> See, in this family, we DON’T just want to maximize the overall quantity of individual happiness (like Bentham). No… In this family, we want to maximize the overall quantity AND the quality of individual happiness (like John Stuart Mill).
But daaad, this now becomes a multi-objective optimization problem, and there are potentially an infinite number of solutions that lie along the Pareto frontier...
Yes, a utility monster is conceivable under both theories. It's amusing how a utility monster represents a serious objection for utilitarian philosophers, but is a total non-concern for people that solve optimization problems for a living. It would be like software engineers lying awake in bed worrying about what they'd do if they just stopped writing bugs one day.
Avoiding weird solutions by adding appropriate constraints is extremely important to people who solve optimization problems in practice. The classic example from the inventor of linear programming is the diet problem [1], where the naive LP suggested to eat nothing but bouillon cubes or drink 500 gallons of vinegar.
It's even a matter of being aware of assumed, implicit constraints. "In
the early 1950s [...] the nutritional requirements didn't show a limit on the amount of salt? "Isn't too much salt dangerous?" He replied that it wasn't necessary; most
people had enough sense not to consume too much."
In more old-school convex optimization the closest thing is probably insufficiently constrained problems. If you don't say the amount of each food you eat has to be greater than zero, you can get all your dietary needs satisfied for the low low price of minus infinity dollars!
From another perspective, though, perhaps there's a "No True Scotsman" side of this. Is a utility monster a sign of a badly-specified problem, or are they a definitive sign of one? If the former, it stands to reason it's not a "concern" for modellers -- it's a dream!
Utility monster is a case of lack of time constraint on optimization problem and lack of robustness.
For example, the special "Felix" case ignores the case where said guy is stuck by gamma radiation and dies. Over time, the probability of that k or a bunch of other catastrophes ruinning the solution tends to 1.
Therefore, the best solution avoids the most known catastrophes and is updated as new possibilities of those are found. (Tontine lotto, anyone?) Minimax loss optimal. Maximin (maximizing gain without increasing base loss) could be decent as well. Deciding between the two is better left to wizards.
Online stochastic optimization is mathematical black magic anyway so far.
But then, satisfying humans is much easier given all the built in biases we have. Keeping things alive long term is much harder.
Does the millionth lucky penny feel as special as the first? If you gave Jeff Bezos a million $ would he even notice, let alone feel happier.
I feel that most happiness is gained from being able to feed and house your family, not having your children die from disease. Anything much beyond that is a rounding error and based on standards of the day.
Notice that in neoclassical economics, value grows because satisfaction of the agents grows and nothing else. Therefore growth can be infinite as long as someone could grow infinitely happy with whatever they get out of economic activities. This implies some form of utilitarianism. This also strikes as complete, unreal fantasy. Hmmm.
Not quite -- if a single poor chap starts off with Very Bad torture, maximin will perscribe that everyone else have Medium Bad torture as long as the single worst-off person does a little better.
Hmm, really? Maximin = maximizing the minimum, right? Seems like it could also lead to "Find the people with the most difficult-to-cure genetic conditions and/or abusive upbringings that make them extremely unhappy, and enslave the rest of humanity to try to find cures for them." Unless pumping such people with dopamine or whatever is considered a solution. (Or killing them.)
If your algorithm accounts for future states - and it'll have to, to be practical - "assigning minimal resources to the really unhappy people to let them die from neglect" is also part of the set of options.
I have met at least one vegetarian (who is also a utilitarian) who has said that many species of animals currently suffer so much that it would be better if those species were all dead. I've heard of others who share this opinion. I call it the "Final Solution" to animal welfare; I think the name is quite appropriate.
Anyway, well, then, that seems to leave some big question marks. How is everyone who goes through utilitarian moral reasoning supposed to decide between help and neglect, and hope to come up with the same answer? (Because if two people come up with sufficiently different answers, it may lead to one or both concluding that the expected utility of violently enforcing obedience from the other person is worth the cost, unless they have deontological rules of some sort. Like the kind that the article says Mill supported.)
I don't think that's quite as marginal of an opinion as you think.
