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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

> What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It’s okay for me to treat others that way?

No, that’s not what the Golden Rule said. It says to treat people the way you want other people to treat you. How you treat yourself is your own business.

There’s also a certain amount of making reasonable assumptions here. Obviously the intent is to get people to treat each other fair & well, not to set a logic trap and interpret this aphorism literally to mean you should hurt people if you’re okay with being hurt, even when you know other people don’t want to be hurt. Most people don’t want to be hurt. Obviously.

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Yes, reasonable assumptions! But according to whom? The golden rule can be reasonable to you but not to me. But does that make me bad and you good? Not really. It just means we disagree on what it means to be a moral person.

Anyone who doesn't agree with your "reasonable assumptions" has bad morals can be twisted to mean any moral values based on what you mean by reasonable. For example, the church can say it is reasonable assumptions to burn witches and then twist reason itself to make it morally good as well. In that case how can we trust this system itself? If the answer is by using your own eyes and thinking for yourself, then why do we need to follow a specific fixed rule?

The reasonable assumption I was referring to is what the words in the golden rule mean, not what actions are moral or not. The golden rule is almost as far as it gets from a “specific fixed rule”, despite the name, and it doesn’t prescribe what’s bad or good or moral, and nobody upthread said anything about what makes you bad or good. It’s nothing more than a rule of thumb, an aphorism, a (perhaps extremely obvious) reminder that you shouldn’t treat other people in ways you wouldn’t like yourself, at a minimum. Is this hard to understand or something? The aphorism is already completely relative and subjective, there’s really no need to belabor that point, it’s built in.

How can you trust the system? What are you even asking? We have laws, a lot of them, and the golden rule is not one of them. But if you don’t hurt others, and others don’t hurt you, we’re off to a good start. Use whatever definition of ‘hurt’ you’d like, it doesn’t matter if it’s reciprocal.

The go-to example of a failure state in the golden rule that I am aware of is "thirsty person wants everyone else to jump their bones, thus the rule suggests that they should jump everyone else's bones".

The take-home being, as long as peoples preferences are different, the rule has some failure states based upon that.

And the wider example that this points to is that as long as everyone's values are different.. the rule loses a lot of it's luster. The more different another person's values are, the less you can rely on projecting your own values as a method to gainfully interact with them.

In place of that biblical aphorism (born from a monoculture no less), there is a lot of room available for us to build something more robust and sophisticated and the AI alignment problem offers a fine excuse to get cracking and try to formalize something already! ;)

Again, that’s an overly literal and straw man interpretation of the golden rule that seems nearly intentionally obtuse. The rule is not suggesting you should do anything that you know other people wouldn’t like. Jumping people’s bones is a very bad example, because that’s not something anyone should do without communication and explicit permission, otherwise it’s rape and it’s illegal.

If you understand and accept the reciprocal intent of the golden rule, via the above mentioned reasonable assumptions, not to mention the hundreds of years of examples and explanations, then it doesn’t really have a “failure state”. And, again, this so-called rule is not law, isn’t specific, and doesn’t cover all situations or all behaviors. It seems very silly to be nit picking this aphorism to death like this. It’s very simply a good faith suggestion to be kind.

The notion of fairness and reciprocity is not a religious idea, it’s common sense.

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