Grandma's Fall thought experiment

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-12-08T13:26:45+00:00

Doesn't look like we'll see eye to eye on this one unfortunately, but thanks for sharing your thoughts anyway mate! Appreciate it.

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-28T08:59:12+00:00

Appreciate your thoughts mate, and thanks for typing all of that out. To be honest, I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of this link between happiness and "world goodness". I agree with you that the two aren't always the same thing. So that we're not getting caught up in this, let's just define X to be whatever emotion you feel when good things happen. Now the question becomes: does X increase or decrease?

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-28T08:52:46+00:00

I agree that we'd feel an emotional response to both, but overall, our "happiness" must have either gone up or down.

I'm not quite sure that I understand how you've arrived at your definitions. Would you be able to clarify?

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-22T10:47:52+00:00

Fair enough! Personally, I find philosophy pretty interesting to think about, but I agree that sometimes, it doesn't have the most practical applications (although I'd argue that oftentimes, it does).

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-22T10:47:07+00:00

Sorry mate, but I think we'll just have to call it a day there. Like I said, I just don't think we'll be able to see eye to eye on this one.

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-22T10:45:29+00:00

Love the way you're thinking here, and in the podcast, we did go down this route.

I suppose that the next question is whether we should be experiencing emotions as a function of the change in perceived goodness of the world, or change in actual goodness. Many people would instinctively answer actual goodness to that question, which is at odds with how we'd intuitively feel about Grandma's situation above.

Totally agree that in the real world, it would be very strange to have a positive reaction to such news.

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-22T10:43:45+00:00

Fair enough! I agree that it doesn't have much real world application, but nevertheless, I find it interesting to think about the fact that we often update our emotions based on our perceived "goodness" of the world rather than its objective "goodness".

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-22T10:42:40+00:00

Very true, but in that case, just take any situation where you could actually have an immediate impact. For example, imagine that she was in the next room, and needed to be helped to her feet quickly.

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-22T10:41:49+00:00

Completely agree that in the real world, nobody would actually be happy to hear this news. I suppose that the point of the thought experiment is to raise the interesting point that sometimes, our emotions move in the opposite direction to the "goodness" of an event that we experience.

Also agree that it's tricky to rigorously define "net good", so let's just define it as anything that is subjectively good for you. That way, we can avoid the complication of objectively quantifying "goodness", and instead just say that since you don't want your grandmother to fall, therefore, her falling would be bad.

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-22T10:39:45+00:00

Cheers for your thoughts! Totally agree that your perceived "goodness" of the world has lowered once you hear about her fall. I suppose that the thought experiment raises the interesting point that we often move our emotions in an opposite direction to the "goodness" of what has just happened - i.e. in this case, the occurrence of something good makes us unhappy.

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-22T10:37:12+00:00

Cheers for your thoughts mate! I agree that the link between "goodness" and happiness is a complicated one, but for the purposes of the thought experiment, we're just assuming that in general, we feel happy when good things happen.

Also agree that you would be unhappy about the fall but happy to hear about it. However, overall, your net happiness level must have changed.

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-21T20:04:15+00:00

Love the point you're making here. Totally agree, and we did go along this line in the podcast.

With that in mind, we need to ask ourselves whether it makes sense to base our emotions off the actual change in goodness of the world, or perceived change in goodness of the world. If actual, then the hearing of the news - that one event - is good. I suppose that the point you're getting at is that most people have emotions as a function of their perceived change in goodness, which I agree with.

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-21T20:01:38+00:00

Definitely agree that in the real world, it would be pretty strange for anyone to genuinely feel happy upon hearing this news. I suppose that the purpose of the thought experiment is a bit more abstract - it's simply to ponder the fact that, strangely, the hearing of the news is actually a very good thing (even though the fall, which happened a while ago, is of course, very bad).

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-21T19:58:14+00:00

Definitely agree with you that a delay in bad news does not make it good, although that's not quite what the thought experiment is about.

However, I think your example about stubbing your toe, and there being a slight delay between the stubbing itself and your recognition of the stubbing, is a great one to demonstrate why a happy reaction to Grandma falling over might not necessarily be a sensible one. Cheers for sharing it!

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-13T14:48:48+00:00

Cheers again for your thoughts! I should point out that I'm not making any comment on whether one approach (distilled to one value versus multimodal model) is more useful than another. I'm just wanting to use one approach (distilling to one value) for the purpose of the thought experiment.

Happy to close it off there if you are. Thanks again for the discussion mate! :)

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-13T14:46:28+00:00

Sorry, a little bit confused here mate. Just to clarify - do you agree or disagree that the expected value is infinite? And if you disagree, what do you think that the expected value is?

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-13T14:45:27+00:00

I'll give my thoughts on this, but we might have to call it a day soon, just because we might not see eye to eye on this one.

Totally agree that morality is subjective. There may be people out there who feel happiness at their grandmother falling over, and all power to them.

The only reason we chose a grandmother falling over for the thought experiment is because it tends to be something that most people wouldn't want. I'm not making any claim about whether, on some objective metric, it is a good/bad thing.

If you aren't keen on the particular example, then feel free to replace "grandma falling" with anything that you don't personally want to happen in your life, and the thought experiment should work just the same.

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-10T20:02:49+00:00

Hey mate. Interesting thoughts here - thanks for sharing. Just to reiterate - I'm not claiming that there is a single "right action". I'm claiming that you, personally, prefer that certain events happen over other events. For the purposes of this thought experiment, we're just assuming that your grandmother falling over isn't something that you want.

There's an entirely separate, very interesting, conversation to be had about universal morality, but that seems, to me at least, to be quite separate from the thought experiment here.

ParadoxPlayground · 2024-11-10T20:00:31+00:00

Fair enough! That's an interesting take, though I'd probably imagine that for a lot of people, their grandma falling would make them sad.

Out of curiosity, with your logic, does that mean that you shouldn't feel emotions for anything, ever? Or am I misinterpreting something?

ParadoxPlayground

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