The Least Convenient Possible World

I think a better way to frame this issue would be the following method.

1. Present your philosophical thought-experiment.
2. Ask your subject for their response and their justification.
3. Ask your subject, what would need to change for them to change their belief?

For example, if I respond to your question of the solitary traveler with "You shouldn't do it because of biological concerns." Accept the answer and then ask, what would need to change in this situation for you to accept the killing of the traveler as moral?

I remember this method giving me deeper insight into the Happiness Box experiment.

Here is how the process works:

1. There is a happiness box. Once you enter it, you will be completely happy through living in a virtual world. You will never leave the box. Would you enter it?
2. Initial response. Yes, I would enter the box. Since my world is only made up of my perceptions of reality, there is no difference between the happiness box and the real world. Since I will be happier in the happiness box, I would enter.
3. Reframing question. What would need to change so you would not enter the box.
4. My response: Well, if I had children or people depending on me, I could not enter.

Surprising conclusion! Aha! Then you do believe that there is a difference between a happiness box and the real world, namely your acceptance of the existence of other minds and the obligations those minds place on you.

That distinction was important to me, not only intellectually but in how I approached my life.

Hope this contributes to the conversation.

David

I'm not sure if I'm evading the spirit of the post, but it seems to me that the answer to the opening problem is this:

If you were willing to kill this man to save these ten others, then you should long ago have simply had all ten patients agree to a 1/10 game of Russian Roulette, with the proviso that the nine winners get the organs of the one loser.

There are real life examples where reality has turned out to be the "least convenient of possible worlds". I have spent many hours arguing with people who insist that there are no significant gender differences (beyond the obvious), and are convinced that to assert otherwise is morally reprehensible.

They have spent so long arguing that such differences do not exist, and this is the reason that sexism is wrong, that their morality just can't cope with a world in which this turns out not to be true. There are many similar politically charged issues - Pinker discusses quite a few in the Blank Slate - where people aren't wiling to listen to arguments about factual issues because they believe they have moral consequences.

The problem, of course - and I realise this is the main point of this post - is that if your morality is contingent on empirical issues where you might turn out to be wrong, you have to accept the consequences. If you believe that sexism is wrong because there are no heritable gender differences, you have to be willing to accept that if these differences do turn out to exist then you'll say sexism is ok.

This is probably a test you should apply to all of your moral beliefs - if it just so happens that I'm wrong about the factual issue on which I'm basing my belief is wrong, will really I be willing to change my mind?

One way to train this: in my number theory class, there was a type of problem called a PODASIP. This stood for Prove Or Disprove And Salvage If Possible. The instructor would give us a theorem to prove, without telling us if it was true or false. If it was true, we were to prove it. If it was false, then we had to disprove it and then come up with the "most general" theorem similar to it (e.g. prove it for Zp after coming up with a counterexample in Zm).

This trained us to be on the lookout for problems with the theorem, but then seeing the "least convenient possible world" in which it was true.

I voted up on your post, Yvain, as you've presented some really good ideas here. Although it may seem like I'm totally missing your point by my response to your 3 scenarios, I assure you that I am well aware that my responses are of the "dodging the question" type which you are advocating against. I simply cannot resist to explore these 3 scenarios on their own.

Pascal's Wager

In all 3 scenarios, I would ask Omega further questions. But these being "least convenient world" scenarios, I suspect it'd be all "Sorry, can't answer that" and then fly away. And I'd call it a big jerk.

For Pascal Wager's specific scenario, I'd probably ask Omega "Really? Either God doesn't exist or everything the Catholics say is correct? Even the self-contradicting stuff?" And of course, he'd decline to answer and fly away.

So then I'd be stuck trying to decide whether God doesn't exist, or logic is incorrect (i.e. reality can be logically self inconsistent). I'm tempted to adopt Catholicism (for the same reason I would one-box on Newcomb: I want the rewards), but I'm not sure how my brain could handle a non-logical reality. So I really don't know what would happen here.

But let's say Omega additionally tells me that Catholicism is actually self-consistent, and I just misunderstood something about it, before flying away. In that case, I guess I'd start to study Catholicism. If my revised view of Catholicism has me believe that it does some rather cruel stuff (stone people for minor offenses, etc.) then I'd have to weight that against my desire to not suffer eternal torture.

I mean, eternal torture is pretty frickin' bad. I think in the end, I'd convert. And I'd also try to convert as many other people as possible, because I suspect I'd need to be cruel to fewer people if fewer people went against Christianity.

The God-Shaped Hole

To clarify your scenario, I'm guessing Omega explicitly tells me that I will be happier if I believe something untrue (i.e. God). I would probably reject God in this case, as Omega is implicitly confirming that God does not exist, and I do care about truth more than happiness. I've already experience this in other manners, so this is a much easier scenario for me to imagine.

Extreme Altruism

I don't think I can overcome this challenge. No matter how much I think about it, I find myself putting up semantic stop signs. In my "least convenient world", Omega tells me that Africa is so poverty stricken, and that my contribution would be so helpful, that I would be improving the lives of billions of people, in exchange for giving up all my wealth. While I might not donate all my money to save 10, I think I value billions of lives more than my own life. Do I value it more than my own happiness? This is an extremely painful question for me to think about, so I stop thinking about it.

"Okay", I say to Omega, "what if I only donate X percent of my money, and keep the rest for myself?" In one possible "least convenient world", Omega tells me that the charity is run by some nutcase whom, for whatever reason, will only accept an all-or-nothing deal. Well, when I phrase it like that, I feel like not donating anything, and blaming it on the nutcase. So suppose instead Omega tells me "There's some sort of principles of economy of scale which is too complicated for me to explain to you which basically means that your contribution will be wasted unless you contribute at least Y amount of dollars, which coincidentally just happens to be your total net worth." Again, I'm torn and find it difficult to come to a conclusion.

