Fundamental Philosophical Errors in Taking Children Seriously

Elliot Temple
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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2596-fundamental-philosophical-errors-in-taking-children-seriously
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But most intellectuals spend 0 hours a month on being rational so 10 hours still sounds like too much work to them.

lol. also sad.

They should be external things, generally written down in advance. They need the ability to overrule your judgment or exert control over you.

Should there be limits on what judgments they could overrule? Like if you think think following the rule is catastrophically bad, for example that it leads to high risk of death.

(and hopefully intellectually interesting for others).

it was.

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In general, you should design the rules not to allow that.

But say the AI robots start a war with humanity and you were supposed to discuss online for 2 hours a month but the AIs are tracking down any humans who post online and killing them. So you don’t want to post online for over a month.

Shrug. Whether you explicitly write “circumstances permitting” or “unless there is a special exception” in a rule or it’s just implied, it’s there with some sort of meaning (you could also e.g. get in a car accident and be hospitalized in a coma for over a month). This allows some scope for bad judgment (you think you’re in special circumstances that permit an exception, when you aren’t), which is often handled reasonably well with transparency but not always (with the war scenario doesn’t allow transparency and your family might not share about your coma which is fine). It’s unrealistic to write down every possible very unlikely exception in advance, but likely or foreseeable exceptions should be specified in advance.

It’s kinda the same as if you agreed to debate a person on a stage at a specific location and time, but then the city gets nuked, or you get food poisoning and are stuck in the bathroom vomiting at debate time, or your spouse dies, so you cancel. But the agreement didn’t mention that scenario. As long as the scenarios are genuinely extreme outliers, it’s OK, but if people start making inappropriate excuses there’s a problem.

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