I listened to this ep, it's good but basic if you're as deep into the rabbit hole as I am. Biggest takeaway for me is that according to the guest, today's EA's are hardcore fundamental Benthamists, while ignoring the fact that John Stuart Mill in his time criticized Bentham for being unrealistic.
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Same here - basic but interesting. And hearing about the eugenics never fails to shock me, even when I already know about it.
This interview made me want to read her book.
The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey | Nov 15, 2019
i’m gonna take a moment here to point out there seems to be a widespread historical error about bentham’s role
bentham was neither a “total” utilitarian, nor particularly hardcore about how to assess units of pleasure/pain - he believed (a) that what you want to do is work out in a practical fashion how to maximise pleasure and minimise pain of people who currently exist, and (b) that there were pretty impractical ways to do it
he was a legal mind, concerned with public policy and the rectification of injustice. the “total” view comes from sedgwick, who much later in the mid-19th century was the real formaliser of modern utilitarianism - it’s from him that the EA types get their incessant trade-offs and indeed specifically the view that future lives have, by parity of reason, to count. bentham by contrast was in many ways not a particularly philosophical thinker, and intended rather to apply a radically reduced psychological theory to social problem-solving - he also left behind very little finished work, inland this is a typical feature of his philosophical style
the “utility” reduction was something that had been floating around in british moral philosophy (then not distinguished from psychology) for some time, and bentham put it into action. by contrast, sidgwick was a later full time ethicist devoted to the academic study of the by then popular utilitarian system in the abstract
this idea of bentham the radical versus mill the moderate is justified, but seems to come, primarily, from mill’s aversion to bentham’s “pushpin is as good as poetry”, which permitted no weighting of the utilitarian scale in favour of “higher pleasures”
but it is easy to see in this light that bentham’s radicalism doesn’t give you the juice for an extension to EA, since the radicalism of EA is not in giving equal weight to all kinds of pleasure/pain
Thanks a lot for expanding on this. I've never heard of Sedgwick before.
Highly recommended for a dissenting view, against the greatness of Sidgwick, is from another great (and personal fave) Bernard Williams, who has a longish essay criticising Sidgwick in particular (his critiques of utilitarianism and kantianism in general are much better known)
It’s very easy to get the impression reading the more surface material that Sidgwick is universally admired, even where his reasoning may go awry. Williams corrects that misapprehension.