{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/4389",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
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  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 4389,
    "subject": "altruism (slight thread necromancy)",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2005-04-01T18:12:14+00:00",
    "last": "2005-04-01T18:12:14+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<424DFF6E.7030506@gmail.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "maru",
        "address": "marudubshinki at gmail.com"
      },
      "date": "2005-04-01T18:12:14+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) altruism (slight thread necromancy)",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I realize our debate on altruism and ethics is a bit dead, and pointless\nbut I saw this on a another list and it seems pretty relevant to our \ndiscussions\nso I'm forwarding it. Makes for interesting reading, anyway.\n\n~Maru"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "From http://sl4.org/wiki/DialogueOnFriendliness\n(Eliezer-2003 era, partially superceded by CollectiveVolition)\n\nCathryn: All right. Suppose I wished for the genie to grab an ice \ncream cone from a little girl and give it to me. Now it might be a \nreally delicious and satisfying ice cream cone, but it would still be \nwrong to take the ice cream cone away from the little girl. Isn't your \ndefinition of satisfaction fundamentally selfish?\n\nDennis: I'll say! *I* should get the ice cream cone.\n\nBernard: Well, of course, the so-called altruist is also really \nselfish. It's just that the altruist is made happy by other people's \nhappiness, so he tries to make other people happy in order to increase \nhis own happiness.\n\nCathryn: That sounds like a silly definition. It sounds like a bunch \nof philosophers trying to get rid of the inconvenient square peg of \naltruism by stuffing it into an ill-fitting round hole. That is just \nnot how altruism actually works in real people, Bernard.\n\nAutrey: I wouldn't dismiss the thought entirely. The philosopher \nRaymond Smullyan once asked: \"Is altruism sacrificing your own \nhappiness for the happiness of others, or gaining your happiness \nthrough the happiness of others?\" I think that's a penetrating question.\n\nEileen: I would say that altruism is making choices so as to maximize \nthe expected happiness of others. My favorite definition of altruism \nis one I found in a glossary of Zen: \"Altruistic behavior: An act done \nwithout any intent for personal gain in any form. Altruism requires \nthat there is no want for material, physical, spiritual, or egoistic \ngain.\"\n\nCathryn: No *spiritual* gain?\n\nEileen: That's right.\n\nBernard: That sounds like Zen, all right - self-contradictory, \ninherently impossible of realization. Different people are made happy \nby different things, but everyone does what makes them happy. If the \naltruist were not made happy by the thought of helping others, he \nwouldn't do it.\n\nAutrey: I may be made happy by the thought of helping others. That \ndoesn't mean it's the reason I help others.\n\nCathryn: Yes, how would you account for someone who sacrifices her \nlife to save someone else's? She can't possibly anticipate being happy \nonce she's dead.\n\nAutrey: Some people do.\n\nCathryn: I don't. And yet there are still things I would give my life \nfor. I think. You can't ever be sure until you face the crunch.\n\nEileen: There you go, Cathryn. There's your counterexample.\n\nCathryn: Huh?\n\nEileen: If your wish is to sacrifice your life so that someone else \nmay live, you can't say \"Yes, I'm satisfied\" afterward.\n\nAutrey: If you have a genie on hand, you really should be able to \nthink of a better solution than that.\n\nEileen: Perhaps. Regardless, it demonstrates at least one hole in that \ndefinition of volition.\n\nBernard: It is not a hole in the definition. It is never rational to \nsacrifice your life for something, precisely because you will not be \naround to experience the satisfaction you anticipate. A genie should \nnot fulfill irrational wishes.\n\nAutrey: Cathryn knows very well that she cannot feel anything after \nshe dies, and yet there are still things she would die for, as would \nI. We are not being tricked into that decision, we are making the \nchoice in full awareness of its consequences. To quote Tyrone Pow, \"An \natheist giving his life for something is a profound gesture.\" Where is \nthe untrue thing that we must believe in order to make that decision? \nWhere is the inherent irrationality? We do not make that choice in \nanticipation of feeling satisfied. We make it because some things are \nmore important to us than feeling satisfaction.