If I suddenly found myself on a trolley platform with perfect knowledge of trolleys and a weird choice to make, my attention would be on trying to understand the context of how the fuck I got there, not on the ethics of the weird choice.
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Yup! The more-clueful-rationalist response is “this is difficult due to incomplete knowledge”; a better response is “this is silly due to the inherent nebulosity of ethics and artificial decontextualization”
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I'd suggest there are two problems with them (1) they focus on what we should do rather than what we should avoid (which is easier to judge) and (2) they focus only on reasoning, rather than on the complex embodied motivations that actually determine judgement.
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I agree!
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Yeah, utilitarianism too
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Yes :-)
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Thought experiments in ethics are to parse out principles in extreme situations. SSC called them the "linear accelerators" of ethics, and I kind of agree. Obvs most real world applications are made under circumstances of substantial uncertainty with conflicting values in play.
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Right, but ethical decision making in practice isn't about making perfect decisions given full information, it's about making reliably good ones under bounded rationality and information, and if you include weird shit in your training you fit to the wrong distribution.
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I love solving puzzles and I despite trolley problems. What kind of mutant does that make me?
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I summarized some of my thoughts on this herehttps://twitter.com/danlistensto/status/950781620289753088?s=20 …
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Trolley problems appeal to people who like solving puzzles.
Ethics is not sudoku. That way of thinking reliably leads to extreme moral misjudgment.