Alternative, I say to Omega "I'll just donate X percent of my money." Omega tells me "that's good, but it's not optimum." And I reply "Okay, but I don't have to do the optimum." but then Omega convinces me that actually, yes, I really should be doing the optimum somehow. Perhaps something along the line of how my current "ignore Africa altogether" behaviour is better than the behaviour of going to Africa and killing, torturing, raping everyone there. That doesn't mean that the "ignore Africa" strategy is moral.

Let's try something different.

• Puts on the reviewer's hat.

The Yvain's post presented a new method for dealing with the stopsign problem in reasoning about questions of morality. The stopsign problem consists in following an invalid excuse to avoid thinking about the issue at hand, instead of doing something constructive about resolving the issue.

The method presented by Yvain consists in putting in place the universal countermeasure against the stopsign excuses: whenever a stopsign comes up, you move the discussed moral issue to a different, hypothetical setting, where the stopsign no longer applies. The only valid excuse in this setting is that you shouldn't do something, which also resolves the moral question.

However, the moral questions should be concerned with reality, not with fantasy. Whenever a hypothetical setting is brought in the discussion of morality, it should be understood as a theoretical device for reasoning about the underlying moral judgment applicable to the real world. There is a danger in fallaciously generalizing the moral conclusion from fictional evidence, both because there might be factors in the fictional setting that change your decision and which you haven't properly accounted for in the conclusion, and because decision extracted from the fictional setting is drawn in the far mode, running a risk of being too removed from the real world to properly reflect people's preferences.

One difficulty with the least convenient possible world is where that least convenience is a significant change in the makeup of the human brain. For example, I don't trust myself to make a decision about killing a traveler with sufficient moral abstraction from the day-to-day concerns of being a human. I don't trust what I would become if I did kill a human. Or, if that's insufficient, fill in a lack of trust in the decisionmaking in general for the moment. (Another example would be the ability to trust Omega in his responses)

Because once that's a significant issue in the subject , then the least convenient possible world you're asking me to imagine doesn't include me -- it includes some variant of me whose reactions I can predict, but not really access. Porting them back to me is also nontrivial.

It is an interesting thought experiment, though.

So I asked him, "In the least convenient possible world, the one where everyone was genetically compatible with everyone else and this objection was invalid, what would you do?"

Obviously, you wait for one of the sick patients to die, and use that person's organs to save the others, letting the healthy traveler go on his way. ;)

But that isn't the least convenient possible world - the least convenient one is actually the one in which the traveler is compatible with all the sick people, but the sick people are not compatible with each other.

There's another benefit: you remove a motivation to lie to yourself. If you think that a contingent fact will get you out of a hard choice, you might believe it. But you probably won't if it doesn't get you out of the hard choice anyway.

Would you become a Catholic in this world? Or are you willing to admit that maybe your rejection of Pascal's Wager has less to do with a hypothesized pro-atheism God, and more to do with a belief that it's wrong to abandon your intellectual integrity on the off chance that a crazy deity is playing a perverted game of blind poker with your eternal soul?

I don't think I would be able to bring myself to worship honestly a God who bestowed upon us the ability to reason and then rewarded us for not using it.

The problem with the 'god shaped hole' situation (and questions of happiness in general) is that if something doesn't make you happy NOW, it becomes very difficult to believe that it will make you happy LATER.

For example, say some Soma-drug was invented that, once taken, would make you blissfully happy for the rest of your life. Would you take it? Our immediate reaction is to say 'no', probably because we don't like the idea of 'fake', chemically-induced happiness. In other words, because the idea doesn't make us happy now, we don't really believe it will make us happy later.

Valuing truth seems like just another way of saying truth makes you happy. Because filling the god shaped hole means not valuing truth, the idea doesn't make you happy right now, so you don't really believe it will make you happy later.

I like the phrase "precedent utilitarianism". It sounds to utilitarians like you're joining their camp, while actually pointing out that you're taking a long-term view of utility, which they usually refuse to do. The important ingredient is paying attention to incentives, which is really the rational response to most questions about morality. Many choices which seem "fairer", "more just", or whose alternatives provoke a disgust response don't take the long-term view into account. If we go around sacrificing every lonely stranger to the highest benefit of others nearby, no one is safe. It's a tragedy that all those people are sick and will die if they don't get help, but we don't make the world less tragic by sacrificing one to save ten every chance we get.

I would act differently in the least convenient world than I do in the world that I do live in.

Very good point, and crystalizes some of my thinking on some of the discussion on the tyrant/charity thing.

As far as the specific problems you posed...

For your souped up Pascal's Wager, I admit that one gives me pause. Taking into account the fact that Omega singled out one out of the space of all possible religions, etc etc... Well, the answer isn't obvious to me right now. This flavor would seem to not admit to any of the usual basic refutations of the wager. I think under these circumstances, assuming Omega wasn't open to answering any further questions and wasn't giving any other info, I'd probably at least spend rather more time investigating Catholicism, studying the religion a bit more and really thinking things through.

For question 2 (the really "god shaped" hole) though, personally, while I value happiness, it's not the only thing I value. I'll take truth, thank you very much. (In the spirit of this, I'm assuming there's no psychological trick that would let me fake-believe enough to fill the hole or other ways of getting around the problem.) But yeah, I think I'd choose truth there.

Question 3? Assuming the most inconvenient world (ie, there's no way that I could potentially do more good by keeping the money, etc etc, no way out of the "give it away to do maximal good") well, I'm not sure what I'd do, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to in any way justify not giving it away to Charity X. Though, if I actually had a known Omega give me that information, then I think that might just be enough to give me the mental/emotional/willpower strength to do it. ie, assuming that I KNEW that that way was really the path if I wanted to optimize the good I do in the world, not just in an abstract theoretical way, but was actually told that by a known Omega, well, that might be enough to get me to actually do it.

I am trying to imagine the least convenient possible world (LCPW) for the LCPW method.

