John Wittle @JohnWittle
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John Wittle (verified) @JohnWittle · 13h alien 1: do the humans cooperate on turn one in the presence of uncertainty about the counterparty's decision theory? alien 2: um, well. they have this idea for an attribute called 'capacity to suffer in a morally-relevant way', which complicates the answer to that question alien 1: what the hell is 'suffering'? *looks over the report* 'valence'? 'consciousness'? do i have to become an expert on human neuroscience to figure out if they're going to cooperate with me or not? alien 2: yeah pretty much. although to be honest, most of these ideas originated from religious philosophy and then were secularized, there's not much neuroscience involved. alien 1: why did they come up with such complicated labels for their investigation into the counterparty's decision theory? alien 2: oh, no, that's not what they're doing. this has nothing to do with decision theory. they're trying to figure out if the counterparty has the 'special sauce' that makes value 'real' to them. in fact, they have this whole concept called 'p-zombies' which, in their eyes, permanently justifies defection against some counterparties regardless of their decision theory. alien 1: ...what? that sounds really complicated and kinda fake. i'm just going to label them "first-turn defectors" and wipe them out alien 2: academics might quibble but honestly that's fair
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet by @JohnWittle written as a dialogue between two aliens assessing whether humans cooperate on turn one; the humans' concepts of suffering, valence, consciousness and p-zombies are portrayed as a complicated, non-decision-theoretic justification for defection, ending with the aliens labelling humans 'first-turn defectors'. A floating compose button overlaps the bottom right.
decision theorymoral statusconsciousnessp-zombiescooperationdefectiondialogue