From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri May 24 2002 - 09:01:53 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 02:16:41AM -0700, Wei Dai wrote:
> > Consider a situation where you absolutely don't have time to judge someone
> > on his own merits before having to make some decision. The only
> > information you have is that he belongs to a certain group. Should you
> > ignore that information and just treat him as a random human being?
>
> Use Bayes' theorem and estimate that he has property X given
> membership in group G:
> P(has propery X | member of group G) = P(X and in G)/P(in G)
However, there are ethical implications to altering our treatment of people
based on prior probabilities rather than observed behavior. Bayes's theorem
necessarily influences our estimate of the prior probabilities, but does not
necessarily control whether we choose to alter our treatment based on those
probabilities. Arguably the situation is viewed as an iterated Prisoner's
Dilemna in which we agree not to prejudge in exchange for not being
prejudged by others. To put it another way, being judged only by your
actual, personal actions and not your statistical associations with the
actions of others is a public good; it helps preserve the ethical structure
of reciprocal altruism, which requires that you adjust your treatment of an
agent based on those actions that are subject to the judged agent's control.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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