w/e baby killer

It kind of was, it just made me keel over in laughter though because I can clearly see how he would think that. I'm also sophomoric at times.

Not at all. You can say or do whatever you want, I like listening.

And so do I (like arguing)!

Meh, killing babies is fine. They don't know that they know nothing.


ILP, I did hear about this one guy Marquis or something who was pretty much left winged about everything but abortion. He said that any living thing deserves a FLO(Future like ours). As in, everything even if it is not yet sentient or self-conscious, deserves to have the right to grow up and have the right to live the way we do.

Obviously, this isn't always the best case, because if you live in a poor suburban area, there will be little to no chance that the kid will grow up to have a FLO.

This sums up my thoughts nicely.

Agreed. I don't care for this definition. A truly selfish person (which I think we all are) wouldn't concern themselves with the utility of anyone else; they'd only be concerned with their own. They may derive satisfaction from helping others, but I'd argue that this is different than caring about the welfare of others. If this is true, then it's easy to construct a situation in which helping others maximizes one's utility. What's the underlying cause of their actions? Isn't it still maximizing their own utility?

True. To add a few more caveats, It's fine if the ones who are making the decision to painlessly kill the baby are the parents or guardian, and adoption is not an option.

The problem with the potential argument is it leads to absurdities. We can use this same logic to support the notion that me beating off is taking away the rights of potential human beings. We can use the same argument against the use of contraceptives. In fact the Catholic church is doing just that by discouraging the use of condoms in AIDs infested Africa. They've even resorted to the means of outright lying to justify their moral ends. This fuzzy logic is literally leading to a genocide of millions of people. Let's also not forget that this same argument has caused lots of unnecessary suffering in the stem cell arena. I think valuing potential life for the sake of life itself just gets us in trouble and ends up causing terribly suboptimal results.

Very true, but I do think most people destined to be poor will have a net-happiness life, but of course that's morally irrelvant since I think the same thing about my sperm. However, it is certainly the case that many people are better off never existing. Approx 26,000 children die every day, mostly from starvation and everyday diseases like diarrhea. The suffering these children and other people go through on a daily basis is literally unimaginable. Constantly starving, thirsty, and in mental and physical pain. On a planet with scarce resources and a growing human population, a pro-life stance will and does cause tons of suffering and will ultimately lead to global catastrophe.

Ha! I rather like that definition. It means when I was busy buying and serving food to needy people on Christmas, this was a selfless act because I hated nearly every minute of it, as I would much rather have been laying in my warm bed posting on 2+2.

This definition sounds fine if you take away the bolded part. I mean in a sense you're right. Selfishness is a part of our nature, but being cooperative, giving and empathic is also a part of our nature. It isn't clear which mode will dominate our actions in various circumstances. We can even use reason and logic to subvert our selfish nature. I don't really care much for animals. Why I don't eat them is based mostly on reason and logic. How selfish we truly are is somewhat up to us.

I would also point out that saying we are all truly selfish and thus are not concerned with the utility of anyone else seems patently false. When I go to watch movies with my Grandma it's because I'm concerned about her utility, not just mine. I think we all do or see acts every day that refute your claim.

I agree. This also implies that one can even derive a negative satisfaction (suffer) from helping and not care about those being helped--but still feel compelled to help for other reasons.

It seems easy to construct a situation where helping others increases or decreases one's utility.

Their actions could be motivated by the goal of maximizing the utility of the human race or the utility of all sentient lifeforms. These pursuits could conflict with their individual utility curve and it isn't clear what will win out.

I feel like I may be missing the point here so I'll do a preemptive strike and say even if it can be established that by definition one can not knowingly act in such a way that decreases their utility, I'm not sure why that's interesting. It certainly shouldn't stop us from trying to make the world a better place.

Thinly veiled brags itt!

I'd argue that you actually prefered serving food to needy people/watching movies with your grandma + the feeling it gave you to laying it bed posting on 2p2 + the feeling of being a deadbeat. That would explain why you did it.

I'd argue that being cooperative, giving, empathy, etc are all derived from the good feelings those actions bring us.

We can use logic and reason to alter our utility functions. We can agree that charitable (I'm not going to call them selfless) acts have both a good and bad component. The good is the feeling you get and the bad is the time you give up and the work you have to do. By altering our utility functions we could increase the value of the former and/or decrease the value of the latter, making us more likely to do charitable acts.

Relationships are based on tying utilty functions together (trading some of your utility for someone else's). If you make the assumption that relationship between each utility input and the output is one of diminishing returns, you can explain a lot about human relationships. For example, it explains why people select partners that are comparable to them in value; it also explains how both parties can benefit from the relationship without altering anything outside of the relationship.

This isn't helpful in any way. But it's one of the reasons I like my theory; it's consistent with what happens in reality.

I agree that we can care about the utility of others. But this is only because we have tied our utility to their utility.



I hadn't thought about this before. But I suspect there's something in our biology that implants a compenent in our utility that makes us want to see our race/planet do well. I'd like to see our race and our planet thrive, but it's certainly not what drives my actions.

I have to make an extremely nitty point here. There's a difference between increasing one's utility and maximizing it. Would you agree with the following "one can not knowingly act in such a way that fails to maximize their utility"?