Perhaps it is the world in which there is precisely one possible world. All 'possible' worlds turn out to be impossible on closer scrutiny. Omega reveals that talking about a counterfactual possible world is as incoherent as talking about a square triangle. There is exactly one way to have a world with anyone in it whatsoever, and we're in it.

Yes! I can't believe I don't see this repeated in one form or another more often. Fallacies are a bit like prions in that they tend to force a cascade of fallacies to derive from them, and one of my favorite debate tactics is the thought experiment, "Let's assume your entire premise is true. How might this contradict your position?"

Usually the list is longer than my own arguments.

On your Pascal's Wager example, I don't think your "least convenient possible world" is really equivalent to the world I live in on every meaningful feature other than convenience. Selecting Catholicism out of all similarly complex stories would take a whole lot of evidence. So if Omega tells me the Catholic interpretation of Yahweh is the only plausible god and I completely trust Omega, I've been given a lot of evidence in favor of the Catholic interpretation of Yahweh.

Pascal's Wager is meant to be an argument for theism in the complete absence of evidence, not an argument for theism when you have almost all the evidence to prove that a particular god exists. We have perfectly good mainstream decision theory for what you do when you have evidence; nobody needs Pascal for that.

The least convenient world is one where there's no traveler and the doctor debates whether to harvest organs from another villager. I figure that if it's okay to kill the traveler for organs, then it should be okay to kill a villager. Similarly, if it's against general principle to kill a villager for organs, then it shouldn't be okay to kill the traveler. Perhaps someone can come up with a clever argument why the life of a villager is worth intrinsically more than the life of the traveler, but let's keep things simple for now.

So, let us suppose that N sick people is the threshold wherein it is okay to kill a traveler, and hence a villager. If it's good to do once, it's good to do anytime this situation comes up. So we have ourselves a society where whenever the doctor needs is in dire need of organs for N patients, a villager is sacrificed. If we scale it up to the national level we should have ourselves a proper system wherein each month a certain number of people are chosen (perhaps by lottery) for sacrifice and their organs are harvested. I should imagine an epidemic of obesity and alcoholism as people seek to make their organs undesirable and so avoid being sacrificed.

I find that a fair number of morality puzzles of this sort exhibit interesting behavior under scaling.

This might be better placed somewhere else, but I just thought I'd comment on Pascal's Wager here. To me both the convenient and inconvenient resolutions of Pascal's Wager given above are quite unsatisfactory.

To me, the resolution of this wager comes from the concept of sets of measure zero. The set of possible realities in which belief in any given God is infinitely beneficial is an infinite set, but it is nonetheless like Cantor Dust in the space of possible explanations of reality. The existence of sets of measure zero explains why it is reasonable to assign the value zero to the probability of something which is not literally impossible. To me, the only true resolutions to this paradox are to either convert, dispute the use of infinity in the utility (which I would also do, although I'm not yet completely convinced either way), or accept that not just is zero an acceptable probability for something that's not literally impossible but that it's also the correct value to assign to the probability of an infinitely vindictive God. Everything else is just convenience, egotism or missing the point. Cancelling infinities against other (possibly negative) infinities is simply bad maths, refusing to change your beliefs on the basis of utility rather than evidence is simply not acting in your own best interest and dismissing it based on contradictions in any particular religion or on the existence of other religions is as this article says simply assumed convenience.

In this case, your least convenient world kind of misses the point then. As soon as Omega tells me there's a non-zero probability of Catholicism being correct (whether Omega has actually told me that or not is not entirely clear mind you) then sure, I'm converting. But this is such a substantial change to reality that I would say it's essentially removed the paradox. The principle is fine though, I guess my point is just that the least convenient world is not a fixed thing but relative to a particular argument.

It's interesting to me that the mathematics to resolve the paradox didn't even exist at the time it was raised. Most people knew there was a problem with it, but at the time (and even today for most people's level of maths understanding) they had simply no way of expressing it correctly. To me this is actually some justification for a little bit of inertia of beliefs - just because you can't refute an argument doesn't mean it's correct, and your intuition can often tell you something's wrong before you know what it is. It just needs to be balanced against the many situations where intuition is demonstrably misleading. Innertia and an immovable object are not the same thing.

Although I understand and appreciate your approach the particular examples do not represent particularly good ones:

1: Pascal's Wager:

For an atheist the least convenient possible world is one where testable, reproducible scientific evidence strongly suggests the existence of some "super-natural" (clearly no-longer super-natural) being that we might ascribe the moniker of God to. In such a world any "principled atheist" would believe what the verifiable scientific evidence support as probably true. "Atheists" who did not do that would be engaging in the exact same delusional thinking modern-day theists engage in: belief in "beings" despite the utter lack of evidence supporting the existence of such "beings" only in reverse, like flat-earthers.

2: The God-Shaped Hole:

The use of "Omega" here is a fair bit over the absurd line. It very much sounds like you wish to create the following situation for atheists: suppose there exists an oracle that can tell you that there is a "hole" in you and it's "God shaped", but cannot confirm the existence nor non-existence of the "God" that the hole is "shaped" like. Well, then my hole (being an atheist) is penguin shaped ;-).

It is clear that you want to create a world where some form of definitive information about some other "thing" is true while trying to maintain the "true" state of the existence or non-existence of that thing left undecided. Alas, your not allowed that degree of freedom. If definitive statements are made and accepted as true then the thing that the statement references also must exist in some meaningful way.

