“...and it was in that vital moment Ginger Gypsy realized her mask, the carefully schooled edifice of flesh and bone that she had trained for years to guard the secrets of her heart, had at last betrayed her. That those were tears leaving hot trails down her cheeks; that her lips, so long practiced to sneer in derision, now curled in pain. ‘Goodbye,’ she whispered, though she knew Buttercup had long passed beyond the sound of her voice. ‘Goodbye.’”
So saying, Twilight Sparkle turned the last page of 45 Reasons Why and closed the book, setting it gently on the coffee table in front of the couch. After a moment she lifted her glass of wine for another long sip.
“Wow,” Starlight Glimmer said. She lay across the couch’s other cushion, reclining against the armrest with her legs curled loosely beneath her barrel. Her own glass of wine floated somewhat unsteadily beside her, swimming through the air in time with her attention. “I mean, it’s a little, you know, over-dramatic, maybe,” she paused for another sip and cleared her throat. “It kinda hits you right here, you know? That place in your chest where you feel things.”
“Your heart?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” Starlight finished off her glass and concentrated hard on setting it down on the table, where several empty bottles stood guard over it. A magnum of Reisling, still half-full, filled the air with a heady, fruity scent. She very carefully lifted it and splashed a bit in her glass. Apricots assaulted her nose. “More?”
“Uh.” Twilight considered her options, which seemed at this point to consist of varying levels of being drunk. Since she’d already crossed that bridge, there didn’t seem like much reason to stop now. “Sure. Not… not too much, though.”
Starlight giggled at something. “Okay, princess. Just a smidge for her highness.”
“Stop that.” Twilight batted at Starlight’s tail and giggled herself. She couldn’t help it – she was in a giggly mood. That realization brought on a moment of introspection, followed almost immediately by a touch of the melancholy drifting that so often afflicted her in times of deep thought. She shook her head to banish the feeling and nearly tipped out of her seat.
“So, what did you think?” Starlight asked. She apparently didn’t notice Twilight’s attempts to capsize their couch.
“Oh, um.” Twilight blinked rapidly and focused on the book. “Well, for a romance novel, it seemed to flout some of the major conventions of the genre. Aren’t… aren’t the lovers supposed to end up together at the end? But that didn’t happen. Instead they just drifted away.”
“I think they failed the author’s test. If they deserved a happy ending, they should’ve earned it, but they didn’t. Ginger Gypsy couldn’t open up and be honest, and Buttercup was too concerned with her own dreams.”
“And Ginger Gypsy realized it too late.” Twilight licked her lips. They were sweet with the residue of the wine. “That… that’s the worst thing, I think. That she realized, at the end, what she could’ve had.”
“Yeah.” Starlight stared into her glass, as though some secret swam beneath the surface. “Did… have you ever felt like that?”
“I, uh.” Twilight cleared her throat. No. Of course not. That’s silly. “Yes,” she blurted out. As soon as the word escaped she gasped, as if to draw it back in, but by then Starlight’s ears had already perked up to full attention.
“...really?”
Well, too late to back out now. “I mean, sort of. It was just a crush! A silly filly thing. Stupid, really. Why, to think!” She forced out a laugh.
“It’s not silly.” Starlight took another long sip and closed her eyes. “It was Celestia, wasn’t it?”
Emergency! Abort! Abort! Twilight swallowed. Finally, she nodded.
“I figured.” Starlight mumbled. “She’s perfect. So wise and kind and beautiful and, uh, perfect. It’s common for students to have crushes on their teachers, you know. Unreq… unrequited feelings.”
“It’s still silly.” Twilight took a deep breath, willing herself to calm down. “What about you?”
“Oh, um.” Starlight studied her wine intently. “I’ve, uh, had relations before, but love? No. No time for love when you’re conquering the world, right? Ha ha.”
“Really?” Twilight scooted a bit closer and set her hoof on Starlight’s. “You mean you’ve never felt anything for somepony?”
Starlight’s eyes fixed on Twilight’s hoof, and for a long moment she stared at it in silence. Finally, she jerked back to the present. “Well, uh… since you mention it…”
“Yes?” Twilight leaned forward.