If someone is vegetarian/vegan for ethical reasons, it's because they want there to be fewer factory farms. This would of course mean that the animals they would have eaten wouldn't exist at all, so of course they'd consider nonexistence better than a life of torture.
"I'd rather you not have lived at all, rather than live a life of torture" is a pretty mainstream opinion in general, I think.
Possibly. But extinction of the species completely eradicates hope; I would prefer "life under torture with a chance of eventually obtaining a good life" over "permanent nonexistence".
Unless cloning counts? Is extinction okay as long as we have some copies of their DNA and plan to clone them into a decent life eventually? I feel rather uneasy about that resolution; at the very least I'd want to see a species successfully reconstructed in this manner before giving the possibility moral weight.
I love SMBC. He does this kind of comic so well, where it starts out with some interesting premise and then go to complete hilarious absurdity with some "logical" steps. I can't think of anyone else who has the same type of humor.
I've really enjoyed watching him develop over the years. His earlier comics, while good, are just so mediocre compared to how good he is today. While he's obviously always been funny, I guess 10+ years of grinding have really helped him hone his craft. He's probably my favorite comic - and his books are excellent as well.
Are you saying the difference between quantity and quality is zero sum, or maybe more like dividing by zero?
I feel like Pareto efficiency only comes into the picture if the quantities are actually clear, but I don't understand how to make that concrete in ethical (not economic) terms.
The "rule" of "quality" seems like it can easily be abused by whoever is in power in the given situation. E.g. an assertion such as this could be valid: it's okay for police to shoot "innocent" people if "they were disturbing the peace".
Are quality and quantity both vulnerable to being gamed?
I'm pretty confident that Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, composed the greatest single-sentence ode to toothpaste ever written:
"In the pipefitters’ sheds, icicled, rattling when the gales are in the Straits, here’s thousands of used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the ceilings, thousands of somber man-made mornings made tolerable, transformed to mint fumes and bleak song that left white spots across the quicksilver mirrors from Harrow to Gravesend, thousands of children who pestled foam up out of soft mortars of mouths, who lost easily a thousand times as many words among the chalky bubbles–bed-going complaints, timid announcements of love, news of fat or translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country under the counterpane–uncounted soapy-liquorice moments spat and flushed down to sewers and the slow-scumming gray estuary, the morning mouths growing idle with the day tobacco and fish-furred, dry with fear, foul with idleness, flooded at thoughts of impossible meals, settling instead for the week’s offal in gland pies, Household Milk, broken biscuits at half the usual points, and isn’t menthol a marvelous invention to take just enough of it away each morning, down to become dusty oversize bubbles tessellating tough and stagnant among the tar shorelines, the intricate draftsmanship of outlets feeding, multiplying out to sea, as one by one these old toothpaste tubes are emptied and returned to the War, heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phantoms of peppermint in the winter shacks, each tube wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands of London, written over in interference-patterns, hand against hand, waiting now–it is true return–to be melted for solder, for plate, alloyed for castings, bearings, gasketry, hidden smokeshriek linings the children of that other domestic incarnation will never see."
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that evolution is a tautological collapse of the "why" in "why do we exist".
Let me explain: evolution is a massive, groping search in the ultrahigh dimensional space of possible organisms, one that is solving for fitness by literally obliterating less fit entities from existence. So fitness is actually just "what is good at existing", which, given enough iterations, will determine what actually exists anyway.
So now we can simply substitute in the answer to the question "why do we exist?": We exist because we evolved, which is like saying, we exist because we are fit, which is like saying, we exist because we exist. And that explanational ouroboros sort of levitates before us, a silent, immutable feature of the universe: we are here because we exist, because we exist, because...
And it's so easy for us to make that small, seductive step to saying that our existence is therefore inevitable. But I think that's a mistake. The tautology doesn't answer the why question; it annihilates it, dissolving the teleological question into its mechanistic refutation: WE. ARE. HERE.
It's not a search. There is no goal, no searcher, and nothing to find. The word evolution was chosen deliberately in its meaning of a dynamical system moving through state space. Not searching: just evolving.