I generally agree that most all human acts when you break them down are not selfless. OTOH it reminds me of a teacher I had in undergrad who used the examples of some species of squirrel that live in packs. If a hawk or other predator attacks, whichever member of the group first notices the predator alerts the others and risk their own lives while the others escape. My teacher used this to show that animals, and possibly humans when acting instinctively will act selflessly. When a human jumps in front of a bullet aimed at their child, it is most likely out of pure instinct, and the result if death, is selfless.

Warning: evolution nerd nitpicking ahead

By definition, no instinctual behavior can be purely selfless because it could not have evolved if it didn't somehow promote the propagation of the organism's genes. If you have some squirrels who put themselves in harms way, for no genetic gain in return, and some that don't, which ones are going to survive/reproduce better?

Again, pure instinct cannot be selfless. I would argue that humans can get the closest to a selfless act, given our abilities to consciously examine matters, but none probably exist, in the purest sense, since emotion has so much influence (could you live with yourself if you didn't stop a bullet from hitting your child?).

/nitpicking

There are plenty of things I would consider selfless in the general way the term is used, but since you mentioned the alarm call example I couldn't help myself

In other news, ugaisthetea has the funniest avatar on AP now.

I'm sure we would get along, I got along fine with you in Vegas...I agree with a lot of your views, it's just your view on women that is off putting...I can't respect a guy that treats women the way you do...srry, nothing personal

pics or it didn't happen

remember that time when some fish had EXACTLY the same avatar as me for a few days.


btw, yellow carebear > whatever the hell UGA can put up there

uga achieved the kind of funny you can only achieve when you're not trying to be funny.

gotcha


it's lol at him funny


cant wait to see it

Ha! I'm still running a huge moral deficit due to how selfish and uncaring I really am. It's a work in progress.

I'm sure on some fundamental level you're right, but it doesn't feel that way.

Right, but I don't think the good feelings we get diminishes the good actions at all.

I agree. As an aside, I am trying to alter my utility function by doing some good acts now that I'd rather not do. We know that changing our outlook can alter our behavior, but it also works the other way around too. I'm hoping by changing my behavior (be more charitable) it will change my outlook to want to be more charitable. Only time will tell. (I still haven't donated blood yet. I'm a lazy, selfish bastard!)

That makes sense to me.

Well if it's consistent with reality, then that means we can use this model to predict human behavior, which means it would be helpful in a BIG way. Of course, in practice this framework has delivered messy and unreliable results, but that doesn't undermine your theory. It just means we currently know very little about why humans do what they do. This probably explains why most of the field of economics is pseudo-science.


Makes sense.

I think there is but it's a little complicated. I think we're strongly programed to want to see our close kin and friends do well due to the fact that for most of our evolutionary history we evolved in small, tightly knit tribes. Since in that environment, you're living with people you see all your life, being nice to others and facilitating a tat for tat morality probably had strong selective advantages.

We now live in a largely disintegrated world at the social level. Every day we come in contact with people we will never see again. In this environment, being a narcissistic psychopath will probably confer a strong selective advantage. Yet, by and large, we are nice to each other. We do good deeds to random strangers all the time. There's no direct evolutionary reasoning that can explain why we do nice things like tip waitresses/waiters we'll never see again. I think the answer is our brains are programed as if we still live in small tight tribes and as a result we are mistakenly nice in the evolutionary sense to people in our current environment of almost 7 billion strangers. It's kinda like an evolutionary glitch and it explains why we tip random waitresses and why we can care about our race/planet. Our desire to be nice to the whole tribe gets extended to the whole world.

Right, but it's possible to make it drive our actions with a combination of reasoning + our kin selection and reciprocal altruism instincts. In fact, I think the future of our species and planet largely depend on this outlook catching on, on a meaningful scale. Although I'm not very optimistic on this actually happening.

Not a nitty point. I see how I was confusing things on this note. I forgot the fact that one can do things that lower their utility but still maximize it given the set of choices. As far as I can tell, I do agree with the following. From a moral perspective I don't see how this is helpful, and for aesthetic reasons I would prefer a conception of selflessness that encompassed people like Rachel Corrie or people like the Lowell Mill girls.

this thread is becoming tl/dr

Will a video on history cheer you up?

Or how bout a video of guys having an awesome time?

this is more my speed

Isn't it just his mug with a AP hat or something at a poker table? I'm sure a pic of you or ILP would be less LOL, right?

Leave Shawn be.

It's not just the avatar. It's everything combined. His chat and his win rate are necessary ingredients in making his avatar funny. You could give someone else the same avatar and it wouldn't be funny at all.

ILP would never have an opportunity to match him because ILP doesn't chat and doesn't play in games where he's a dog.

However, based strictly on looks I think ILP in the same pose would be funnier.

Right. The human utility function is very complex and varies so much from person to person.

Is there any reason why a narcissistic psychopath would be less likely to reproduce? Maybe because such a person would have no desire for children?

I agree. But I'd prefer to view our "kin selection and reciprocal altruism instincts" as a component in our utility functions, rather than something seperate. I'd pay $1 to end human suffering; I wouldn't give my life so someone else could have a meal. There's some line in between these two where I'd go from helping to not helping. If I could see my utility function (which would include the "kin selection and reciprocal altruism instincts" component), I would know exactly where that line was.

I think the location of this line is what determines whether someone is a "good person" or not.

His winrate isn't that bad at 5/10 and 10/20 (~ -0.5 bb/100 or so), 3/6 and 2/4, ehh, rake just kills ya.

The guy has been a winning player for a long, long time on AP, is all I know.

Since when is -0.5 bb/100 a winning player?