Monthly Archives: January 2009

A World Without Lies?

By Robin Hanson · January 2, 2009 11:00 pm · Comments (28)

Among the many provocative answers to this year's Edge question, "What Will Change Everything?" my favorite was Sam Harris' "True Lie Detection":

Deception commends itself, perhaps even above violence, as the principal enemy of human cooperation. Imagine how our world would change if, when the truth really mattered, it became impossible to lie. … Reliable lie-detection will be much easier to achieve than accurate mind reading. … We will almost surely be able to determine, to a moral certainty, whether a person is representing his thoughts, memories, and perceptions honestly in conversation. Compared to many of the other hypothetical breakthroughs put forward in response to this year's Edge question, the development of a true lie-detector would represent a very modest advance over what is currently possible through neuroimaging. …

The greatest transformation of our society will occur only once lie-detectors become both affordable and unobtrusive. Rather than spirit criminal defendants and hedge-fund managers off to the lab for a disconcerting hour of brain scanning, there may come a time when every courtroom or boardroom will have the requisite technology discretely concealed behind its wood paneling. Thereafter, civilized people would share a common presumption: that wherever important conversations are held, the truthfulness of all participants will be monitored.  Of course, no technology is ever perfect. Once we have a proper lie-detector in hand, we will suffer the caprice of its positive and negative errors. … But some rate of error will, in the end, be judged acceptable.

I'm more skeptical about developing unobtrusive detectors soon, but even cheap obtrusive detector-caps would change a lot; by refusing to put one on you'd be admitting you expected to lie.  Of course by asking someone to put one on, you'd be admitting you don't trust them, but such admissions are already pretty common today.

I'm also more skeptical that "lying" is such a clear categories of mind states.  Many people seem to find it relatively easy to find a state of mind where they can "honestly" saying whatever is in their interest to say, no matter what other beliefs their minds may hold.  A world of cheap "lie" detectors would reward people with good self-deception abilities, and encourage others to train such abilities.  Perhaps we could also develop self-deception detectors, but I expect a murky mess of an arms race to follow.  Still this is indeed one of the biggest changes likely to come in the next twenty years. 

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The Uses of Fun (Theory)

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 2, 2009 3:30 pm · Comments (12)

Followup to:  Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun

"But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia?  On the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a hygenic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive.  A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create."
        — George Orwell, Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun

There are three reasons I'm talking about Fun Theory, some more important than others:

  1. If every picture ever drawn of the Future looks like a terrible place to actually live, it might tend to drain off the motivation to create the future.  It takes hope to sign up for cryonics.
  2. People who leave their religions, but don't familiarize themselves with the deep, foundational, fully general arguments against theism, are at risk of backsliding.  Fun Theory lets you look at our present world, and see that it is not optimized even for considerations like personal responsibility or self-reliance.  It is the fully general reply to theodicy.
  3. Going into the details of Fun Theory helps you see that eudaimonia is actually complicated - that there are a lot of properties necessary for a mind to lead a worthwhile existence.  Which helps you appreciate just how worthless a galaxy would end up looking (with extremely high probability) if it was optimized by something with a utility function rolled up at random.

Continue reading "The Uses of Fun (Theory)" »

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Status-Biased Morality

By Robin Hanson · January 2, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (0)

Power can make a person stricter in moral judgment of others while being less strict of their own behavior, new research suggests.

To simulate an experience of power [researchers] assigned roles of high-power, such as prime minister, and low-power positions, such as a civil servant, to participants. The participants were then presented with moral dilemmas. Results showed that compared with low-power individuals, high-power participants judged others more strictly for speeding, dodging taxes and keeping a stolen bike, while finding it more acceptable to engage in these behaviors themselves.

The underlying cause is three-pronged. … Power makes people more egocentric, and so they focus on their own needs; power reduces a person’s ability to take on the perspective of others; and power makes people feel psychologically invisible.  “They become unaware that their behavior can be observed by others,” Galinsky said.

