Practical Ethics

Ok, things are getting a little heated and personal so I'll attempt to engage one more time in good faith.

The premise of the argument is that the Chinese Room passes the Turing Test for Chinese. There are two possibilities for how this happens: 1) the program emulates the brain and has the right relation to the external world more or less exactly, or 2) the program emulates the brain enough to pass the test in some context but fails to emulate the brain perfectly. We know that as it currently stands, we've "passed the Turing Test" but we do not go further and say that brains and AI perform "indistinguishably." Unless there are significant similarities to how brains work and how AIs work, on some fundamental level (case 1), even if they pass the Turing Test, it is possible that in some unanticipated scenario they will diverge significantly. Imagine a system that outputs digits of pi. You can wait until you see enough digits to be satisfied, but unless you know what's causing the output, you can never be sure that you're not witnessing the output of some rational approximation or some cached calculation that will eventually halt. What goes on inside matters a lot if you want a sense of certainty. This is simply a trivial logical point. Leaving that aside, assuming that you do have 1), which I believe we are still very far from, we're still left with the ethical consequences, which it seems you agree does hinge on whether the system is conscious.

You made a really strong…

There's a lot of motte/bailey'ing[1] going on in the climate change debate.

There is tons of histrionics and scare mongering out there. I particular remember during the COP15 meeting in Copenhagen, art installations illustrating how the city would be under water if sea level rose 7 meters, which is the estimated rise if all of the ice on Greenland melts. The Day After Tomorrow, not to mention An Inconvenient Truth.

While there certainly are and were voices critical of these things and their dubious relationship with the science (whether settled or consensus or not), their usefulness in advancing the agenda appears to be appreciated more than their role in misrepresenting the science. This is an actual quote from a scientist listed in the "criticism" section of the "The Day After Tomorrow" Wikipedia page[2]: "I'm heartened that there's a movie addressing real climate issues. But as for the science of the movie, I'd give it a D minus or an F. And I'd be concerned if the movie was made to advance a political agenda.". This is an actual scientist on the record believing that TDAT is "addressing real climate issues". That is like applauding Swordfish[3] for addressing cyber security issues. That is the Bailey.

Then, years after, when these things perhaps look a bit more absurd (and some very specific predictions turned out not to come through, at least not as unambiguously as expected), we get "The IPCC's 2001 report was for <1 meter rise over the entire century ... Do you…

I only said that something being factually true does not necessarily protect it from being racist or sexist when used in argument or action.

I only argue that there are (or could be) examples of scientific facts being used in racist discourse where an argument or action is racist regardless of whether it's supporting facts are true or false.

Just like libel/slander law in many (most?) places doesn't care whether a defamation is factually correct or not. (In US that's not the case though)

I'll quote an oxford writer:

> Take a simple example. Imagine there was an imaginary newspaper, let’s call it the Mail Daily, which only cited certain facts about immigration – let’s say negative facts. True facts. Facts which might have to do with crime, for example, or housing shortages, or the abuse of the welfare system. Imagine that the Mail Daily never gave any positive facts about immigration – never emphasized any of the enormous benefits that immigration brings.Would it be fair to accuse the Mail Daily of being racist in its coverage of immigration? That’s a rhetorical question.

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2013/08/can-facts-be-racist/

His point (which is counter to Dawkins - who holds your position) is that this tabloid is racist while only reporting facts - simply because of how facts are filtered in res publication and which arguments are made with them.

Could we please get that changed to the actual article and add a (2016)?

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/02/oxford-uehiro-prize-in-practical-ethics-should-we-take-moral-advice-from-our-computers-written-by-mahmoud-ghanem/

That contains much more debatable content. But even with the linked excerpt, I find it hard to draw the rather absolute conclusion the title suggests. Computers are indeed very good at both points, but only after a human carefully crafted a problem specific set of instructions to hold its virtual hand.

I think the bias and modelling discussions of the last few years sufficiently show that it's rather non-trivial to project these functions to algorithms/ML/... and state of the art in the foreseeable future is not particularly good at many aspects of the tasks mentioned in the article.

In the long form it even draws analogies between asking the phone for food recommendations and ethics considerations. Every recommendation engine out there is being actively gamed, that was the case in 2016 just as it is now. There's some truth to the article of course, e.g. more crafted systems that actively address human biases, but we're nowhere near a point to even remotely let our computers take over ethical considerations - even if it's just a recommendation.

>His point about wild animals is very accurate, but that's not considering that animals bred in captivity ("free"-range or otherwise) would not have been if not for meat demand. It's debatable whether non-existence is preferable to being raised and then killed, but the dichotomy isn't between wild animals vs. free-range animals

The idea is is as follows. Might be worth just reading the article:

"If ethical vegetarians believed animals have lives that are unpleasant but still better than non-existence, they would focus on reducing harm to these animals without reducing their numbers, for instance by supporting humane slaughter or buying meat from free-range cows.

I will argue that if vegetarians were to apply this principle consistently, wild animal suffering would dominate their concerns, and may lead them to be stringent anti-environmentalists."

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/03/oxford-uehiro-prize-in-practical-ethics-how-should-vegetarians-actually-live-a-reply-to-xavier-cohen-written-by-thomas-sittler/

> What is religion anyway?

I have my own take on this. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.

A religion is: an organization with a set of ethics, and with practices that help to encourage those ethics as well as inculcate those ethics into new adherents. It also has a positive evolutionary affect on its members[1].

> What exactly is the difference between religion and science?

I think that, if you're going to talk about science, you need to be very specific. People use the word "science" to mean a great many things. You risk combatting a motte-and-bailey[2].

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1. IMO, this bit is what distinguishes religions from cults. It's very possibly for sub-groups of religions to be cults (as well as the reverse). It's not important what the documents say - what is important is how it's practiced: the "lived experience".

2. http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/