Controversial Pages/Altruism And Friendliness
I originally planned to use this page to discuss the topics of "IntuitiveAltruism", "NormativeAltruism", and "rational, altruistic, qualia-based utilitarianism". In the first draft of this page, I provided my attempted definitions of each of these terms, then wandered off topic. This version contains only these definitions. The rest was moved to Controversial Pages/No Particular Topic.
Two related terms I heard someone use on #sl4 are "RationalAltruism" and "Effective Altruism". From what I've heard, "rational altruism" could be defined simply as "having an altruistic Goal System, and being rational", and "effective altruism" could be defined as "a Goal System in which value is derived from achieving altruistic goals". These definitions seem almost the same, but they both leave "altruism" undefined.
"intuitive altruism" is informally defined as the form of altruism that is (supposedly?) hardwired into our brains. Performing "intuitively altruistic" actions is typically associated with that "warm, fuzzy feeling" you get when you believe that you did something to make the world a better place, or to make someone else happy, or when you believe that you "did the right thing". This is not the same as RationalAltruism, or Effective Altruism, since it is possible to get the "warm fuzzy feeling" from an action with little or no effective altruism, and it is possible to not get that feeling from an action with much more effective altruism. (The same is true for RationalAltruism.)
"normative altruism" is informally defined in section 3.4.4 of CFAI. (the note at the top says to read the rest of CFAI first, but you might not need to in order to understand the definition of normative altruism)
"rational, altruistic, qualia-based utilitarianism" (or rational QBAU, or RQBAU) could be defined simply as "having QBAU as a Goal System, and being rational"
The rest of this page wandered off topic, and was moved to the third section of Controversial Pages/No Particular Topic.
--observer
