Disagreement Case Study: Hanson and Hughes
Fourteen months ago I learned that seventeen months earlier James Hughes published a book which critiqued a paper I published ten years before that, on the economics of whole brain simulations (sometimes called "uploads"). I immediately started a public email conversation with James, and this week a lightly edited version of that conversation appears in the Journal of Evolution and Technology, along with closing comments by myself, James, David Brin, and Guilio Prisco.
James and I debated whether he was correct in attributing to me claims he read "between the lines" of my paper, such as that I gleefully envisioned
a dismal, elitist utopia … the division of society into a mass of well-fed plebes and a superpowerful elite … the enormous population of uploads would be forced to work at very low subsistence wages – the cost of their electricity and disk space – ruled over by a very few of the most successful of the uploads.
James thought my true colors were revealed by my being a GMU economist describing a situation of rapidly falling wages, who did not explicitly call for more transfers from "rich" to "poor." I responded that economists usually analyze low regulation scenarios first, as a baseline to compare with higher regulation scenarios, and that I don’t endorse vague slogans – it is hard to tell who are the deserving "poor" in the scenario I consider. My explicit denials did not much move James.
I have yet to meet anyone else who read me the way James did. But in general, I feel sympathetic to James’ situation, since we humans do communicate a great deal of information, and often the most important bits, via "subtext" rather than text. I do not think I intended what James reads me as saying, but I admit that I may well not be conscious of much of the subtext that my text communicates. Surely many human disagreements arise from our tendency to communicate subtext of which we are not fully aware, and which others are eager to read.
Peter, I'll look out for a chance to disagree about the repugnant conclusion.
Robin, I'm a bit disappointed that you only analyzed the initial disagreement, which seems to result from a relatively common communications problem.I'd be more impressed by an analysis why people disagree with you over the "repugnant conclusion" of utilitarianism, which seems likely to cause some important and persistent policy disagreements.My intuition causes me to disagree with most people and say that what we should try to maximize is some combination of total welfare and average welfare, weighted according to whatever set of preferences evolution happens to have built us to value. This doesn't satisfy me the way a less arbitrary rule created by a wise deity would, but until I can find such an external source of a rule for what to maximize, it's hard for me to see why I should abandon the values evolution appears to have given me.
Matthew, here are some play-money prediction market contracts on SENS milestones:http://www.ideosphere.com/f...http://www.ideosphere.com/f...http://www.ideosphere.com/f...But long-term contracts on that exchange (and probably all play-money markets) tend to be biased to be too close to 50%.