3: Extreme Altruism

Lots of leeway is left in your example to re-cast the moral dilemma, for example:

a. Charity X is, in fact, using the money you give it to feed people in Africa, but the population that is being helped lives in a fundamentally unsustainable environment. Suppose changes in weather patterns means that getting a meaningful sustained water supply requires considerable cost. In this case the charity itself is engaging in the morally wrong thing by not supporting efforts to relocate the people to a place that can sustain them better. Your analysis (not literally you, the "you" responding to pleas for money) leads you to extreme altruism. Others follow-suit creating an unsustainable dependant society. In the case of extreme charity you accidentally do harm: they're alive, but utterly dependant of the charity of others.

b. Turn the entire situation amoral: why should their lives there be of such an importance to affect me, in any way, here? I.E. why is this a moral consideration at all? In this context person a may choose to contribute to charity X not knowing if "in the large" a "good overall outcome" will result from such a donation, regardless of amount contributed. Another way of looking at it is if I consider increased happiness being an important element of "good morality" (dubious?) then is my personal depletion of resources and the "net" increase in happiness in the receiving population a net increase of happiness overall? And is that the "right" thing? By who's measure?

The above examples are not meant as a broad-stroke justification for a "let-em starve" thing. The issue simply concerns constraining the examples sufficiently to get the outcome you are looking for. To simplify matters this particular example is closely analogous to the trolley situation above: suppose the doctor offered to the patient with the good organs the option of donating all the organs to the patients in need, but as a result the patient would need to survive on uncomfortable synthetic replacements of his organs.

"I believe that God’s existence or non-existence can not be rigorously proven."

Cannot be proven by us, with our limits on detection, or cannot be proven in principle?

Because if it's the latter, you're saying that the concept of 'God' has no meaning.

0: Should we kill the miraculously-compatible traveler and distribute his organs?

My answer is based on a principle that I'm surprised no one else seems to use (then again, I rarely listen to answers to the Fat Man/Train problem): ask the f**king traveler!

Explain to the traveler that he has the opportunity to save ten lives at the cost of his own. First they'll take a kidney and a lung, then he'll get some time to say goodbye to his loved ones while he gets to see the two people with the donated organs recover... and then when he's ready they'll take the rest (though he ought not wait long, as patients are dying while he waits).

Sure, most travelers will say no. But utilitarians should want to spread their moral thinking far and wide, thus creating more utilitarians who would be willing to say yes.

I'll call the principle is shared moral responsibility. Instead of one person claiming a moral authority to kill other people, which is problematic for various reasons, we give each person the moral responsibility (should they choose to accept it) of killing themselves or (as in this case) giving someone else permission to kill them. Of course, when the time comes, some "utilitarians" will agree that they should die under their own moral system, but refuse to die (and allow multiple other people to die instead). But this tradeoff is still the most appealing one I know of.

In a world like this, where organ compatibility is apparently easy to come by, I think I would donate all my organs, but wait until I was old enough for my remaining life to drop substantially in value. If Effective Altruism becomes sufficiently common, I suppose there will be enough people like me to provide almost all the organs that the world needs, even in our actual world where compatibility is rare. For myself, knowing my own "expiry date" would provide some relief to my financial worries, since I wouldn't have to plan for a very long retirement, nor would I have to plan for unforeseeable medical expenses of unbounded size. (I can't rule out that I might chicken out when the time comes, though).

1. Pascal's Wager?

This is a weird one because the "wager" doesn't seem to have the ordinary meaning of "placing money on a bet that God exists with a non-transferable payout to be received after death" (on which I would surely place a wager, if only for shits and giggles). Rather it means "discard my epistemic standards and choose to believe God exists regardless of what the evidence says". Presumably you can't fake it - profess belief but secretly disbelieve - for God would detect your deception. So, the problem with taking this second wager is that humans are not physically capable of choosing to discard epistemic standards in just one domain while keeping strict standards in all other domains. Also, probably if you appreciate the value of good epistemics, you'll be incapable of letting go of them entirely. Thus, in practice, only those with poor epistemic standards even have the ability to take the wager in the first place, and someone taking Pascal's Wager is engaging in a status-quo bias in which they promise not to improve their standards.

2. The God-Shaped Hole

I'll go off-topic. My God-shaped hole is the sense that I have a soul (which I now call a consciousness, because souls are considered to be eternal, but I have no evidence that my soul is eternal). This issue is also known as the hard problem of consciousness, and it seems to me that what makes it hard is that there's no reason for evolution to give humans a strong-but-wrong sense of having a soul/consciousness, nor is there a reason for evolution to involve genuine souls/consciousness. The hard problem is not hard for Christians, who can just suppose that humans have whatever-God-has-only-smaller. Nor is the problem hard for people that lack a sense of having consciousness/qualia (if such people exist?).

However, several years ago I noticed that the existence of God does not imply eternal life for human souls, nor does the existence of eternal life for human souls imply there is a God. This observation, along with the observation that God really, honestly seems like kind of an evil bastard (especially in the Old Testament), helped me let go of my theism.

But if the God-shaped hole you asked about was really, truly God-shaped, wouldn't that provide evidence that God actually exists and thus justify theism to at least some extent? If it's justified to some extent, well, we should at least attend mass on Christmas and Easter, no?

3. Shouldn't we give all our possessions to the charity?

I recall Scott Alexander argued about this in later posts. Basically the answer is no, on consequentialist grounds, because

1. the number of people willing to do this is extremely low
2. people who do this probably harm their own future earning potential (and their own happiness)
3. by giving a lesser amount, say 10%, and then strongly encouraging/campaigning others to do the same, the total amount of donations can be vastly increased because almost everyone is capable of doing that and might actually do it with enough social pressure, whereas campaigning on "donate literally everything to charity" is never, ever, going to have many takers.

(I don't feel like putting forth the effort to figure out what kind of hypothetical worldstate is required for giving away everything to actually be the utilitarian best answer)

My answers:

1.No, because their belief doesn't make any sense. It even has logical contradictions, which makes it "super impossible", meaning there's no possible world where it could be true (the omnipotence paradox proves that omnipotence is logically inconsistent; a god which is nearly omnipotent, nearly omniscient and nearly omnibenevolent wouldn't allow suffering, which, undoubtably, exists; "God wants to allow free will" isn't a valid defence, since there's a lot of suffering that isn't caused by other humans, like illness and natural catastrophes) (note: I'm adding "nearly" to avoid paradoxes like the omnipotence paradox)

2. belief isn't a choice, for example, you can't "chose" to believe that the continent Australia doesn't actually exist. Therefore, I wouldn't be able to hold religious believes even if I'd acknowledge that this would bring greater happiness without negative side effects.

