How I disagree with Yudkowsky

LessWrong began as a blog about how Bayesian statistics is better than frequentism.  I've already written about my opinion about Bayesianism.  Suffice it to say here that although I respect it, I don't think it's as omnipotent as some of its most dogmatic adherents do.

I've written a lot on this blog about how much I hate and oppose utilitarianism.  Mostly, this is because I think utilitarianism is unscientific.  It should therefore come as no surprise that I am opposed to "Effective Altruism," which is a recent, and particularly nasty form of utilitarianism.  I don't especially blame Yudkowsky for this - I put the blame much more on Peter Singer and others who founded this movement.  But one must admit that Yudkowsky and his followers did quite stupidly and uncritically go along with this nonsense, and it led them to terrible errors.

Some people think that Yudkowsky and his followers are wrong about AI.  But I think they are wrong about humanity.  (And therefore, perhaps, slightly wrong about AI as well, in so far as AI is built by humans, trained on human creativity, marketed to humans, and, as a product, determined by the human-created capitalist economy.)

I think they are profoundly wrong about human desire.  Or at least, I think they are profoundly narrow-minded about human desire, and they take their narrow view for the whole.

The assumptions of EA-style utilitarianism - that satisfying desires makes people happy, and in a quantifiable, measurable way ("shut up and multiply") - belie an understanding of human nature that is so fleshless, so simplistic, so false, that even the pure philosophy of utilitarianism itself demonstrates its own incoherence and inapplicability.

What's especially frustrating about Yudkowsky is that he's clearly smart enough to understand that utilitarianism doesn't make sense - and in fact, he himself has written pieces that demonstrate the incoherence of utilitarianism - and yet he stubbornly remains a utilitarian.

 

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