\n\nBernard: Like what?\n\nCathryn: Like ten other people living to fulfill their own wishes. All \nsentients have the same intrinsic value. If I die, and never get to \nexperience any satisfaction, that's more than made up for by ten other \npeople living to experience their own satisfactions.\n\nBernard: Okay, what you're saying is that other people's happiness is \nweighted by your goal system the same as your own happiness, so that \nwhen ten other people are happy, you experience ten times as much \nsatisfaction as when you yourself are happy. This can make it rational \nto sacrifice for other people - for example, you donate a thousand \ndollars to a charity that helps the poor, because the thousand dollars \ncan create ten times as much happiness in that charity as it could \ncreate if you spent it on yourself. What can never be rational is \nsacrificing your life, even to save ten other lives, because you won't \nget to experience the satisfaction.\n\nCathryn: What? You're saying that you wouldn't sacrifice your own life \neven to save the entire human species?\n\nBernard: (Laughs.) Well, I don't always do the rational thing.\n\nCathryn: Argh. You deserve to be locked in a cell for a week with Ayn \nRand.\n\nAutrey: Bernard, I'm not altruistic because I anticipate feeling \nsatisfaction. The reward is that other people benefit, not that I \nexperience the realization that they benefit. Given that, it is \nperfectly rational to sacrifice my life to save ten people.\n\nBernard: But you won't ever know those ten people lived.\n\nAutrey: So what? What I value is not \"the fact that Autrey knows ten \npeople lived\", what I value is \"the fact that ten people lived\". I \ncare about the territory, not the map. You know, this reminds me of a \nconversation I once had with Greg Stock. He thought that drugs would \neventually become available that could simulate any feeling of \nsatisfaction, not just simple ecstasy - for example, drugs that \nsimulated the feeling of scientific discovery. He then went on to say \nthat he thought that once this happened, everyone would switch over to \ntaking the drugs, because real scientific discovery wouldn't be able \nto compare.\n\nCathryn: Yikes. I wouldn't go near a drug like that with a \nten-lightyear pole.\n\nAutrey: That's what I said, too - that I wanted to genuinely help \npeople, not just feel like I was doing so. \"No,\" said Greg Stock, \n\"you'd take them anyway, because no matter how much you helped people, \nthe drugs would still make you feel ten times better.\"\n\nCathryn: That assumes I'd take the drugs to begin with, which I \nwouldn't ever do. I don't want to be addicted. I don't want to be \ntransformed into the person those drugs would make me.\n\nAutrey: The strange thing was that Greg Stock didn't seem to mind the \nprospect. It sounded like he saw it as a natural development.\n\nCathryn: So where'd the conversation go after that?\n\nAutrey: I wanted to talk about the difference between psychological \negoism and psychological altruism. But it was a bit too much territory \nto cover in the thirty seconds of time I had available.\n\nDennis: Psychological egoism and psychological altruism? Eh?\n\nEileen: The difference between a goal system that optimizes an \ninternal state and a goal system that optimizes an external state.\n\nCathryn: There's a formal difference?\n\nEileen: Yes.\n\nBernard: No.\n\nCathryn: Interesting.\n\nAutrey: In philosophy, this is known as the egoism debate. It's been \ngoing on for a while. I don't really agree with the way the arguments \nare usually phrased, but I can offer a quick summary anyway. You want \none?\n\nDennis: Yeah.\n\nAutrey: Okay. Psychological egoism is the position that all our \nultimate ends are self-directed. That is, we can want external things \nas means to an end, but all our ultimate ends - all things that we \ndesire in themselves rather than for their consequences - are \nself-directed in the sense that their propositional content is about \nour own states.\n\nEileen: Propositional content? Sounds rather GOFAI-ish.\n\nAutrey: Maybe, but it's the way the standard debate is phrased. \nAnyway, let's say I want it to be the case that I have a chocolate \nbar. This desire is purely self-directed, since the propositional \ncontent mentions me and no other agent. On the other hand, suppose I \nwant it to be the case that Jennie has a candy bar. This desire is \nother-directed, since the propositional content mentions another \nperson, Jennie, but not myself. Psychological egoism claims that all \nour ultimate desires are self-directed; psychological altruism says \nthat at least some of our ultimate desires are other-directed.