However, if we make the hypothetical world even less convenient by adding that, actually, I would be able to effectivly self-deceive, and there would be absolutly no negative side effects, then Yes, I would chose to believe.

3. I'm already highly sympathetic towards the "Effective altruism" movement and donate a lot of money to their causes. The reason I'm not donating literally everything I don't need for survival is that I'm not morally perfect; I admit that.

(EDIT just to correct spelling)

either God does not exist or the Catholics are right about absolutely everything.

Then I would definitely and swiftly become an atheist, and I maintain that this is by far the most rational choice for everybody else as well. My prior belief in God not existing is relatively high (let's say 50/50), but my prior belief in all of Catholicism being the absolute truth is pretty much nil. And if you're using anything vaguely resembling consistent priors, it has to near-nil for you too, because the beliefs of Catholicism are just so incredibly specific. They narrow down the space of possible God-like beings to a very narrow slice of the type-of-God space.

Or do you admit that even if believing something makes you happier, you still don't want to believe it unless it's true?

More like: Believing something may make you happier but you can't easily force yourself to believe something is true. Placebos have the same problem. You give someone a placebo and tell them it's a happy pill, and it will make them happy. But you can't do that trick on yourself. The placebo won't work.

Still, I've seen people force themselves (over time) to believe in religion so I'm not saying it's impossible.

I think your third example (charity) best illustrates your point, but the proposed world is still not optimally inconvenient, because someone could counter by saying that if they invest their money they can make even more in the future and donate much more money. So, increasing the level of inconvenience, the question you have to answer is: "Assuming you have the most money you will ever have, and assuming your charity money will be used honestly, would you donate?" I don't have the answer to that question.

I find this method to be intellectually dangerous.

We do not live in the LCPW, and constantly considering ethical problems as if we do is a mind-killer. It trains the brain to stop looking for creative solutions to intractable real world problems and instead focus on rigid abstract solutions to conceptual problems.

I agree that there is a small modicum of value to considering the LCPW. Just like there's a small modicum of value to eating a pound of butter for dinner. It's just, there are a lot better ways to spend ones time. The proper response to "Well, what about the LPCW?" is, "How do you know we are in the LCPW?" I think there is far more value in having a conversation that explores our assumptions about a difficult problem rather than indulges them.

Q: Consider the Sick Villager problem. How do we know that the patients won't die due to transplant rejection? A: Oh, well, Omega says so. Q: Okay. So, how do we know Omega is right? A: Because Omega is omniscient. Q: If Omega is omniscient, why can't it tell us how to grow working organs without need for human sacrifice? A: Because there are limits to how much it knows. Q: Ok, so if I knew in advance that Omega is omniscient but has these limitations, why on earth am I working in a village helping 10 villagers instead of working on advancing Omega to the point where it doesnt have those limitations. (And if I don't know this in advance, why would I suddenly start believing some random computer that claims it is Omega?) A: I don't know, because it's the LCPW.

That conversation yields a lot more intellectual value; it trains you to think creatively and explore all possible solutions, rather than devise a single heuristic that is only applicable in a 5d-corner case. As I indicated above, it can actually be dangerous because novice rationalists may feel compelled to apply that narrow heuristic to situations where a more optimal, creative solution is present.

Yvain,

Do you have a blog or home page with more material you've written? Failing that, is there another site (apart from OB) with contributions from you that might be interesting to LW readers?

with regards to the third question: what if I believe that any resources given simply allow the population to expand and hence cause more suffering than letting people die?

Is this not just an alternative way of describing a red herring argument? If not, I would be interested to see what nuance I'm missing.

I find this classically in the abortion discussion. Pro-abortionists will bring up valid-at-face-value concerns regarding rape and incest. But if you grant that victims of rape/incest can retain full access to abortions, the pro-abortionist will not suddenly agree with criminalisation of abortion in the non-rape/incest group. Why? Because the rape/incest point was a red herring argument

This is a good argument against Pascal's Wager, but it isn't the least convenient possible world. The least convenient possible world is the one where Omega, the completely trustworthy superintelligence who is always right, informs you that God definitely doesn't value intellectual integrity that much. In fact (Omega tells you) either God does not exist or the Catholics are right about absolutely everything.

Would you become a Catholic in this world? Or are you willing to admit that maybe your rejection of Pascal's Wager has less to do with a hypothesized pro-atheism God, and more to do with a belief that it's wrong to abandon your intellectual integrity on the off chance that a crazy deity is playing a perverted game of blind poker with your eternal soul?

This is a bad example. Pascal's wager wasn't a thought experiment. Pascal genuinely believed that the two options his wager proposed were the only options. Not hypothetically, but in real life. He wasn't asking, "If this were the case, would you wager that God exists?" He was saying, "This is the case, and so you'd be stupid not to wager that God exists, QED" It's not fighting the hypothetical to say "Those aren't the only two options", because the problem as Pascal viewed it wasn't hypothetical in the slightest. He was making an argument, and the rebuttal to his argument is to point out that it relies on flawed assumptions.

I apologize for banging on about the railroad question, but I think the way you phrased it does an excellent job of illustrating (and has helped me isolate) why I've always vaguely uncomfortable with Utilitarianism. There is a sharp moral contrast which the question doesn't innately recognize between the patients entering into a voluntary lottery, and the forced-sacrifice of the wandering traveller.

Unbridled Utilitarianism, taken to the extreme, would mandate some form of forced Socialism. I think it was you who commented on OvercomingBias, that one of the risks associated with Cryogenics is waking up in a society where you are not permitted to auto-euthanize. Utilitarianism might argue that the utility of your own diminished suffering would be less than the utility of others people valuing your continued life.

