Utilitarianism can be used to justify literally anything, especially when paired with large scale drug use. FTX was just the beginning.
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Yeah, Yudkowsky saying many years ago that it would be better for one person to be tortured for 50 years than for 3^^^3 people to get a dust speck in their eye was pretty much everything I needed to know to realize this group was going to be a problem. And things just get worse from there.
It's way worse than that. It can be 3^^^3 people getting a dust speck in their eye that only exist in some counterfactual world that's a mere figment of your imagination. Nevertheless this can have real-world consequences because "counterfactual mugging" is a valid concern given Rationalist logic. Very confusing.
> saying many years ago that it would be better for one person to be tortured for 50 years than 3^^^3 people getting a dust speck in their eye
I just looked this up on lw and it is pretty slimy text.
These weasels always leave it ambiguous to leave room to deny if their perfect rational view somehow goes wrong. Notice instead of actually having a backbone or taking the stance he just says
> I think the answer is obvious. How about you?
I’m not a christian but this sharply contrast the story of christ in which he sacrificed himself to in his mind spare billions from torture and the worst anguish in the universe.
Here we see Yudkowsky casually implying that it is better for someone to get tortured to save the inconvenience of a speck of dust, but notice he doesn’t volunteer himself.
Its fundamental to these rationalist and effective altruists that they are the right ones and others must sacrifice to fulfill the rationalist elitist intelligent world view. Look at FTX and this group. Their point of view it is OK for others to suffer financially and it is morally justified for the “intelligent” to steal and kill because they are the right ones and the ends justify the means.
Yeah, he leaves the original post ambiguous, but if you dig into the comments, he clarifies that his stance is that torture is the right option. I'm going to try to find the link.
EDIT: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs...
> I'll go ahead and reveal my answer now: Robin Hanson was correct, I do think that TORTURE is the obvious option, and I think the main instinct behind SPECKS is scope insensitivity.
When you find yourself writing "torture is the obvious option", you should realize that something has gone deeply wrong with the way you view the world. It's no wonder that death cults have sprung out of this philosophy.
That comment is from 2007-10-31, and it's at least a tiny bit comforting to see that in almost a year his thinking got a bit more humane.
2008-10-14 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t...
I feel like this is missing the point. Trolley problems are absurd hypotheticals with no direct bearing on reality. Their usefulness is as thought experiments.
If you don't pull the lever the trolley kills one person. If you pull it N people lose a single limb. At what value of N does your ethical framework place the crossover point and why?
I don't agree that they're absurd. They have widespread popularity because they capture the kind of cost dilemmas that crop up all the time, eg 'if we build this refinery we can predict that an additional 20 people will get cancer over the next decade, but otoh we might achieve a 2% reduction in the cost of gasoline for everyone in our state over the same period.'
The main intellectual error of utilitarianism is the assumption of perfect foreknowledge, and the justification of conclusions as if those predictions were facts. But just because trolley problems are stark oversimplifications does not make them useless as ethical reasoning tools; studying them helps you recognize messy ethical dilemmas as such rather than being seduced by the alleged upsides of a policy proposal.
Just to be a little pedantic: Your refinery example isn't a trolley problem, because there are more than two choices, and one of the possible choices is "don't build it in the first place". The refinery example allows foresight, which the trolley problem doesn't. "I would build the tracks differently" isn't a possible answer to the trolley problem. The whole point is that it's too late to make any other decision than "kill few" or "kill many".
Most utilitarian dilemmas boil down to Omelas in disguise.