other notes on moral realism Just For The Fuck of It™
voter's paradox--I can't find that blog post we vaguely recall that calculated that the voter's paradox wasn't a paradox in US election, but I think it relied on an assumption of (very modest) altruism towards other voters. With the right assumptions of probability of changing outcome, payoffs of your side winning, and selfishness, paradox is restored (OTOneH your vote doesn't make difference, OTOtherH the people who vote anyway win)
If you take the "vote anyway"/"one box" viewpoint to VP and Newcomb, you can apply the same sort of thinking to the Prisoner's Dilemma more broadly--assume that both I and other player are rational, if I refuse to snitch then the other player will too because rational. David Lewis, 1979 "Prisoners' Dilemma Is a Newcomb Problem."
This sounds way too much like Group Selection for me to be comfortable with, but Price's Equation says group selection sometimes actually makes sense.
But I think Price's Equation is assuming heritable traits, not sure it's still applicable if we're talking about human agents with memes and reason. Reason might actually be the larger problem (advantageous kinds of altruism might be easier if you're going with your gut than going through backwards induction), which might be why humans instinctively avoid it in "disgusting" Organ Harvest/Trolley Problems (u no, push fat bot onto trolley tracks to save armenia). In addition, the kind of "reason" we're talking about here--game theory, epistemic logic--is kind of suspect anyway (just like the arbitrage proof by contradictions--assuming other guy is perfectly rational) |