While Utilitarianism is excellent for considering consequences, I think it's a mistake to try and raise it as a moral principle. I lean towards a somewhat Objectivist viewpoint: namely, that the first principle we ought to start with is that each person has the right to their own person and property, and that it is immoral to try and take it from them for any cause.

Following from this, let me address your third question: I'd argue that this type of wealth transfer not only undermines long-term economic develop of the African country (empirical, I could be proved wrong), not only prevents me from spending money on quality products & investing in practical businesses (once again, empirical), but that on a deeper level it undermines the individuality which I value in the human condition. Askin which produces greater happiness & material wealth, Communism or Capitalism, is an empirical question: Omega could come down and tell me that Communism will produce 10x the happiness, or 100x, or whatever. But the idea of slamming everybody into the same, mass produced box to maximize happiness utility sounds suspiciously like Orgasmium.

I don't see how you can compromise on these principles. Either each person has full ownership of themselves (so long as they don't infringe on others), or they have zero ownership. Morality (as I would define it) demands that we fight to protect others freedom, but it says nothing about ensuring their welfare. Giving something for 'free' is just another form of enslavement - even if it's only survival and dependence in exchange for a smug sense of superiority.

On a side note, you did a brilliant job of deconstructing 'morality based on empiricism.'

I don't see any problem with acknowledging that in a world very different from this one my beliefs and actions would also be different. For example, I think the fact that there are and have been so many different religions with significantly different beliefs as to what God wants is evidence that none of them are correct. It follows that if there was just one religion with any significant number of adherents then that would be evidence (not proof) that that religion was in fact correct.

Maybe if Omega tells me it's Catholicism or nothing I'll become a Catholic. Maybe if he says it's the Aztec religion or nothing I'll cut out your beating heart and toss you down a pyramid. But no worries, neither one is going to happen in the real world.

Yvain,

Do you have a blog or home page with more material, or is there another site (apart from OB) with contributions from you that might be interesting to LW readers?

Yvain, you frequently seem to have extra line breaks in your post, which I've been editing to fix. I'm leaving this post as is because I'm wondering if you can't even see them, in which case are you using an unusual browser or OS?

So I asked him, "In the least convenient possible world, the one where everyone was genetically compatible with everyone else and this objection was invalid, what would you do?"

That's a pretty damn convenient world. It's basically like saying "In a world where serious issue X isn't applicable, what would you do?" which might as well be the better question instead of beating around the bush.

Sorry if this was posted before.

The acceleratingfuture domain's registration has expired (referenced in the starting quote) (http://acceleratingfuture.com/?reqp=1&reqr=)

I have a question related to the initial question about the lone traveler. When is it okay to initiate force against any individual who has not initiated force against anyone?

Bonus: Here's a (very anal) cop out you could use against the least convenient possible world suggestion: Such a world—as seen from the perspective of someone seeking a rational answer—has no rational answer for the question posed.

Or a slightly different flavor for those who are more concerned with being rational than with rationality: In such a world, I—who value rational answers above all other answers—will inevitably answer the question irrationally. :þ

In fact (Omega tells you) either God does not exist or the Catholics are right about absolutely everything.

That sounds like it would decrease my probability that God exists by several dozen orders of magnitude.

I think that traveler's problem may pose two questions instead of one. First of all - is that a right thing to do just once, and the second is if it's good enough to be a universal rule. We can counclude that's the same question, because using it once means we should use it every time when a situation is the same. But using it as a universal rule has an additional side effect - a world where you know you can be killed (depraved of all posessions, etc.) any moment to help some number of strangers is not such a nice place to live in, though sometimes it's possible that the sacrifice is still worth it.

Someone can say that in the least convenient world the general rule is "you only kill strangers when it's absolutely not possible anyone (even the patients) would know that, and they have no one, and so on". In that world it's similar with "living happily in a lie" problem. If the world where people don't know about murdered travellers (the lie) is worse then the world where they know about the murders, then this world is even worse than the previous one.

Would this be moral or not?

Of course it is, if you live in this hypothetical world. The fact that in real life things are rarely this clear, or the fact that in real life you will be jailed for doing this, or the fact that you'd feel guilty if you do this, or the fact that in real life you won't have the courage to do this, doesn't mean that it's wrong.

But in real life I'd hardly ever violate the libertarian rights because of all the reasons mentioned above.

The biological commentary is indeed accurate, but I question its relevance in the context of the question, which seems to be one in favor of a utilitarian ethical discourse without the biological considerations. It might be better to assume the biological factors involved are compatible, or assume all other factors are equal, and disregard the biology.

The first answer that comes to mind for most I'm sure is that 10 is greater than 1, and that such a sacrifice would return a net gain in lives saved. However, this question is complicated by what it is about saving lives at all that is good. If you can save a life of a dying patient without risk then you should. We assume this is true - even from a utilitarian position - that life has intrinsic value and therefore saving lives when possible is the correct decision. Thus, as a strictly quantitative normative comparison, the decision to kill one healthy person to save 10 dying patients is right. But qualitative interests should be accounted for too: treating the act of killing a healthy individual as a separate act, it stands in direct contradiction to the supposed ethical duty we are to uphold, mainly, saving life, by taking the life of one who is not sick. Consider it in these terms: is it ethically correct, then, to take the lives of the healthy to save those of the sick? This amounts to a zero-sum game and a clear logical aporia.

But in the least convenient possible world, here comes Omega again and tells you that Charity X has been proven to do exactly what it claims: help the poor without any counterproductive effects.

You don't need the least convenient possible world and Omega for that; for non-excessively-large values of proven, this world and givewell.org suffice. I'm surprised that in three years nobody pointed that out before.

I dont think this would be a moral example Debt Consolidation Loan

The least convenient possible world is the one where Omega, the completely trustworthy superintelligence who is always right, informs you that God definitely doesn't value intellectual integrity that much. In fact (Omega tells you) either God does not exist or the Catholics are right about absolutely everything.

