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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27147 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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I think we can make a more concrete claim, which is that deontologists are doomed in the long run due to competition and natural selection. Their rules will consistently be used against them. Today it's asylum seekers, tomorrow it will be ultra-charming machines that will claim moral primacy over whoever has resources.

It's my own impression that the fiercest advocates for generous asylum policies or even open borders aren't deontologists (who generally have a lot of respect for rules around borders and citizenship), but utilitarians (who are willing to compromise because they value the utility of asylum seekers over maintaining strong borders). It's also my own impression that utilitarians are more vulnerable to charisma and arguments - theoretically a utilitarian is capable of endorsing any behavior if they're persuaded of it's utility, whereas it's much harder to argue a deontologist into bending his own rules.

It is a trope of right-populist complaints against the pro-immigration lobby that advocates for generous asylum policies are doing virtue ethics. As a practical point about the noisy bits of the pro-immigration lobby, this is mostly correct - hence language like "What kind of country does this?" The person of hair colour supports generous immigration policies because she/they is kind, anti-racist, not a xenophobe, sympathetic to the oppressed, tolerant, cosmopolitan, etc. and a person who is those things is the type of person who supports generous immigration policies.

The effective bits of the pro-immigration lobby are doing consequentialism - Bill Gates supports generous immigration policies because he believes that the types of immigration enabled by liberal immigration policies are good for the immigrants and (on net, applying Kaldor-Hicks aggregation of gains and losses to individual host country citizens) good for host countries.

It is a trope of right-populist complaints against the pro-immigration lobby that advocates for generous asylum policies are doing virtue ethics.

Virtue signaling surely, unless right populists are criticizing the Aristotelian basis of pro-immigration policies.

For virtue signalling to be useful, you have to believe in virtue ethics in the first place. Dishonest deontologists engage in casuistry to explain why they haven't committed a wrong. Dishonest utilitarians exaggerate the benefits of their actions and minimise the costs. Dishonest virtue ethicists signal virtues they don't possess.

Hmmm. I think you're on to something. I think we need to distinguish between utilitarianism done well, and done poorly. I agree it's easy to do poorly - I think that's part of why we love rules so much - they're easier to follow than trying to come up with a good strategy from scratch for every situation. I guess my claim is that, in the presence of enough adversarial intelligence or optimization, following even pretty good rules won't protect you, because the adversary will find the edge cases they can exploit. At that point you have to adjust your rules, and I claim the only effective way to do that in a way that avoids exploitation is very intelligent consequentialism.

I claim the only effective way to do that in a way that avoids exploitation is very intelligent consequentialism.

I claim that doesn't work either, if your environment is adversarial, because the difference between your model of the expected consequences of your actions and the actual realized consequences of your actions can be exploited. This doesn't even require an adversary that is generally more intelligent than you, just an adversary that notes a specific blind spot you have (see how humans can beat the wildly superhuman Go engine KataGo by exploiting a very specific blind spot it has in its world model).

Okay, well I include some degree of adaptation in my definition of "very intelligent". In fact, adaptation is the main advantage that consequentialists have over deontologists.

Your adversary is allowed to adapt too, and they are allowed to (and in fact incentivized to) adapt in the way that is as inconvenient as possible for your ability to counter that adaptation.

BTW in terms of a concrete adversarial environment I'm thinking "high frequency trading". You can build a gloriously detailed model of the world and a list of actions you can take within the world and the predicted effect of those actions, and you are certainly free to choose the algorithm of "consult my super detailed world model about the expected outcome of each of my possible actions, and take the action with the best expected result according to that model". But your environment contains a bunch of different entities trying out a multitude of different strategies, keeping the ones that work and discarding the ones that don't. The strategies that lose money on average will run out of money and stop trading, and eventually a strategy that makes money on average while trading with you will emerge (and keep trading as long as it continues making money). It is entirely possible that neither you nor your adversary will know why their strategy beats yours on average.

If you're talking about how consequentialism becomes optimal in the limit as your world model approaches perfection, then sure, but I don't think the behavior at the limit is particularly informative of the behavior in the real world. Consider that in the limit as your adversary's available computing power approaches infinity, if you have a 1,000,000 byte message, and you encrypt it with a 4096 bit RSA key that you keep to yourself, and you hand the encrypted message to your adversary, they have 999,488 bytes of information about what your message was. But in practice your adversary actually has ~0 bits of information about the contents of the message.

I agree that even adaptation can be successfully adapted to by an adversary. My claim is merely that adaptive agents (e.g. consequentialists) will eventually outcompete agents that operate according to fixed rules (consequentialists). In your example, the adversaries are adaptive. If they followed fixed rules, they would be poor adversaries.

I think there are probably environments where consequentialists outcompete deontologists (specifically ones where the effects of your actions fall within a known and at least somewhat predictable distribution), and other environments where deontologists outcompete consequentialists (the ones where certain actions are on average good given certain observations, or where acting predictably leads to good outcomes). And there are yet other environments where having a policy of blindly doing things similar to ones that have worked in the past will outperform both of those principled approaches.

And then there are adversarial environments where there may not even be a single strategy that dominates all other strategies within that environment (e.g. you may have a situation with policies A, B, and C, where A > B, B > C, C > A, or even more cursed scenarios where how well a strategy does depends on how many other players are playing that strategy).

My point is not "deontology > consequentialism", it's "whether a strategy is useful depends on the environment, and consequentialism-in-practice is not the most useful strategy across all environments".

These strike me as bigger problems for the utilitarians, memed best by the bikecuck illustration.

Really though, no premise moral philosophies should be subject to those particular failure modes - it's the specific tenets that become problems. Deontologists can easily adhere to the principle of concentric loyalties and avoid issues with "asylum seekers". Utilitarians can concoct a calculation that "shows" that it'll make things worse in the long-run.

The bike cuck meme is only a problem if you subscribe specifically to a humanist universalist progressive conception of utilitarianism, which it’s not clear to me at all that most of the early utilitarians did.

Of course not. The usual form of modern utilitarianism I see is posthoc accounting of utils to make them work based on gut feeling. There's always a good utilitarian reason to do what I wanted to do anyway!

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