In a banal sense, it's correct to say that there's no searcher, no goal to evolution. As far as we know, "natural selection" isn't "real" in the sense that electromagnetism is "real"; natural selection is just a staggeringly convenient shorthand that refers to the multitude of ways organisms can die. But if we go further, and think of evolution as a mere random walk through state space, we've suddenly lost all explanatory power. The independent emergence of echolocation in whales and bats, for instance, becomes a brute mystery.
Evolution only makes sense if we think of it as as some kind of massively parallel Monte Carlo that's weighted to explore regions of the state space with high fitness. So it's perfectly valid to talk, as biologist do, of selection pressures and directional selection, because- and here we've come full circle- there is a goal to evolution: to exist.
And, to exist with a minimum of fuss. Why do people get cancer, or get feeble when old? Well, if the organism can reproduce and support their offspring well enough, given the eco-niche and available calories etc, then they are Fit. So, just enough avoiding cancer to work out in the end.
Kind of like the space program, where everything is made by the lowest bidder.
While Evolution clearly doesn't have any "goal" I wonder if we can say that it directs to the goal that is constantly changing (that is, a goal only known once some organism is there)?
Virtual reality is perhaps an unfortunate moniker, because it encourages a dichotomisation of reality into the "virtual" and "real", and conceiving of these as opposing, or at least orthogonal forces. Thought of in this way, virtual reality seems to promise a compelling-but-ultimately-empty facsimile of reality, the ultimate fulfilment of the escapist dream.
Disruptive technologies are often initially viewed from an oppositional mindset, which makes sense, because any disruptive technology will steal time away from the Old Activities that existed before the technology. People who aren't early adopters will naturally focus on the decrease in the time spent on Old Activities.
We saw this oppositional reaction when the internet gained popularity:
* People are spending so much time in cyberspace that they won't know how to effectively navigate the real world
* People are having fantasy cyber-lives instead of spending time in the Real World
* He's seeing someone he met online, he must not know how to interact with Real People
* And so on.
But social networks descended on society in an incredibly short period of time, and worked their way into the furthest corners of our lives. The oppositional mindset gave way to an integrative one, where the notion of a "CyberLife", as distinct from a "life", is simply misplaced- the internet is now simply a part of life, sans prefix and with a lowercase "l", no longer boxed up in the conceptual category of "the Cyber".
There was another motifical recurrence when smartphones entered the fray. The oppositional critiques were voluminous and eloquent:
* We're spending so much time texting we're forgetting how to speak to each other
* Every crack in every interaction is plastered over with the ritualized and mutually fraudulent "notification check", signposting the way to the unravelling of the social fabric..., etc.
* You can find the Real World up there, when you hold your head high, with dignity, and not down there, with your head bowed, staring transfixed at a shining rectangle, face ghost-like, bathed in the soft pearlescent glow of vapidity.
But at some point, the integrative mindset arrived. It's hard to maintain the oppositional mindset when you get off your Uber, arrive at a restaurant that you found on Yelp, and are chatting to your friend on WhatsApp, only to have them sit down in front of you. The handoff between "smartphone life" and "real life" is seamless. Smartphones are woven so deeply into our lives that if you ask someone how their "smartphone life" compares to their "real life", they'll just give you a strange look. Smartphones are just a part of life.
I think VR/AR could go in this direction, as just another arrow in our technological quiver. If we start looking at things like social VR, which has the potential to reshape the way we interact remotely, or how architects are today routinely using VR to demo to clients, it's not impossible to believe that the integrative mindset could eventually overcome the oppositional mindset in terms of how we think about VR.
Excellent--except all your examples of the "oppositional critiques" have happened, and aren't abating. So the concern is well founded. Every day I see people texting, reading, watching videos, and gaming on their smartphones AS THEY ARE DRIVING--navigating traffic, changing lanes, turning, etc. They are so hooked on their devices they're unable (or unwilling) to unplug even while driving a multi-ton death machine amongst other multi-ton death machines.
The truth is that humans have a tendency to be lazy. It's not a simple case of equal substitution; we will happily choose inferior substitutions which require less effort (or expense or time or complexity).
Will people choose to "travel" via VR? Yes. Will this reduce real-life traveling? Absolutely. The sense of having been somewhere will reduce our need to actually GO there.