The problem with this specific formulation is that fundamentalist Christian beliefs are inconsistent, and thus it is trivially follows from Omega's wording that God does not exist.

A better wording would be to postulate that Omega asserts the possibility that a God exists who judges you posthumously based on belief, and it is the same one for all humans who have ever lived. In that case, if I completely trust Omega, the argument collapses into "shut up and calculate": in other words, there is some threshold of probability P(faith-judging God exists) at which point worshiping it would be the rational choice.

"first, do no harm"

It's remarkable that medical traditions predating transplants* already contain an injunction against butchering passers by for spare parts

*I thought this was part of the Hippocratic oath but apparently it's not

3: Extreme Altruism.

I don't want to save starving Africans. In most circumstances I would not actively mass murder to cull overpopulation but I wouldn't judge myself immoral for doing so.

2: The God-Shaped Hole....Do you admit that even if believing something makes you happier, you still don't want to believe it unless it's true?

I would, and do, admit that I don't want to believe it unless it's true. I watch myself make that decision more than enough to be honest about it.

(I'll note that believing things that aren't true makes me miserable and stressed. My verbal beliefs go about interfering with my behavior and my aversion to hypocrisy frustrates me. I'm usually better off believing the truth and just going along with the lie. However, I've assumed that in the least convenient possible world my God shaped hole was repared to normal function.)

You are a doctor in a small rural hospital. You have ten patients, each of whom is dying for the lack of a separate organ; that is, one person needs a heart transplant, another needs a lung transplant, another needs a kidney transplant, and so on. A traveller walks into the hospital, mentioning how he has no family and no one knows that he's there. All of his organs seem healthy. You realize that by killing this traveller and distributing his organs among your patients, you could save ten lives.

I wouldn't kill him. It isn't worth the risk for me. I also wouldn't consider it my job. I'm a doctor, not a super hero. The service doctor's provide isn't maximising survival.

Would this be moral or not?

No. And even if it was, I'd violate the moral out of self interest.

1: Omega, the completely trustworthy superintelligence who is always right, informs you that God definitely doesn't value intellectual integrity that much. In fact (Omega tells you) either God does not exist or the Catholics are right about absolutely everything.

Would you become a Catholic in this world?

Yes, plus pay bribes/alms at whatever the going rate is for having doubts that have been updated to greater than 50% based on observations. Since faith is somewhat destinct than raw prediction I suspect God'd be cool with that.

*kill traveler to save patients problem

assuming that

-the above solutions (patient roulette) were not viable

-upon recieving their new organs, the patients would be restored to full functionality, the equal of or better utility generators than the traveler

then I would kill the traveler. however, if the traveler successfully defended himself, and turned the tables on me, I would use my dying breath to happily congratulate his self preservation instinct and wish him no further problems on the remainder of his journey. and of course Id have left instructions w my nurse to put my body on ice and call the doctor from the next town over to come and do the transplants from my own organs.

1. pascal wager

if catholicism is true, then Im already in hell. what else can you call an arbitrary, irrational universe?

1. god hole

if there is a evolutionary trap in the human mind that requires irrational belief to achieve optimal happiness, then I just add that to the list of all the other 'design flaws' and ignore.

1. extreme altruism

I can not imagine a least convenient world in which something resembling what we understand of the laws of economics operates, where both I and the africans would not be better off by me using my money to invest in local industry, or financing an anti-warlord coup dtat. if you want to fiat that these ppl cant work, or that the dictator is unstoppable and will nationalize and embezzle my investments, then I dont see how charity is going to do any better. if theres no way that my capital can improve their economy, then they are just flat doomed, and Id rather keep my money.

The problem is the "least convenient world" seems to involve a premise that would, in and of itself, be unverifiable.

The best example is the pascals wager issue - Omega tells me with absolute certainty that It's either a specific version of God (Not, for instance Odin, but Catholicism), or no God.

But I'm not willing to believe in an omniscient deity called God, taking it back a step and saying "But we know it's either or, because the omniscient de . . . errr . . . Omega tells you so" is just redefining an omniscient deity.

Well, if I don't believe is assuming god exists without proof, I can happily not assume Omega exists without proof. Proof is verifiably impossible, because all I can prove is that Omega is smarter than me.

Since I won't assume anything based only on the fact that someone is smarter than me - which is all I know about Omega - then no, the fact that Omega says any of this stuff and states it by fiat isn't going to convince me.

If Omega is that damn smart, it can go to the effort of proving it's statements.

Jonnan

Post-script: Which suddenly explains to me why I would pick the million dollar box, and leave the $1000 dollars alone. Because that's win win - either I get the million or I prove Omega is in fact not omniscient. He might be smarter than me (almost certainly is - the memory on this bio-computer I'm running needs upgraded something fierce, and the underlying operating system was last patched 30,000 years ago or so), but I can't prove it, I can only debunk it, and the only way to do that is to take the million.

“Do you head down to the nearest church for a baptism? Or do you admit that even if believing something makes you happier, you still don't want to believe it unless it's true?”

I believe that God’s existence or non-existence can not be rigorously proven. Likewise there is no rigorous protocol for estimating the chances. Therefore we are forced to rely on our internal heuristics which are extremely sensitive to our personal preferences for the desired answer. Consequently, people, who would be happier believing in God, mostly likely already do so. The same principle applies to people with “rationality-shaped holes”. It’s possible that one group is on average happier than the other. However, becoming happier simply by switching sides may not be possible without a profound personality change. In other words you need to become somebody else than you are now. Since this seems little different from being erased and replaced by another person, it’s hardly an appealing choice for most people.

On the other hand, we seem to be little concerned about the gradual change of our personalities (compare yourself now and twenty years ago). Hence, it’s quite possible for the same physical person at different points of life to be comfortable in totally different camps.

I think Pascal's Wager and the God-Shaped Hole should get more play.

