James Camacho's Shortform

Religious freedoms are a subsidy to keep the temperature low. There's the myth that societies will slowly but surely get better, kind of like a gradient descent. If we increase the temperature too high, an entropic force would push us out of a narrow valley, so society could become much worse (e.g. nobody wants the Spanish Inquisition). It's entirely possible that the stable equilibrium we're being attracted to will still have religion.

Graph Utilitarianism:

People care about others, so their utility function naturally takes into account utilities of those around them. They may weight others' utilities by familiarity, geographical distance, DNA distance, trust, etc. If every weight is nonnegative, there is a unique global utility function (Perron-Frobenius).

Some issues it solves:

• Pascal's mugging.
• The argument "utilitarianism doesn't work because you should care more about those around you".

Big issue:

• In a war, people assign negative weights towards their enemies, leading to multiple possible utility functions (which say the best thing to do is exterminate the enemy).