Comment by Eliezer Yudkowsky - I may never actually use this in a story, but in another universe I had thought of having a character mention that... call it the forces of magic with normative dimension... had evaluated one pedophile who had known his desires were harmful to innocents and never acted upon them, while living a life of above-average virtue; and another pedophile who had acted on those desires, at harm to others. So the said forces of normatively dimensioned magic transformed the second pedophile's body into that of a little girl, delivered to the first pedophile along with the equivalent of an explanatory placard. Problem solved. And indeed the 'problem' as I had perceived it was, "What if a virtuous person deserving our aid wishes to retain their current sexual desires and not be frustrated thereby?"
(As always, pedophilia is not the same as ephebophilia.)
I also remark that the human equivalent of a utility function, not that we actually have one, often revolves around desires whose frustration produces pain. A vanilla rational agent (Bayes probabilities, expected utility max) would not see any need to change its utility function even if one of its components seemed highly probable though not absolutely certain to be eternally frustrated, since it would suffer no pain thereby.
Feynman had a story about trying to read somebody’s paper before a grand interdisciplinary symposium. As he told it, he couldn’t get through the jargon, until he stopped and tried to translate just one sentence. He landed on a line like, “The individual member of the social community often receives information through visual, symbolic channels.” And after a lot of crossing-out, he reduced that to “People read.”
Yud, who idolizes Feynman above all others:
I also remark that the human equivalent of a utility function, not that we actually have one, often revolves around desires whose frustration produces pain.
tbh I don’t think that’s a good rephrasing by feynman.
I also don’t think yud intended to claim that people don’t like to hurt. I’m pretty sure what he meant is that people have a strong desire not to desire things fruitlessly, one that can outweigh EV considerations. still gibberish unless you have enough rationalist brain poisoning to take the assumptions behind “can outweigh EV considerations” seriously, which I don’t
It’s definitely a bad rephrasing. It’s like trying to simplify E = MC² to “big boom”. Like technically yes, matter can be converted into energy but that loses a lot in the rephrasing. It just sounds like he didn’t understand the subject.
More like “People want things and hurt if they don’t get them. Also, look at me saying things like utility function! Function is math! Math is smart. I am smart! Isn’t that so cool?”
I too wish academics, and those at least pretending, would do away with the rhetorical peacocking. Nobody learns from it and it makes the writing inaccessible. It’s deliberate gatekeeping confused for professional writing.
Feynman had a story about trying to read somebody’s paper before a grand interdisciplinary symposium. As he told it, he couldn’t get through the jargon, until he stopped and tried to translate just one sentence. He landed on a line like, “The individual member of the social community often receives information through visual, symbolic channels.” And after a lot of crossing-out, he reduced that to “People read.”
Yud, who idolizes Feynman above all others:
Ah. People don’t like to hurt.
tbh I don’t think that’s a good rephrasing by feynman.
I also don’t think yud intended to claim that people don’t like to hurt. I’m pretty sure what he meant is that people have a strong desire not to desire things fruitlessly, one that can outweigh EV considerations. still gibberish unless you have enough rationalist brain poisoning to take the assumptions behind “can outweigh EV considerations” seriously, which I don’t
It’s definitely a bad rephrasing. It’s like trying to simplify E = MC² to “big boom”. Like technically yes, matter can be converted into energy but that loses a lot in the rephrasing. It just sounds like he didn’t understand the subject.
More like “People want things and hurt if they don’t get them. Also, look at me saying things like utility function! Function is math! Math is smart. I am smart! Isn’t that so cool?”
I too wish academics, and those at least pretending, would do away with the rhetorical peacocking. Nobody learns from it and it makes the writing inaccessible. It’s deliberate gatekeeping confused for professional writing.