I this the rise of VR will see many become thoroughly entranced (addicted?) and less productive and even alive than they were previously. We will see society split into two groups: one large, one small. The small group will be comprised of the productive, who limit their entertainment consumption in any medium (but especially VR). This group will be exponentially more affluent than the much larger group. The larger group will be comprised of the numerous people who already consume what is already available through any medium: Netflix, Xbox, cable, internet, tablets, phones, etc. These are the people who (best case scenario) have a full-time job, but they spend every other possible waking hour watching or playing something. More and more of this group are working less and consuming/playing more. And we're not talking about real life here. Just think about World of Warcraft--but on steroids. It's going to be insane how addictive VR will be once the bugs have been ironed out.
In short: I too worry that this is something the human race is not prepared for. I worry that our proclivities dispose us to losing ourselves in it at the expense of our real life and responsibilities.
The truth of the matter is that, anecdotally, I look back over my 38 years and I can see the impact on my life of the digital revolution. I want to do more with my life, but oftentimes the allure of the easy "hit" via Netflix or the internet is more of a draw than spending my free time learning languages, exercising, meditating, working on some of my app ideas, writing, or reading. Instead I choose the cognitively easy "hit" at the expense of my personal development and health.
Think about smartphones and tablets. They can and sometimes are used for meaningful and productive purposes. They can be very useful tools. But for most people they're a distraction and a time suck. Which is to say most people spend most of their time on their devices not doing anything meaningful: playing the latest hot game, Facebooking, Facetiming, Snapchatting, reading the news (as vapid as it is). I predict VR will be more of the same.
I think I was addressing attitudes towards new technologies, rather than their actual impacts, which you quite rightly focus on.
I'm less convinced that the impacts of these new technologies are as pernicious as you claim, though I'm very open to the idea that hyperrewarding stimuli can "hack" reward pathways carefully tuned for a very different environment, be it McDonalds, PornHub, cocaine, or even Netflix.
But ultimately this is an empirical question, and while I see strong evidence that the food industry exploits our evolved impulses with carefully crafted payloads of calorie-dense foods, I don't see correspondingly strong evidence for a drop in productivity with the rise of ubiquitous, frictionless distraction- if anything we see a negative correlation.
Also worryingly absent from this analysis is the smorgasbord of opportunities for self-improvement that technology has created. Through technology, millions of people have picked up hobbies, languages, instruments, careers, partners, and yes, World of Warcraft, but I don't think we could tabulate these effects into a "net-technology-induced-eudaimonia" metric and say with a straight face that the result turned out to be negative after all.
Further red flags go up with your assertion that the population will bifurcate into the productive and unproductive, which seems to posit some mechanism that AFAIK we don't have good evidence for, like a susceptibility to distraction that's bimodally distributed among the population, or the lack of/ existence of various feedback effects that would amplify small variations, etc.
Anyway, my main point is not that these general concerns are unfounded, but that they're not well-supported by empirical evidence, so we're probably in broad agreement on that front.
Yes, I agree, framed this way we are more or less living in VR since the days of TV, telephone and radio. But I wonder , there seems to be a difference, people can become unconsciously and unnaturally emotionally attached and dependent on this. Can they still manage themselves when the internet and VR falls away? I mean, viaiting eachother and going out walking in nature is infinitaly better (when you are in > 1h physical proximity).
Will this technology on average provide more meaningful authentic communication and activities or less? You could argue that the medium is not relevant, but the medium pushes and shapes our bodies, minds and imagination to conform to a certain way of relating which might not necessarily be 'better'. Yes playing Tabletop Simulator boardgames with people across countries is very cool and conversing and working together with dedicated people on the same project this way is as well, but it takes dedication, setting boundaries, clear rules and focus. The same goes for navigating the internet - before you know it you have aimlessly browsed hundreds of sites, send dozens of replies to forum posts, and what have you really meaningfully contributed? It takes time to learn this, just as it takes time to read books, read about and apply research, learn nettiquette and living a balanced life. Some people decided a mobile or a TV didn't add enough value and live without one. Will you be able to make that decision more easily with VR or the internet?
The key difference is that the economic distance between our bodies and VR technology is very high. Small is beautiful and less is more. How can you integrate VR in a minimal lifestyle?