“There is one pon— mare, who I’ve, uh, had feelings for. She’s so smart and kind and perfect, but she could never love me. How could anypony love me?”
“Starlight!” Twilight’s voice cracked like a whip. “Don’t you dare say such a thing! You deserve love just as much as anypony! You’re smart, and funny, and being around you makes me, uh, feel like I need to be better. That’s… uh, lots of ponies could find that attractive!”
“But I’ve made so many mistakes. I’m not a nice pony. I’m not—”
“Shh.” Twilight silenced her with the tip of her hoof on Starlight’s lips. Her aim was a bit off so she kind of smooshed them a bit, but the effect was the same. “Starlight, you… you’re perfect just the way you are. You try harder than anypony I know to be good. And that… I…”
Starlight grasped Twilight’s hoof. “Yes?”
“Well, I mean, I’m just saying, like, hypothetically, um, if we were alone on an island—”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, just kiss already,” Rainbow Dash said. She finished off her half-full glass in one chug. “Fuck. It’s like watching balloon animals try to have sex.”
“That’s it, I’m cutting you off,” Rarity said. She floated Dash’s glass and the nearest two bottles of wine away. “You have to let them move at their own pace. Besides, I think they’re cute like this. Also, language, darling. Fluttershy is with us.”
“I’ll language you.”
“Sorry, Rares, I gotta side with Dash on this one,” Applejack said. “These two’re just gonna sit next to each other and blush and stammer ‘til judgement day at this rate.”
“Hey, we’re right here,” Starlight said.
“Sometimes I have to help my little woodland critters find the right mate,” Fluttershy said. She’d acquired Applejack’s stetson at some point, and wore it so low on her head that it concealed everything but the tip of her muzzle. “They’re not all smart enough to do it themselves.”
“Okay, first off, Starlight and I are not woodland critters,” Twilight said. “Second, why are we the focus here? None of you have special someponies.”
“Maaaaybe you’re just fun to tease,” Pinkie Pie offered. “Or maybe we’re all so afraid of our own lack of relationships that we hope by focusing on you to distract ourselves from the slow, impending realization that every year we grow older but never seem any closer to achieving the markers of adulthood that our parents’ generation mastered so easily and who now expect us to follow in their hoofsteps despite all the complications of modern life that make marriage, home ownership and parenthood so much harder to achieve.”
“Hey, have you met my parents?” Dash said. She eyed her stolen glass, now cradled in Rarity's hooves, like a slightly drunken hawk.
“Okay, listen,” Twilight said. She rose to her hooves, wobbled a bit, and held her wings out for balance. “I’m only going to say this once.”
There was a pause while she sorted out her thoughts.
And then she threw up all over the coffee table.
Didn't you already post this?
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All of them started as blog posts.
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That might be why.
Favorite chapter yet! Gosh, you two are funny. Do you collaborate on every chapter?
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We share ideas, but Jaxie writes his and I write mine and then we put them together!
In this story, Twilight endorses rape!
"Sometimes you have to lock them in a shed for a while until they figure it out."
I believe a quote from Nowacking would be most appropriate here:
OH MY GOD, JUST BUCK ALREADY!
Twilight can be very expressive at times, when she puts some thought into it
It’s like watching balloon animals try to have sex.
I laughed so hard I nearly wet my self. Going to figure out how to work that into a conversation with my coworkers.
Sorry, Twilight, could you repeat that last part again? I didn't quite catch that.
Well, Pinkie. Stop sleeping with everypony and just pick one already.
Dat Flutterjack and Raridash undertones shippings. Poor Pinkie the odd mare out. Well, Pixie might work xD
Should we read them in the order posted, or maybe in chronological order?
I was going to be cross, all "I've been lied to!" but this is a good way to end, if nothing else. XD
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I appreciate you taking the time to add this preface, and I will certainly tell you if any offense is given. That said, I don't think it will be a problem. I love a spirited debate, and I accept your argument in the good spirit with which it was intended.
