#ea cw

And this is, like, utterly baffling to me. If I'm a fan of something I want to see critical analysis! And some of that will say good things and some will say bad things. Unmitigated positivity mostly just pisses me off for being shallow.

Like, the first thing I ever really did with the internet was join a Wheel of Time fan community. But I also spent time looking for negative comments about the books. (I just didn't find any that made sense! The two critiques were "it's too long", which like fair enough but I was a bored speedreader in high school; and "all the female characters are indistinguishable", which may be one of the most incorrect claims about a work of literature that I've read.)

If I post meta about a work of literature, I'd kinda like people to argue with me! That's fun and engaging. (As long as the things they're saying aren't stupid, obviously, but stupid responses are annoying regardless of whether they're positive or negative.) And when I search for commentary, I'd like both positive and negative commentary.

I kind of suspect that I just don't do "fandom" in the sense that people who are part of fandom think and talk about it.

But where would the “proper feedback loop” come from—an updated set of tablets on Mt Sinai? Like, I agree that the people in Scott’s article take ideas more seriously than most, but for morality in particular, I don’t see how you can say they take them *too* seriously.

I suspect <a class=“tumblelog”>shlevy</a> would give a different answer to this than I will.  But my answer is that the feedback loop has to come from your own core intuitions and values.

Like, there’s no such thing as an objective moral fact.  There are values and ethics and desires.

And what I see happening sometimes is people say:

Okay, I know these things are good and those things are bad.

There must be some clear rule determining whether something is good or bad.

Hm, “happiness is good and pain is bad” seems like it fits the data in (1) pretty well. 

Therefore “happiness is good and pain is bad” defines morality.

But what exactly do “happiness” and “pain” mean?

What if electrons feel pain?

Fuck.

Like, no one starts out from the position that electron suffering is bad, or whatever.  They start out with some “data”, of the form “these things are bad and those things are good”.  They build a model, to try to explain what things are good and what things are bad.

And then they proceed to throw away the data and reify the model.  It’s not just confusing map and the territory; it’s throwing away the territory because the map is more accurate.  After all, it’s a map.  Are you the sort of ignorant flat-earther who doesn’t believe maps?

If you assume that morality must be described by a relatively simple and compact set of rules, then you’ll wind up throwing away a lot of the complexity of people’s actual values.  (One of the best parts of Yudkowsky’s writing is his fairly nuanced understanding of this point).  

Would the discovery that unimaginable suffering is woven into the fabric of the universe really not faze you?

I mean, if by “suffering” you mean something that I care about, like actual people being in pain, then it would bother me quite a lot.

My problem with the suffering-in-physics argument is that it expands the definition of “suffering” enough that it covers a lot of things I don’t care about.  It really is a form of Scott’s [Worst Argument in the World](http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html?nojs=1): “People being in pain is bad; we call that “suffering”; electron repulsion has some traits in common with people being in pain, so we can also call that “suffering”; therefore, since people being in pain is bad, electron repulsion is also bad.”

Though I disagree with several aspects of his post, I think @fatpinocchio calls that one right here.

We have moral intuitions where some things tug at our heartstrings more, and also the intuition that cuteness shouldn’t affect people’s worth.  And we reconcile those in some way and often it involves subjugating the first intuition to the second.

There’s always a little bit of this sort of adjustment going on.  If we discover that two things we believe or value are in tension, we have to resolve that somehow.  We can abandon a value; we can restrict its scope; we can impose a balancing test; we can rationalize how they aren’t actually in conflict (and sometimes be correct).  But this process is continuous.

But you always want to be checking this process and make sure it hasn’t exploded so much that it’s abandoned the core inputs you started with.  And a lot of people who get very invested in ethical consistency lose that step altogether.

Their inputs have markets, but their outputs are not measured in dollars, surely; eg. QALY

The fact that their inputs have markets is kind of enough to make my point, I think.

Some of their outputs are financial.  The others are measured in QALYs, which are really just an attempt to get market data on something where there is no actual market, basically by asking people what hypothetical transactions they would make between different conditions.  (”How many years of one-legged life would you pay for another year of able-bodied life?”)

And at that, the whole QALY idea is super contentious because different people value these things differently---which is another problem that markets solve.

To the extent that Givewell works, it works by

Using market data for inputs;

Trying to simulate market data for outputs;

Restricting which types of problems it solves (like critical public health stuff) so that a lot of the “matter of taste” issues are sidelined as much as possible;

For some of its most effective interventions (like Give Directly) working entirely through market mechanisms.

Let me start with the side note. I like people. I want them to be happy. This isn't a thing about altruism or obligation; I just like it when people are happy.

Then one thing that seems really destructive to people's happiness to me is this idea that there are things they're "supposed" to do, or that they "have" to do. Half the time when my friends are upset about something, it's because they're "supposed" to do a thing that they don't want to do. So I'm really hostile to this idea of free-floating obligation.

If it makes people happier to give a fixed amount, they should do it. Hell, it makes me happier, generally, to toss some money to charity. Except when someone has put the language of obligation on it.

(There's a side note here: I like to feel like I'm being generous. It is impossible to feel generous for doing a thing you're supposed to do. So giving is a lot more rewarding for me if I'm not supposed to do it).

If people want to donate, then great, they should do it. But we should all stop telling them they should donate.