LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Is there a salient reason LessWrong readers should care about John Mearsheimer's opinions?

Another piece of evidence against practical CF is that, under some conditions, the human visual system is capable of seeing individual photons. This finding demonstrates that in at least some cases, the molecular-scale details of the nervous system are relevant to the contents of conscious experience.

Mostly saying the same thing twice, a rhetorical flourish. I guess just really doubling down on how this is not good, in case the reader was like "well this sucks incredibly but maybe there's a good upside" and then got to the second part and was like "ah no I see now it is genuinely bad", or vice versa.

Apologies if I gave the impression that "a selfish person should love all humans equally"; while I'm sympathetic to arguments from e.g. Parfit's book Reasons and Persons^[1], I don't go anywhere that far. I was making a weaker and (I think) uncontroversial claim, something closer to Adam Smith's invisible hand: that aggregating over every individual's selfish focus on close family ties, overall results in moral concerns becoming relatively more spread out, because the close circles of your close circle aren't exactly identical to your own.

1. ^{^}

   Like that distances in time and space are similar. So if you imagine people in the distant past having the choice for a better life at their current time, in exchange for there being no people in the far future, then you wish they'd care about more than just their own present time. A similar logic argues against applying a very high discount rate to your moral concern for beings that are very distant to you in e.g. space, close ties, etc.

Yeah i'm confused about what to name it. we can always change it later i guess.

also let me know if you have any posts you want me to definitely tag for it that you think i might miss otherwise

I'd call that an empirical problem that has philosophical consequences :)

That's arguable, but I think the key point is that if the reasoning used to solve the problem is philosophical, then a correct solution is quite unlikely to be recognized as such just because someone posted it somewhere. Even if it's in a peer-reviewed journal somewhere. That's the claim I would make, anyway. (I think when it comes to consciousness, whatever philosophical solution you have will probably have empirical consequences in principle, but they'll often not be practically measurable with current neurotech.)

Uh, there are minds. I think you and I both agree on this. Not really sure what the "what if no one existed" thought experiment is supposed to gesture at. I am very happy that I exist and that I experience things. I agree that if I didn't exist then I wouldn't care about things

I think your method double counts the utility. In the absurd case, if I care about you and you care about me, and I care about you caring about me caring about you... then two people who like each other enough have infinite value. unless the repeating sum converges. How likely is the converging sum exactly right such that a selfish person should love all humans equally? Also even if it was balanced, if two well-connected socialites in latin america break up then this would significantly change the moral calculus for millions of people!

Being real for a moment, I think my friends (degree 1) are happier if I am friends with their friends (degree 2), want us to be at least on good terms, and would be sad if I fought with them. But my friends don't care that much how I feel about the friends of their friends (degree 3)

In the case of "love" I'm not sure what you mean by "belief", since love is a noun and beliefs are usually about some kind of anticipated experiences. [? · GW] Unless you mean more like you Believing In [LW · GW] love? (which I don't think is that helpful to think about through the "accuracy" lens)

Your first point is a good one And your second point successfully annoyed me

Note, this is outside of Shard Theory's scope, and I wasn't appealing to shard theory here.

So the links that I personally viewed to make these updates are here:

This summary of Matthew Barnett's post:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i5kijcjFJD6bn7dwq/evaluating-the-historical-value-misspecification-argument#N9ManBfJ7ahhnqmu7 [LW(p) · GW(p)]

And 2 links from Beren about alignment:

https://www.beren.io/2024-05-11-Alignment-in-the-Age-of-Synthetic-Data/

https://www.beren.io/2024-05-15-Alignment-Likely-Generalizes-Further-Than-Capabilities/