Holden Karnofsky on utility legions
Utilitarianism allows “utility monsters” and “utility legions.” A large enough benefit to a single person (utility monster), or a benefit of any size to a sufficiently large set of persons (utility legion), can outweigh all other ethical considerations. Utility monsters seem (as far as I can tell) to be a mostly theoretical source of difficulty, but I think the idea of a “utility legion” - a large set of persons such that the opportunity to benefit them outweighs all other moral considerations - is the root cause of most of what’s controversial and interesting about utilitarianism today, at least in the context of effective altruism.
Quote holden karnosfky moral philosophy utilitarianism naming
Tyler Cowen on historicism and taking sides
I’ve become more historicist as I’ve got older. We in the west are embedded in a society that we should not pull apart and reassemble. We’re embedded in some form of common sense morality, there’s a history behind us. A lot of things we can’t change readily but we can make different alterations at the margin.
I don’t have answers to the large scale Parfitian or Rawlsiam or Nozicikian moral questions. I don’t think there are absolutes and even if there are I don’t think there are many things we can treat as absolutes in real-world decision making.
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I’m not sure there is really a morality across species that are very different and cannot trade with each other. It may be that in some unpleasant way we just have to take sides. And to take the side of a vision of the world that is not just nature but is also humans building… I don’t think I can justify it morally but that is the side I will take. Because the alternative is we all go extinct pretty rapidly. I mean you can be a very conscientious vegan but if you look closely at different parts of your life they’re actually all pretty morally unacceptable, where you live, the various supply chains you interact with.
I just don’t think there’s a utilitarian scale where you can add up the insects on one side and the humans on the other. And so I’m on the side of the humans and the other animals we trade with.
quote tyler cowen bernard williams historicism conservatism commensurability
Fallow period
It is winter. Cold and wet outside, but your apartment is warm. You take your morning walk, do your 20 press ups, and show up at your desk—to write and think, per your plan for the week. But your mind is blank. All you really want to do is sit and read. Or gaze at storm clouds, the rain blowing sideways. Or take another walk.
Eliezer Yudkowsky on naturalism
Belief in a fair universe often manifests in more subtle ways than thinking that horrors should be outright prohibited: Would the twentieth century have gone differently, if Klara Pölzl and Alois Hitler had made love one hour earlier, and a different sperm fertilized the egg, on the night that Adolf Hitler was conceived?
For so many lives and so much loss to turn on a single event, seems disproportionate. The Divine Plan ought to make more sense than that. You can believe in a Divine Plan without believing in God—Karl Marx surely did. You shouldn’t have millions of lives depending on a casual choice, an hour’s timing, the speed of a microscopic flagellum. It ought not to be allowed. It’s too disproportionate. Therefore, if Adolf Hitler had been able to go to high school and become an architect, there would have been someone else to take his role, and World War II would have happened the same as before.
But in the world beyond the reach of God, there isn’t any clause in the physical axioms which says “things have to make sense” or “big effects need big causes” or “history runs on reasons too important to be so fragile”. There is no God to impose that order, which is so severely violated by having the lives and deaths of millions depend on one small molecular event.
The point of the thought experiment is to lay out the God-universe and the Nature-universe side by side, so that we can recognize what kind of thinking belongs to the God-universe. Many who are atheists, still think as if certain things are not allowed. They would lay out arguments for why World War II was inevitable and would have happened in more or less the same way, even if Hitler had become an architect. But in sober historical fact, this is an unreasonable belief; I chose the example of World War II because from my reading, it seems that events were mostly driven by Hitler’s personality, often in defiance of his generals and advisors. There is no particular empirical justification that I happen to have heard of, for doubting this. The main reason to doubt would be refusal to accept that the universe could make so little sense—that horrible things could happen so lightly, for no more reason than a roll of the dice.
But why not? What prohibits it?
In the God-universe, God prohibits it. To recognize this is to recognize that we don’t live in that universe. We live in the what-if universe beyond the reach of God, driven by the mathematical laws and nothing else. Whatever physics says will happen, will happen. Absolutely anything, good or bad, will happen. And there is nothing in the laws of physics to lift this rule even for the really extreme cases, where you might expect Nature to be a little more reasonable.
Tyler Cowen on who should get more status
Nick: You’ve often said that most political disputes are really disputes about who gets status. Nominate a few things or people to which we should give more status?
