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As long as my average expected utility over all choices available goes up, I'm down to get more goals, and even loose old ones. But if my average expected utility goes down, then screw getting a new value. Though in general, adding a new value does not imply getting rid of an old one; as long as you keep all your old values there is no danger in adding a new one.
"1+1=giraffe" is meaningless "Godel sentence" is undecidable
"There is no particular word limit. It's too many words, and too overwrought, for what it's saying, which is simply the often-made point that overreaction to child abuse scares can itself be damaging." Sorry sir, but if you had simply read my introduction a bit more carefully you might have noticed that from the very beginning I make it clear that my aim is to give an example of how completely un-beneficial moral judgements can enter our culture and become rooted if they hide in our taboo box.
Wait I misunderstood what you were asking, sorry. No, I specifically argue that sex involving a non-consenting partner is always going to be traumatic for that member of the ordeal.
I don't disagree, but i think the situation becomes drastically different when we are talking about sexual desires. Again, I don't have anything better than moderate familiarization with Kinsey to back that up.
I would say quite the opposite, as would Dr. Kinsey from what i understand.
My claim is not that "Don't have sex with children." is a bad rule because some children like sex, my claim is that it is primarily the continued enforcement of that rule which causes that rule to be useful at all. Unlike in the case with the king and peasant wife. The peasant's wife really doesn't want to engage in sex with the king but she realizes it might be better off for her because of the way things are ran. The situation I presented is one in which the child is not forced into anything, child rape should be legalized for the same reasons as all other forms, but if the child has no serious opposition to touching a genital, then i don't see why we should morally judge it.
Yes, absolutely would. The only thing i think i would loose in doing so is showing that there is much more to our distaste of pedophiles than the obvious harms they cause.
Also, I don't understand why it say's my page does not exist. I might just try again.
It means precisely that it works well with what we already consider to be beneficial thanks to our genetic and memetic predispositions.
I'm sorry, I'm new honestly, and I'm not trolling. I thought I might have that sort of reaction. Sorry about the word count I also didn't know the distinction between discussion and main post. Expect not to have similar problems with me in the future.
There are a couple things, I would like to apply my informationalist ontology to the vast variety of issues that are being considered here, I think it would be of great help but i won't do that till I have some massive charma. I think it's a novel ontology and i would like for it be used by others. I also hope to see if I can't use some Dennett to help out all of the qualiaphiles that seem to hang out here. I love Yudcowsky (w/e his name is) but I can't help but feel like he's a little naive to modern philosophy's success. I think Quine and Davidson could definitely present some useful positions on human cognition and reasoning, even stronger ones than Dennett. But I doubt that they would really factor into this side of the debate which is unfortunate. They were both hard naturalists, and even both considered themselves to be just a special sort of scientist. The problem with philosophy is clear, it lacks a method of hard inference by which to systematically dissolve competing hypothesis. But that problem is not universal through out the entire feild, there are certainly schools of philosophers that do have agreed upon formal methods by which to decide what hypothesis to eliminate. The problem is simply that they are not cross disciplinary methods. You can't convince Zizek the same way you convince Pinker, and that is truly no surprise if you have ever read the two, but it is a problem that philosophers must overcome if they ever plan to become a serious feild of knowledge. I think the standard view of philosophers is of them as not considering the issue of peer reviewed verifiability in philosophy important, and that is not true. We have made a lot of progress as philosophers and logicians towards figuring out ways of classifying deductive and inductive arguments, and formalizing our competing hypothesis into deductive systems. The only problem is that that stuff isn't popular because its formal, but let us not forget that it was a philosopher that made principia mathematica and a philosopher who proved its incompleteness.
Hello Less Wrong.
I am a philosopher that is apparently concerned with precisely your mission statement. To improve the art of human rationality, I am here to help an be helped towards that aim