I still disagree with the point you outlined in your reply, but before I get into why, I'd like to highlight the areas in which we agree. I think affirming our common priors will give the discussion a more solid grounding and reduce misunderstandings.
I agree with this entirely. This is quite well written, and I appreciate a succinct and accurate summary.
While I don't think this is the only possible interpretation of the phrase "the ends justify the means," I do accept this as a valid interpretation, and the historical analysis behind it as accurate. We can keep using this definition for the rest of the discussion.
With those two points of agreement established, I'd break my disagreements down into four categories.
Point 1: The objectivity of utility does not preclude the subjectivity of utility functions.
I offer Felicity, the utilitarian pony (it's a pony name) a choice between two actions, A and B. For the purposes of simplifying the example, Felicity has already done detailed utility calculations and determined all other options are inferior to A and B, so she now only has to choose between them.
Felicity wishes to perform a utility calculation to determine which of these options is better. Being the utilitarian pony, her natural cutie mark magic gives her a perfectly rational perspective, infinite calculation ability, and all the objective data she needs. Her calculations are as objective as it is possible for any calculations to be.
But before she can perform those calculations, she needs to make a decision: is being more worldly and self-aware beneficial even if it has no other benefits? Is it good only insofar as it causes other good things to happen, or is it, inof itself, a contributor to utility?
This question has no objectively right or wrong answer. Felicity could say that the primary determinant of utility is happiness, and so an ignorant blissful life is not inherently worse than a worldly reflective life. Put more simply, she could say that education has no value except insofar as it alters ponies' behavior. She could also say that being a rational being is apriori better than being ignorant and instinctual, and so philosophy education contributes to utility regardless of it's practical use.
In making this choice, Felicity is letting her personal judgement determine her course. She has decided something about what makes the world better, and by extension, will take action indirectly based on that decision. She may consult others in the process of making her decision (and probably would, since she wants to be as objective as possible), but ultimately, she doesn't need anypony else to agree with her.
If, having consulted all the facts and carefully considered the matter, she decides that a philosophy education is an inherent contributor to utility, the fact that every earth pony in the world disagrees is not directly relevant. It is indirectly relevant because imposing something on them against their will may make them unhappy (and thus lower utility), but she does not require their consent to assign them a utility function.
This is what Starlight means when she talks about "her goals." Her personal utility function isn't the utility function about her own personal well being. It's the utility function that she, personally, assigns to others.
Point 2: The recognition of multiple possible future-states with distinct probabilities does not preclude the hypothetical evaluation of absolutes.
At multiple points, you argue that Starlight isn't a utilitarian because her argument assumes absolutes, and a utilitarian never assumes P=1. While it's certainly true that P!=1 in any real world utility calculation, I'd like to offer the following scenario as a counter-argument:
While a P=1 scenario is certainly an edge case, and I'm sure you'd argue that many P=1 scenarios are degenerate, argument-by-edge-case is not an invalid means of evaluating a decision framework, unless there is an explicit reason why the edge case violates one of the model's underlying assumptions.
Point 3: The dismissal of trivial calculations does not imply apathy towards a requirement those calculations be performed.
You state:
In the quoted section, Starlight says that the professor is reducing the number of ponies killed, and she doesn't see why that would change her answer. In the context of the discussion, "ponies dying" is fairly explicitly a negative-utility event, one that Starlight is accepting because she sees the following positive-utility event as resulting in a net positive. Thus, her casual "it won't change my answer" is stating "you are only making the event I've already evaluated as net-utility positive more utility positive."
Again, I'd offer the following scenario as an illustration:
In this scenario, the customer is dismissing the calculations because the outcome is already known, not because he is indifferent to the need to perform those calculations in the first place. This is the same action Starlight is taking in the story.
Point 4: Empathy and utilitarianism are distinct and only distantly related concepts.
At several points, you characterize Starlight in this story as heartless or sociopathic. Which she certainly is -- that was the authorial intent. But you then go onto say this precludes her being a utilitarian, because utilitarianism is a philosophy that inherently takes into account the feelings of others.