\n\nBernard: If you want Jennie to have a candy bar, it means that you \nwould be happy if Jennie got a candy bar. Your real end is always \nhappiness.\n\nAutrey: That's known as psychological hedonism, which is a special \ncase of psychological egoism. As Sober and Wilson put it, \"The \nhedonist says that the only ultimate desires that people have are \nattaining pleasure and avoding pain... the salient fact about hedonism \nis its claim that people are motivational solipsists; the only things \nthey care about ultimately are states of their own consciousness. \nAlthough hedonists must be egoists, the reverse isn't true. For \nexample, if people desire their own survival as an end in itself, they \nmay be egoists, but they are not hedonists.\" Another quote from the \nsame authors: \"Avoiding pain is one of our ultimate goals. However, \nmany people realize that being in pain reduces their ability to \nconcentrate, so they may sometimes take an aspirin in part because \nthey want to remove a source of distraction. This shows that the \nthings we want as ends in themselves we may also want for instrumental \nreasons... When psychological egoism seeks to explain why one person \nhelped another, it isn't enough to show that one of the reasons for \nhelping was self-benefit; this is quite consistent with there being \nanother, purely altruistic, reason that the individual had for \nhelping. Symmetrically, to refute egoism, one need not cite examples \nof helping in which only other-directed motives play a role. If people \nsometimes help for both egoistic and altruistic ultimate reasons, then \npsychological egoism is false.\"\n\nDennis: The very notion of altruism is incoherent.\n\nAutrey: That argument is indeed the chief reason why some philosophers \nespouse psychological hedonism.\n\nCathryn: Sounds like a lot of silly philosophizing to me. Does it \nreally matter whether I'm considered a \"motivational solipsist\" or \nwhatever, as long as I actually help people?\n\nBernard: That's just it! It doesn't make any operational difference - \nall goal systems operate to maximize their internal satisfaction, no \nmatter what external events cause satisfaction.\n\nEileen: That's not true; it does make an operational difference. If \nAutrey values the solipsistic psychological event of knowing he saved \nten lives, he will never sacrifice his own life to save ten other \nlives; if he values those ten lives in themselves, he may. You told \nhim that, remember?\n\nBernard: Well, I guess Autrey might value the instantaneous happiness \nof knowing he chose to save ten lives, more than he values all the \nhappiness he might achieve in the rest of his life.\n\nCathryn: That doesn't sound anything remotely like the way real people \nthink. Square peg, round hole.\n\nAutrey: Do you have anything new to contribute to the debate, Eileen? \nIt's a pretty ancient issue in philosophy.\n\nEileen: The basic equation for a Bayesian decision system is usually \nphrased something like D(a) = Sum U(x)P(x|a). This is known as the \nexpected utility equation, and it was derived by von Neumann and \nMorgenstern in 1944 as a unique constraint on preference orderings for \nall systems that obey certain consistency axioms -\n\nDennis: Start over.\n\nEileen: Okay. Imagine that D(a) stands for the \"desirability\" of an \naction A, that U(x) stands for the \"utility\" of a state of the \nuniverse X, and P(x|a) is your assigned \"probability\" that the state X \noccurs, given that you take action A. For example, let's say that I \nshow you two spinner wheels, the red spinner and the green spinner. \nOne-third of the red spinner wheel is black, while two-thirds of the \ngreen spinner wheel is white. Both spinners have a dial that I'm going \nto spin around until it settles at random into a red or black area \n(for the red spinner) or a white or green area (for the green \nspinner). The red spinner has a one-third chance of turning up black, \nwhile the green spinner has a two-thirds chance of turning up white. \nLet's say that I offer you one of two choices; you can pick the red \nspinner and get a chocolate ice cream cone if the spinner turns up \nblack, or you can pick the green spinner and get a vanilla ice cream \ncone if the spinner turns up white.\n\n(And then it gets complicated...)\n\n-- \nEliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/\nResearch Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence"
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