To your Pascal's Wager statement

Perhaps God values intellectual integrity so highly that He is prepared to reward honest atheists, but will punish anyone who practices a religion he does not truly believe simply for personal gain.

I don't think what you say is incommensurable with the Catholic position that what is most important to the Omega is that we pursue the best thing we know i.e. intellectual integrity along with charity. But perhaps I am wrong. You might know more about this than I do.

If God is Truth, then wouldn't it follow that rationality fills (or at least could fill) that God-shaped hole? This brings me to the second point you made.

I have never heard a Christian say there is a God-shaped whole inside me. But if there is it would be universe-sized! But I suppose I can be more generous with my interpretation. Christianity has a technical vocabulary too, but this isn't it. The theological way to say it would be something like, "A good life for a human being includes worship of God who is personal and just." That's simply what I imagine a serious Christian would say, right?

You said:

Omega comes along and tells you that sorry, the hole is exactly God-shaped, and anyone without a religion will lead a less-than-optimally-happy life.

What do you mean by happy? What would Omega mean by a "less than happy life?" The truth or doing something that you must do by virtue of knowing the truth will not always make you happy. Perhaps you don't feel like defending the truth today. A blissful life could be spent shopping in malls or donating to African countries or picking up litter. How are the types of happiness achieved in each act different? Or are they?

In good ol days there was concept of whose problem something is. It's those people's problem that their organs have failed, and it is traveller's problem that he need to be quite careful because of demand for his organs (why he's not a resident, btw? The idea is that he will have zero utility to village when he leaves?). Society would normally side with traveller for the simple reason that if people start solving their problems at other people's expense like this those with most guns and most money will end up taking organs from other people to stay alive for longer, or indeed, for totally superfluous reasons. It is a policy issue and the correct policy is obvious.

You can just take organs away from traveller today, but travellers will start paying for a reliable service that finds people where organs end up, and assassinates them, and the patients will start paying for anonymous find the traveller and kill him and take his organs service, and those with most money will end up having the organs as a matter of luxury. Good thing that we live in the convenient world where it is not very practical, albeit happens to some extent. Otherwise you could've seen what you can't think of in your neat little example.

With regards to the doctor, that issue is simply not his problem in the first place unless he's being paid for it. He can make it his problem if he wants to, or he can make it his problem to kill everyone who has particular eye colour, we would deem one choice more moral than another due to better utility to the society but we would still not grant him enough autonomy to pursue this kind of stuff unhindered because a: he will be using it to solve his problems (saving relatives for example) and b: because he can just as well as to decide to do good, decide to cut up random people for no reason what so ever.

Other issue is, of course, that you are making up this kind of stuff in totally imaginary world, where those whose organs have been replaced have reasonable life expectancy, whereas this (people being cut up for organs) is a real world problem that exists right now in the real world where a bunch of other conditions apply, and I think it is you, not your friend, who completely missed the point in the first place. To complicate the issue: what if those people's organs are failing due to their own fault? Their own stupid action? Suddenly you realize that different people have different worth.

With regards to the moral judgement: yes with absolutely equal worth of continuation of life of each of the people saved, and the traveller, the organs have to be transplanted. This, however, raises the question: what is the reason behind this exercise? You may be pursuing this topic idly. Other people are almost always more rational than this, more purpose-driven, and they pursue this topic if they want to make some inference to use in the real world. Especially, they ask a question like that if they want a confirmation which they will misuse. In fact you're an extreme oddity, pursuing this unrealistic example for (giving you benefit of the doubt) other purpose than committing a logical fallacy in the real world after caching the conclusion (perhaps, or perhaps you just want to make a very long chain of tiny fallacies and do actually want to conclude something about real world based on your imaginary world). That is very odd, and most people don't quite know how to react to such behaviour.

The essence of the technique is to assume that all the specific details will align with the idea against which you are arguing.

http://www.tryhydroxatone.com/

For fun here's my personal contribution to "yet another proof of the non-existence of God (of the Bible)", not that really any such "proof" ought to be necessary.

The Bible (and other Arahamic texts) is quite clear that God is both omniscient and omnipotent. But at the same time endowed man with free will (Genesis 2:7-17 - Adam had CHOICE). The problem is that these are irreconcilably contradictory.

Omniscience implies the complete LACK of free will because God already knows everything that will ever happen. In fact, from God's point of view everything that ever could happen has already happened.

Omnipotence implies that even if God lacked omniscience, somehow intrinsically, he could grant omniscience to himself, after all, he is omnipotent right? If he cannot grant himself omniscience then he is not omnipotent because there are tasks that are beyond even his power! At the same time he would also not be omniscient.

So, either we have free will and God is not omniscient (and therefore flawed because he can be wrong about anything -> i.e. not know the outcome of any decision he makes), or we do not have free will and God has always know everything including every soul that would occupy heaven and hell (including knowing for all eternity that Lucifer would fall) -> i.e. your illusion of making choices is irrelevant - your final disposition has always been known - and he made it that way. All that we know is some expression of some ultimately constant "reality". God can play such a reality out along any parameter he wants and the path through is "reality" simulation would always be the same.

Furthermore, God being omnipotent is beyond time: our soul has already been basking in heaven or burning in hell for eternity already (for our notions of time simply do not apply to such a being), the mere illusion of your life is ultimately irrelevant. If God is not beyond time then he is bound by our limits of seeing into the future, again implying that he is both NOT omniscient and NOT omnipotent.

Free will implies the God of the Bible does not exist. Q.E.D. -OR- All of it doesn't matter in the slightest.

If I go back to the original situation: 1 healty stranger-donor to save a dozen transplant patiens and what to to: It always surprizes me why no one suggest to simply talk with the stranger, explain him the situation and ask him, if he would willingly sacrifice his life to save the other dozen. Is it so hard to imagine that such altruism (or an exchange for a small token of appreciation: commemorative plaque, nameds street/building, etc.) could be realistically expected?