More here.   So why are we morally hard on the low status, and easy on high status?  One obvious answer: to increase our own status, we want excuses to affiliate with the high status, and to avoid affiliating with the low status.  Biased moral standards help.

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Open Thread

By Robin Hanson · January 2, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (95)

Here is our monthly place to discuss issues not covered in our other posts.

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Disagreeing About Doubt

By Robin Hanson · January 1, 2009 10:15 pm · Comments (34)

The movie Doubt, now in theaters, offers an interesting chance for a disagreement case study.  In the movie, Sister Beauvier accuses Father Flynn of a particular act, and viewers wonder: did he actually do it, and was she justified in her response?  My wife and I disagreed quite a lot on Flynn's guilt – she's about at 95% confidence and I'm about at 40%. Apparently other viewers similarly diverge:

Those I spoke to after the movie were quite sure, maybe even certain, that Father Flynn was either guilty or innocent.

So what say the rest of you?  And what is it about this situation that causes so much disagreement anyway?  Don't read comments here unless you don't mind spoilers, which are fair game there.  (If needed, let's ground this in terms of what is reasonable to estimate given everything the screenwriter knows.)

Added: It helps to show a base rate and then corrections for each new factor.  For example, on average 5%  are guilty, and someone with a shameful past is twice as likely to be guilty, for a final estimate of 10%.

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Free to Optimize

By Eliezer Yudkowsky · January 1, 2009 8:41 pm · Comments (39)

Previously in series:  Dunbar's Function
Followup to:  Thou Art Physics, Timeless Control, Possibility and Could-ness, The Ultimate Source

Stare decisis is the legal principle which binds courts to follow precedent, retrace the footsteps of other judges' decisions.  As someone previously condemned to an Orthodox Jewish education, where I gritted my teeth at the idea that medieval rabbis would always be wiser than modern rabbis, I completely missed the rationale for stare decisis.  I thought it was about respect for the past.

But shouldn't we presume that, in the presence of science, judges closer to the future will know more – have new facts at their fingertips – which enable them to make better decisions?  Imagine if engineers respected the decisions of past engineers, not as a source of good suggestions, but as a binding precedent!  – That was my original reaction.  The standard rationale behind stare decisis came as a shock of revelation to me; it considerably increased my respect for the whole legal system.

This rationale is jurisprudence constante:  The legal system must above all be predictable, so that people can execute contracts or choose behaviors knowing the legal implications.

Judges are not necessarily there to optimize, like an engineer.  The purpose of law is not to make the world perfect.  The law is there to provide a predictable environment in which people can optimize their own futures.

Continue reading "Free to Optimize" »

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Moral uncertainty – towards a solution?

By Nick Bostrom · January 1, 2009 4:48 pm · Comments (72)

It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality – not just applied ethics but fundamental moral issues? if you don't know which moral theory is correct?

It doesn't seem you can simply plug your uncertainty into expected utility decision theory and crank the wheel; because many moral theories state that you should not always maximize expected utility.

Even if we limit consideration to consequentialist theories, it still is hard to see how to combine them in the standard decision theoretic framework.  For example, suppose you give X% probability to total utilitarianism and (100-X)% to average utilitarianism.  Now an action might add 5 utils to total happiness and decrease average happiness by 2 utils.  (This could happen, e.g. if you create a new happy person that is less happy than the people who already existed.)  Now what do you do, for different values of X?

The problem gets even more complicated if we consider not only consequentialist theories but also deontological theories, contractarian theories, virtue ethics, etc.  We might even throw various meta-ethical theories into the stew: error theory, relativism, etc.

I'm working on a paper on this together with my colleague Toby Ord.  We have some arguments against a few possible "solutions" that we think don't work.  On the positive side we have some tricks that work for a few special cases.  But beyond that, the best we have managed so far is a kind of metaphor, which we don't think is literally and exactly correct, and it is a bit under-determined, but it seems to get things roughly right and it might point in the right direction:

Continue reading "Moral uncertainty – towards a solution?" »

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