Tyler: Everyone. Everyone pretty much deserves more status (not Hitler, not mass murderers) but most things are underappreciated and they’re criticized and praise motivates people and helps them have a sense of fitting in and to go around and appreciate and express your appreciation for what you really value, that’s one of the best things you can do with your life.
https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2019/10/bpr-interviews-tyler-cowen/
Nick Bostrom on singletons
Can we trust evolutionary development to take our species in broadly desirable directions?
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What we shall call the Panglossian view maintains that this past record of success gives us good grounds for thinking that evolution (whether biological, memetic, or technological) will continue to lead in desirable directions. This Panglossian view, however, can be criticized on at least two grounds. First, because we have no reason to think that all this past progress was in any sense inevitable‒‐much of it may, for aught we know, have been due to luck. And second, because even if the past progress were to some extent inevitable, there is no guarantee that the melioristic trend will continue into the indefinite future.
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Evolution made us what we are, but no fundamental principle stands in the way of our developing the capability to intervene in the default course of events in order to steer future evolution towards a destiny more congenial to human values.
Directing our own evolution, however, requires coordination. If the default evolutionary course is dystopian, it would take coordinated paddling to turn the ship of humanity in a more favorable direction. If only some individuals chose the eudaemonic alternative while others pursued fitness‐maximization, then, by assumption, it would be the latter that would prevail. Fitness‐maximizing variants, even if they started out as a minority, would be preferentially selected for at the expense of eudaemonic agents, and a process would be set in motion that would inexorably lead to the minimization or disappearance of eudaemonic qualities, and the non‐eudaemonic agents would be left to run the show.
To this problem there are only two possible solutions: preventing non‐eudaemonic variants from arising in the first place, or modifying the fitness function so that eudaemonic traits become fitness‐maximizing.
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A singleton could be a rather minimalist structure that could operate without significantly disrupting the lives of its inhabitants. And it need not prohibit novelty and experimentation, since it would retain the capacity to intervene at a later stage to protect its constitution if some developments turned malignant. Increased social transparency, such as may result from advances in surveillance technology or lie detection, could facilitate the development of a singleton. Deliberate international political initiatives could also lead to the gradual emergence of a singleton, and such initiatives might be dramatically catalyzed by ‘wild card’ events such as a series of cataclysms that highlighted the disadvantages of a fractured world order. It would be a mistake to judge the plausibility of the ultimate development of a singleton on the basis of ephemeral trends in current international affairs. The basic conditions shaping political realities may change as new technologies come online, and it is worth noting that the longterm historical trend is towards increasing scope of human coordination and political integration. If this trend continues, the logical culmination is a singleton.
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A singleton could take a variety of forms and need not resemble a monolithic culture or a hive mind. Within the singleton there could be room for a wide range of different life forms, including ones that focus on non‐eudaemonic goals. The singleton could ensure the survival and flourishing of the eudaemonic types by restricting the ownership rights of non‐eudaemonic entities, by subsidizing eudaemonic activities, by guaranteeing the enforcement of property rights, by prohibiting the creation of agents with human‐unfriendly values or psychopathic tendencies, or in a number of other ways. Such a singleton could guide evolutionary developments and prevent our cosmic commons from going to waste in a first‐come‐first‐served colonization race.
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We do not know that a dystopian scenario is the default evolutionary outcome. Even if it is, and even if the creation of a singleton is the only way to forestall ultimate catastrophe, it is a separate question what policies it makes sense to promote in the here and now. While creating a singleton would help to reduce certain risks, it may at the same time increase others, such as the risk that an oppressive regime could become global and permanent. If our preliminary study serves to draw attention to some possibly non‐obvious considerations and to stimulate more rigorous analytic work, its purpose will have been achieved.
https://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/evolution.html
It could act merely as a subtle enforcer of certain background conditions that could serve, e.g. to guarantee security or to administer some other minimal governmental tasks. […] When considering the characteristics of a singleton it would be a mistake to assume that it would necessarily possess the attributes commonly associated with large human bureaucracies — rigidity, lack of imagination, inefficiency, a tendency to micro-manage and to expand its own powers, etc. This would be true of some possible singletons but it might not be true of others.
The concept of a singleton is thus much broader and more abstract than concept of a world government. A world government (in the ordinary sense of the word) is only one type of singleton among many.
Nevertheless, all the possible singletons share one essential property: the ability to solve global coordination problems. Intelligent species that develop the capability to solve global coordination problems, such as those listed in the next section, may in the long run develop along very different trajectories than species that lack this capacity.
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A major risk with creating a singleton is that it would turn out to be a bad singleton. Smaller units of decision-making, such as states, can also turn bad. But if a singleton goes bad, a whole civilization goes bad. All the eggs are in one basket.