I think this is a conflation of two distinct concepts: one is a rhetorical or decision-making framework, and the other is an emotion.
Imagine a doctor performing triage. He knows nothing about any of the patients in question, except the information which is strictly relevant to determining who he should treat. He knows their age, probability of survival, suitability as an organ donor should they perish, etc. This doctor is completely detached and professional, and does not allow personal sentiment to interfere with his decision-making.
Is this doctor behaving in a utilitarian manner? Almost definitionally yes, at least for the best approximation of a global utility function he can reach with the information available to him.
But is he empathetic to his patients? No. Empathy is an emotion, which in this scenario he is not experiencing. He doesn't feel their pain, their discomfort doesn't discomfort him, and if he decides that the correct decision is to let one of them die to save the others, he won't feel any guilt over the decision.
This is what Starlight means when she compares ponies to apple trees, and says: "Ponies tell me I'm supposed to care about them. But I don't see why."
Starlight agrees that she has to be concerned about the wellbeing of other ponies, but she doesn't see why she has to feel empathy. Just like Applejack is concerned with the wellbeing of her trees, but if a tree burns down in a lightning storm, she doesn't grieve or hold a funeral. Applejack is generally, roughly, informally utilitarian with regards to her trees. Which means occasionally, she'll cut them down because that's what's best for the orchard.
So yes, Starlight has a heart of stone, if you want to say that makes her a harmful stereotype of utilitarians, you're entitled to that opinion (though I'll still disagree). But it does not preclude her from being a utilitarian at all.
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This has:
And nothing so uncouth as a discount function.
That's almost as bad a saying that a utility function shouldn't need to be well-behaved for complex numbers.
9267565 The Kelly criterion isn't an ethical system. It has no discounting function because it's dealing only with a single, final payoff. A discounting function is needed for real-world decisions because the effects of actions tend to be amplified over time, and also civilization itself grows over time, so the God's-eye utility of actions are usually dominated so heavily by their far-future consequences that these swamp out immediate consequences. In fact there's a proof that under some common conditions, utility forecast indefinitely into the future is incomputable. You need a discounting function just to get the infinite series of utilities to converge.
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And utilitarianism doesn't prescribe a discount function. Q-learning prescribes a discount function. The Kelly Criterion prescribes optimal actions for a given utility function under stochastic circumstances. To the extent that utility functions can be used to approximate ethical value of stochastic outcomes, the Kelly Criterion can be used to make ethical decisions.
The only difference between utilitarianism's mean-utility-based decisions and Kelly Criterion-based decisions is that the Kelly Criterion assumes the law of large numbers is accurate for each time step. It optimizes for the utility of the expected outcome rather than the expect utility over all outcomes.
I don't know why you're saying that it only deals with the final payoff. It's computed as a local optimum independent of the time step, so it holds for every time step simultaneously. It's no different in this sense from utilitarianism.
You must have misunderstood something about the proof, or you must have meant something different from what I think this says. I'm guessing you meant "infinite" rather than "uncomputable", but that seems irrelevant.
Question to help me understand what semantics you associate with discount functions. Suppose I gave you two utility functions that were identical except for the use of two slightly-different discount functions. You're expected to use one of them to make some set of ethical decisions. How would you select between them?
I notice the chapters here were all published quite close together, with quite a big gap since. But I know this collection is an anthology of blogs made over a longer period. So I'm trying to politely and non-pressuringly ask if there'll be more soon, or if the bigger publish gap here is a sign of it being on hold for a while?
Thanks - really loving this story, and have recommended it to my friends!
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Agreed, these chapters were really fun to read. Hopefully one day there will be more of them!
Oh my goodness, yes. Notably:
I deeply enjoy seeing this acknowledgement of subjectivity: what throws me about so many of these discussions is the way it's broken down into ironclad, infallible rules. I understand the tempation to do so, yet I'm dismayed all the same, because it always seems to me like attempts to rise beyond fallibility, to take on armor of unchallengeable rightness… and I see that as an emotional reaction, often driven by unrelated things, but also as a form of mastery and asserting certainty: a certainty that, on a philosophical level, I find unjustifiable.
