem doesn't. "I would build the tracks differently" isn't a possible answer to the trolley problem. The whole point is that it's too late to make any other decision than "kill few" or "kill many".

pas 2y ago

That comment is from 2007-10-31, and it's at least a tiny bit comforting to see that in almost a year his thinking got a bit more humane. 2008-10-14 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...