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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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It seems like this is more or less isomorphic to utilitarianism, and my critique of it would be the same as my critique of utilitarianism: You seem to be trying to do math here, but I don't think it's actually math. That is to say, I don't think these calculations actually deliver repeatable answers independent of specific observers, and I don't think there's a way to fix that any more than there's a rigorous way to multiply potatoes by carrots.

I do, actually, think you can apply math here. You can use hyperreals or surreals: probabilities are able rigorously to be formulated in such contexts, I believe. And, mathematically, out comes Pascal's wager: a fanaticism for the infinite over the finite (and bigger infinites over smaller infinites, but I didn't want to complicate the matter), provided that we're always dealing with finite and not infinitesimal probabilities (which I'm relatively confident we are, but I didn't want to complicate the matter).

Now, assigning probabilities to things is tricky, but I think it's something that must be done. We can certainly think that things are more or less likely in general. It might be hard to do rigorously, to come up with exact numbers, but all you really need for this context is the balance of the matter, to figure out what's more likely from your own point of view, in the sense that the LessWrongers like talking about Bayes.

EDIT: just realized I wasn't quite addressing your objection. The Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem is pretty good evidence that your preferences, if you want them to have certain desirable properties (for example, one of the four is transitivity: if I would prefer to eat a hamburger now than to eat pasta, and I would prefer to eat pasta now than to eat brussels sprouts, then I must prefer to eat a hamburger now than to eat brussels sprouts), must be able to be modeled by a utility function. That of course isn't saying that you need to just calculate whether this makes more people happy or something, and there, ethics is done. You're free to have among the things you care about how subjectively likely it is that that course of action might be violating some divine law, for example. Nor is it saying that you ought to be pulling out a function and writing down numbers or you're Irrational. But it is saying that, if you want your preferences to follow some pretty reasonable seeming properties, they need to have that certain mathematical structure. But you don't necessarily need to think about in your day-to-day life, you can just live it, caring about the things you care about.

I just realized in that last paragraph I was switching back and forth between ethics and preferences. I don't think those are the same, but I do think that ideally, our preferences should follow ethics. In any case, both involve "how do I decide what to do," so the same argument is relevant for each.