The Danger of Stories

Auction go defines what "the value of a move" means. It is the smallest number of captures a perfect player would be prepared to accept as a payment for passing.

To calculate the value of a move, you have to compare moving with taking some kind of null action. That typically involves passing. Without passing (or something similar) there seems to be no way to measure the value of a move empirically.

This explains what I mean by "the value of a move". However, I am no longer clear on what you mean by the term. You have some method of calculating move values which does not involve comparing to passing (or similar)? What do you mean by the term?

I'd somehow gotten the idea that you were talking about taking the proposed pattern of relationships between ideas and considering its applicability to other, unrelated ideas. As an extremely simple example, if the given theory was "All dogs are bigger than cats", make note of the "all X are bigger than Y" idea, so it can be checked as a theory in other situations, like "all pineapples are bigger than cherries". That seems like a ridiculously difficult thing to do in practice, though, which is why I thought you might have meant something else.

Regarding 'translation', yep, I get it.

PTSD or other long-term psychological (or physical) impairment, then - which may be sub-clinical or considered normal. An example: Punishment causes a psychological change that reduces the person's ability to do the thing that they were punished for. We don't (to the best of my knowledge) have a name for that change, but it observably happens, and when it does, the punishment has caused harm. (It may also be helpful, for example if the punished action would have reduced the person's ability to function in other ways. The two aren't always mutually exclusive. Compare it to charging someone money for a class - teaching is helpful, taking their money is harmful.)

Also, I do believe that there could be situations where someone is tortured and doesn't experience a long-term reduction in functionality, in which case, yes, the torture wasn't harmful. The generalization that torture is harmful is useful because those situations are rare, and because willingness to attempt to harm someone is likely to lead to harm, and should be addressed as such.

The most relevant point in the discussion of pain is right at the beginning - people who don't experience any pain tend to have very short or very difficult lives. That makes it obvious that being able to experience pain is useful to the experiencer, rather than net-harmful. So, even though some pain is observably harmful, some pain must be helpful enough to make up the difference. That doesn't jive with 'pain is intrinsically harmful', unless you're using a very different definition of the word, in which case I request that you clarify how you're defining it.

Adelene's attitude as illustrated in this thread towards pain resembles my own.

I do not assign any intrinsic value to avoiding pain (or experiencing pleasure). (I am unsure whether Adelene goes this far.)

I must stress though that pain (and pleasure) are indispensible approximations or "predictors" for various (instrumental) values. If I had a Richard-friendly superintelligence as my constant companion, I could ignore the informational value of my pain (pleasure) sensations because I could consult the superintelligence to predict the long-term effects of the various actions I contemplate, but the way it is now, it is too expensive or impossible for me to estimate certain instrumental values (mostly around staying healthy) unless I consult my pain (and pleasure) sensations.

Moreover, I must stress that there are quite a few things that correlate with pain. Pain for example is a strong sign that I am in a mental state not conducive to learning or to the careful consideration many factors (such as is necessary to do a good job at fixing a computer program). I do not have complete control over the mental machinery that allows me to program computers, etc. I cannot for example choose to put myself in the mental state that I know to be most conductive to, e.g., computer programming while enduring certain conditions that tend to cause pain.

So, that is one thing that has not yet been mentioned in this thread that correlates with pain. Here is another. I probably cannot stay motivated to work hard at something unless I regularly take pleasure from that work (or at the least I have a realistic expectation of future pleasure resulting from the work). I do not (usually -- see next paragraph) take that to mean that what I really care about is pleasure. Rather, I take that to mean that I have imperfect control over the means (e.g., my mind) by which I get my work done and that in particular, one of the circumstances that might prevent me from achieving what I really care about is that there is no way for me to stay motivated to do the things I would need to do to achieve the things I really care about -- because my neurology just does not allow that (even though that would get me what I really care about).

Like many people in this day and age, I wish I had more motivation, that is, I wish my actual behavior was more in line with the policies and goals I have set for myself. In fact, my motivation has become so unreliable and so weak that I have entered upon an experiment in which I assume that life really is all about pleasure -- or to be more precise, all about the search for something I care enough about so that protecting it or pursuing it is "naturally plenty motivating". Nevertheless, this experiment is something I started only this year whereas the attitude towards pain (and pleasure) I describe below has been my attitude since 1992.

Moreover, the attitude toward pain (and pleasure) I describe below still strikes me as the best way to frame most high-stakes situations when it is important to avoid the natural human tendency towards self-deception, to avoid wrongly mistaking personal considerations for global considerations or to see past the cant, ideology and propaganda about morality that bombard every one of us in this day and age. There is in human nature a tension IMHO between perceiving reality correctly (and consequently avoiding the sources of bias I just listed) and having plenty of motivation.

So if you're waiting for the bus and I kick you in the shin, there's no harm?

Though the question was addressed to Adelene, I'll give my answer. If you kick me in the shin hard enough to cause pain, then there is a non-negligible probability that the kick damaged bone, skin or such. Damage of that type is probably "cumulative" in that if enough damage occurs, my mobility will be permanently impaired. So, the kick in the shins will tend to reduce the amount of insult that part of my body can endure in the future, which reduces my behavioral options.

Now if I was waiting to be executed instead of waiting for the bus, and there was no chance of my avoiding execution, I (the current me) would be indifferent to whether you kicked me (the hypothetical, doomed me) in the shins. The reason I would be indifferent is that it is not going to change anything in the long term (since I will be dead by execution in the long term).

What I just said is "big-picture" true, but not true in detail. One detail that prevents its being completely true is that your kicking me in the shin might inspire in you a taste for kicking people in the shin, which I would prefer not to happen. Another detail is that my reputation will live on after my execution, and if onlookers observe your kicking me in the shin, it could concievable affect my reputation.

If I am faced with a choice between A1 and A2 and both A1 and A2 lead eventually to the same configuration of reality ("state of affairs" as the philosophers sometimes say) then I am indifferent between A1 and A2 even if A1 causes me to experience pleasure and A2 causes me to experience pain. Why? Because subjective experiences (in themselves, not counting the conditions -- of which there are quite a few -- that correlate with the subjective experiences) are impermanent, and my reason tells me that impermanent things are important only to the extent that they have permanent effects. (And by hypothesis, the kick in the shins in our latest thought experiment has no permanent effects.)

If reality was structured in such a way that the subjective experience of pain decremented some accumulator somewhere in reality, and if that accumulator could not at trivial cost be incremented again to cancel out the decrementing caused by the pain, well, then I would have to reconsider my position -- unless I knew for sure that the contents of the accumulator will not have a permanent effect on reality.

This got a little long. I just wanted Adelene to know that not everyone here considers her comments on pain strange. (Also, apologies to those who have heard all this before more than once or twice in previous years on Overcoming Bias.)