I see Glimglam in these stories as being just such a pony, tirelessly trying to find such certitude. So's Twilight, to a lesser degree. But, because they care about each other, they keep on butting worldviews like unaccountably gentle rams, and they don't succeed: the universe they're in (which is a fic-verse conducted by two distinct authors) cannot be reduced to only the worldview of the one or the other, so neither can 'win'. The only thing they can do… is practice friendship.
For all that it's dark and witty and funny, this is a heartwarming 'story'.
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I don't know how you responded on chapter 13 to a comment I made in chapter 4, but the result is that there's no link from my comment to your response.
Agreed.
Niggle: I'm assuming that by "With P(o)>0.99 confidence", you meant "With a probability > 0.99".
I agree with the example you gave, but in that example, the outcome "I give you 5 dollars" has P=1 by purely analytic, formal means. You don't even have to understand what "I give you 5 dollars" means.
So predicting that outcome is hardly a philosophical claim or prediction.
I'm excluding such cases from my statement "It is possible to make philosophical claims and predictions with 100% certainty"; otherwise, I'd have to claim that you can't say 1+1 = 2 with P = 1.
I can't find any other places where I said that Starlight isn't a utilitarian because her argument assumes absolutes, and a utilitarian never assumes P=1, so I can't respond further.
I will clarify that I used the word "utilitarian" differently than most people, in basically a "no true Scotsman" argument. We could say that a Marxist revolutionary is a utilitarian who believes revolution will lead to true communism with P=1, and that true communism has higher total utility than any other state. But I'd "no true Utilitarian" that Marxist, for these reasons:
1. I don't believe he/she is computing social utility as some function of individual utilities. To Marxists--as has always been evident in their art and literature--the society is all; the individual is nothing. This is the mindset utilitarianism was designed to combat. Following Hegel and the Christian Church, they redefine "happiness" as meaning "fulfilling one's role in God's plan", where God for Marxists = the arrow of historical inevitability = Hegel's World Spirit. Essentially the same thing as "Arbeit macht frei".
2. Another way of seeing that Marxists don't care about the happiness of individuals is by reading lots of Marxist texts about "the bourgeois" and "consumer society". It becomes quite apparent that what the Marxists hold against the bourgeois isn't that they're oppressing anybody, but that they are enjoying themselves, and in particular that they enjoy consumer goods. Marxists don't argue that Marxism can provide as many consumer goods as a free market; they argue that consumer goods are bad for you, and will corrupt your (spiritual) relationship with humanity and reality. Expressed in Christian terms, Marxists believe that being made happy by consumer goods is a sin. It's just a new spin on Christian asceticism. You can see this in how much the way they talk about "consumers" and "consumer society" resembles the way Christians talk about "sinners" or "heretics" and "the World".
3. If the Marxist objects that he is considering individual happiness, the fact that he ignores the suffering caused, the probability of failure, the happiness lost by giving everyone only what they need instead of what they want and by denying them free economic agency, and naively assumes that the resulting state of True Communism will last forever, means that if he's a utilitarian, he's a very stupid one (= No True Utilitarian).
I'll agree that if we supposed Starlight had done a calculation and found that she would push the button at deaths = ponies/2, then she could say that reducing pony deaths wouldn't change her answer.
But the problem is with these words: "The answer is yes.Of course I'd push the button." The "Of course" indicates that Starlight didn't do a utility calculation. She never counted, not even for the death = ponies/2 case. And this is evident in her later words implying she would still push the button even if it killed everypony, without asking any questions about how much negative utility killing everypony produces, versus how much positive utility will be gained by doing so. Time is not infinite, and the number of ponies who will live in this paradise is unspecified, so she doesn't even have the information needed to make a utility calculation, & can't say "Of course".
I wrote, "Utilitarianism is the only ethical system that cares about peoples' feelings and values. That's literally all it does."
First, note the word "and". "Cares about peoples' feelings and values" is supposed to be synonymous with "Cares about the utility functions of individuals". If you can think of other factors that go into an individual's utility function, I'd add those to the statement.
