What is “better”?

The whole point I’m bringing up is that the actual mathematical topology of “better” is itself a free parameter, and there are choices of parameter in which that doesn’t have a total-order structure where “best option” is a property that exists among an option set.

“You will simply have to tolerate that school shootings happen sometimes or have all the guns collected up and held by one PMC” no actually there are intermediate solutions available as a society lol

Yeah I go a bunch, I assume I was at the same party this week that prompted this post lol

The good AI future is post-capital. And so, we should build now our muscles in every layer of our philosophical discipline that are not based on reduction to fungible scalars.

I know we’ve had capitalism for a long time so that’s not familiar, but I do think it is essential for a good future.

Yeah but you made it comparable by smuggling in the very assumption under scrutiny lol

I am not disabled because of the function of my body / who I am. I am disabled because of society’s inability to provide me the affordances for my own self-actualization.

If there are medical changes I want that’s fine—but there shouldn’t be coercion toward them due to the social/built environment.

I am a huge social model proponent. Every experience is different, but m perspective is that in most cases what would lead to a higher quality of life for disabled people is actually changes to the social/built environment that benefit everyone, rather than individual-level changes toward norms.

As a disabled person I would also point out that I vastly prefer DALYs to QALYs. The latent assumption in QALYs that the life-years of disabled people are “lower quality” is *wildly* bigoted lol.

Like “in the framework that assumes this conclusion, the conclusion obtains” is true but uninteresting lol

But the QALY framework is definitionally the Archimedean scheme.

QALYs were created for insurance reimbursement calculations, which presupposes a need for all healthcare to pass through fungible units, which presupposes supremacy of a certain dominant structure that reduces everything to scalars…

EA solves the problem one way, stipulating as axioms characteristics of suffering / good lives that mirror fungibility and familiar real scalars.

There is an equally egalitarian, equally usable axiom scheme that uses incomparability, rather than fungibility. Its topology radically differs from EA.

A good mathematician friend posed me the question:

> Is human suffering Archimedean?

That is: Are there a number of paper cuts that are equal to a lost life?

It sounds mundane, but the answer actually came up with respect to a real clinical question on whether SSRIs or MAOIs should be first-line.

I think that this is actually not true, and it’s why I have personal ambivalence about EA overall (risky disclosure!), and there’s pretty revealing mathematics to it.

But … does it? What evidence do we have that it does that? Except a produced demo video and a plot of four tasks that *totally* weren’t cherry-picked to make this plot look good at a cost that *totally* wasn’t subsidized to make this plot look good/

I mean, this is a model class that has existed before.

But it’s pretty sweet markwting—look how edgy and cool it looks!

I really would like our collective standards to be a little higher lol

I am familiar with these types of problems.

I’m just saying: the evidence so far presented is a plot with the characteristics I described and a Doom video that performs worse than “AI” code John Carmack wrote in the early 90s.

I hate hype with a burning passion. So I won’t let go when people create these kinds of plots. It is offensive to scientific sensibilities lol

But what evidence is there that this is huge?