I'm baffled that this sort of discourse is considered acceptable. Not in an "I-feel-appalled" sort of way, but in a very literal, "why doesn't society treat this like racism or sexism" sort of way.
If someone wanted to argue that intergenerational differences are significant, they'd have to contend with the fact that the ratio of intragenerational:intergenerational variance is far smaller than intrasex:intersex or intraracial:interracial variance, and commit themselves to also being a racist or a sexist.
It's routinely taught in org-psych and related fields, for example, that different generations have X characteristic that makes them better or worse suited to a particular role. Imagine the uproar that would ensue if we taught that "women are better at teaching professions while men are better at science", or "you should prefer asian employees in STEM roles vs black employees".
Maybe someone would then say, "hey, our condemnation of racism isn't based upon some ANOVA or arbitrary significance test- we aren't racist because Every Human has intrinsic worth." In which case, we can stop promulgating this antiscientific ingroup/outgroup hysteria and just focus on the Every Human part.
I've never considered an association between intergenerational conflict and it's typical blanket statements, as being in line with interracial and sexist prejudice.
Though now you've brought it to my attention. Intergenerational conflict really is just another form of bigotry, why isn't is condemned publicly as such?
I think societal condemnation is inconsistent, poorly calibrated, and largely rooted in exogenous/historical factors.
The outrage over isolated killings of charismatic megafauna is matched only by the indifference to extraordinarily large-scale habitat destruction that sees multiple species go extinct every day. See also factory farming.
The incredible revulsion we feel toward an individual pedophile is diluted over an entire industry of child sex trafficking until it reaches homeopathic levels.
I think the condemnation of racism and sexism were basically gavaged into society by social movements and brave people fighting for their rights. While this was definitely an incredible step forward, it did little to neuter our base instincts for prejudice; we were instead outfitted with a sort of pattern-matching, Pavlovian hair-trigger that fires whenever someone says the word "black".
It's said that society progresses one funeral at a time, and that could be the reason why intergenerational prejudice has had no champion. Who will fight for Gen Z once they're dead?
I'm not capable of putting words together to express how much your comments rang true on the discussion of prejudice (though societies whimsical nature towards one mega fauna dying vs deforestation, a sexual assault vs. the Catholic Churches paedophile circles) was far too raw.
So instead, I'll digress to the stereotype of my generation and settle for a hasthag.
You're implying that if something can be outdone it doesn't have a purpose, which seems to rule out purposes for pretty much everything.
I'm sure there's always someone that can write books or maths papers or symphonies better than you. I don't think this robs you of purpose, unless your purpose is to be the absolute best at something.
Anyway, I find it curious that you would say logic is a quintessentially human trait, because humans are naturally quite bad at logic.
The difference between being outdone by another human and being outdone by a computer is that the computer's efforts are nearly infinitely reproducible, given the processing power.
So a more apt analogy would be if there was someone inside every cellphone who could write books, papers, or symphonies better than you. That day is coming.
Yes, but not particularly harshly. The Electoral Commission's target is 95% of eligible voters enrolled, and it's currently at 93.5%. You are supposed to enrol at some time between your 18th birthday and the next election (which roll around every 3 years or so), so some of that non-enrolled percentage are folks who will do so shortly. A small amount of people are eligible to vote, but not capable, such as people with severe intellectual handicaps. In practice, most folks are enrolled.
The penalty isn't particularly harsh ($20 first time missed a vote, $50 afterwards). I have a 40-year-old friend that's not enrolled, and as far as I'm aware, she has never been fined for it.
I find this is one of the biggest problems with object-oriented programming. The object is a terrible unit of abstraction, because it forces you to carve up your domain into rigid chunks which might map to your domain today, and fail to map to it tomorrow, and a terrible unit of reuse, because it couples methods to data, and bundles these methods together on top of that.
Yeah, this article reads like someone was forced by their employer to write a blog post. If it was for self-promotion you'd think they'd put a bit more effort into it. Would be better if retitled to "10 things that just so happened to pop into my head".
But daaad, this now becomes a multi-objective optimization problem, and there are potentially an infinite number of solutions that lie along the Pareto frontier...