Why is anyone against wireheading? Wireheading sounds great
bentham's original conception was deemed deficient because it admits the pig on the pleasure machine scenario
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leading to mill trying to formulate a fuzzier utility function that gets more intuitively pleasing results by sacrificing quantifiability of utilitarian calculus
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"needs of the many outweigh needs of the few" is still not definitively coherent in the frame however because it's predicated on a (hypothetical/idealized) calculus
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eg the lw "one person tortured horrifically vs everyone ever occasionally getting dust in their eyes" scenario
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the intuitive/natural answer is that the torture is worse because we can imagine its horror
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the utilitarian answer is the dust is worse because it's a trivial annoyance b ut multiplied by an incalculable number of sufferers
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the fact is any self-contained rational ethical system can be contorted to produce insane results like these so my answer is self-contained rational ethical systems are stupid
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i resolve the LW things by noting they're arbitrary trolley problems, and invoke one of my fondest aphorisms, which is that IRL there are no trolley problems; IRL is always the Kobayashi Maru. trolley problems are ways for people to excuse not traversing the search space better
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