More importantly, utilitarianism is explicitly concerned with summing up the utility functions of all the individuals involved. That's what originally distinguished it from other ethical systems.
When I said utilitarianism cares about peoples' feelings and values, I meant it cares about everyone's feelings and values. The distinguishing characteristic of utilitarianism is that ethical decisions must consider nothing but the utility of all of the individuals involved. For instance, if the doctor is a Nazi doctor who decides to let all the Jews die, he's clearly not a utilitarian, because he's making value judgements which don't incorporate the personal utilities of those Jews, and because he's relying on a metaphysical assumption about the relative value of different ethnic groups. Ignoring the utility of some people, and incorporating metaphysical assumptions, are the things that utilitarianism was designed to prevent. All decisions must be reduced to nothing but a "fair" optimization of the feelings and values of all of the people affected. If the doctor in your example is not considering the utilities of individuals, but of society as a whole--by some criterion other than the summed happiness of the people affected--he's not a utilitarian.
See, this is what I’m talking about. As of this line the character development of the show is back on. Yet in earlier chapters (and nominally even earlier in the “season” of “G5” going by episode numbers but yeah yeah that’s just for fun) Starlight pretty obviously isn’t trying and is in fact actively resisting and considers it stupid.
Having said that, this chapter was great. I think I prefer it when you’re at the helm, Gardez. And no, not because of my history with Jaxie. Instead it’s because Twilight and Starlight still have flaws but it doesn’t feel like the flaws are all that they are. They’re complete characters, rather than caricatures. Even in the comedy chapters. Likewise even during the serious chapters you write they still feel more like actual characters, whereas when Jaxie writes them they come across as mouthpieces for an agenda or message.
When Jaxie writes Starlight or Twilight it’s like he’s taken a picture of them and is sticking to that one moment in time for their characterization, whereas with you it’s like it’s a film reel and they retain a bit more of what brought them into this moment,
Which isn’t to say that I haven’t gotten a laugh or enjoyment out of Jaxie’s chapters, mind. The Star Wars slashfic was great. It’s just…well, remember what I said in the last comment about how it’s hard to believe that Starlight and Twilight are actually friends? Well, when you write it, it’s easier to believe.
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Man, you really hate Marxists and love utilitarians. Which puts me, a utilitarian socialist, in an odd spot. ( I don’t call myself a Marxist because I haven’t actually read any Marx, I get almost all my political knowledge from Memes.
Utilitarianism, like every other conceptualization of morality, is founded upon a fallacy, in this case an attempt to quantify unquantifiable concepts like "happiness." Also, marxists tend to be nihilists.
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Most of Marx's stuff reads like what it is--19th Century journalism. That is far from a good thing. It is, by and large, sensationalist opinion pieces laced with some wonderful examples of old school shittalking. <i>Capital</i>, on the other hand, is a must-read. It makes <i>The Wealth of Nations</i> look like a high school research paper by comparison. Just be sure that when you do read it you have enough money on hand for booze, because once you see how the economy works you will never be able to stop seeing it in action. It is profoundly depressing. It really makes you long for a world where a pretty pony princess presides in perfect peace, because everyone loves her--where a young seamstress can have her own shop by making pretty dresses that she gives away half the time, where a pastry chef gets a free flat and an endless supply of sweets for the work she does in between time spent on her party planning hobby, where a recluse can feed and house hundreds of animals by herself without ever doing anything marketable, where the oldest family in town that also owns half the real estate <b>does not</b> live in obscene luxury without ever doing so much as cleaning their own glasses all while keeping the local state and police on puppet strings, where... uh, Rainbow Dash just does whatever whenever she wants, and where a bookish neurotic can become a member of the ruling elite by some absurd contrivance because corporate executives thought that it would help them produce a bigger profit for the board of directors based on a predictive model--damnit! See? It can't be unseen.
you got me good, Chief
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i.pinimg.com/originals/2f/92/ec/2f92ecd6e92d86d37d0b27db813dd95d.jpg
The ferrets. It's the ferrets that give them away.