I think the key to the drowning child parable is the ability of others to judge you. I can't judge you for not donating a huge portion of your income to charity, because then you'll bring up the fact that I don't donate a huge portion of my own income to charity. Sure, there are people who do donate that much, but they are few enough that it is still socially safe to not donate. But I can judge you for not saving the child, because you can't challenge me for not saving them - I was not there. This means that not saving the child poses a risk to your social status, which can greatly tilt the utility balance in favor of saving them.

But how exactly do you do this without hammering down on the part that hammers down on parts? Because the part that hammers down on parts really has a lot to offer, too, especially when it notices that one part is way out of control and hogging the microphone, or when it sees that one part is operating outside of the domain in which its wisdom is applicable.

(Your last paragraph seems to read "and now, dear audience, please see that the REAL problem is such-and-such a part, namely the part that hammers down on parts, and you may now proceed to hammer down on this part at will!")

I agree with and appreciate the broad point. I'll pick on one detail because I think it matters.

this whole parable of the drowning child, was set to crush down the selfish part of you, to make it look like you would be invalid and shameful and harmful-to-others if the selfish part of you won [...]

It is a parable calculated to set at odds two pieces of yourself... arranging for one of them to hammer down the other in a way that would leave it feeling small and injured and unable to speak in its own defense.

This seems uncharitable? Singer's thought experiment may have had the above effects, but my impression's been that it was calculated largely to help people recognize our impartially altruistic parts—parts of us that in practice seem to get hammered down, obliterated, and forgotten far more often than our self-focused parts (consider e.g. how many people do approximately nothing for strangers vs. how many people do approximately nothing for themselves).

So part of me worries that "the drowning child thought experiment is a calculated assault on your personal integrity!" is not just mistaken but yet another hammer by which people will kick down their own altruistic parts—the parts of us that protect those who are small and injured and unable to speak in their own defense.

At a pond, my niece was in a child floaty, reached too far and flipped over into the water. I slammed my half-eaten sandwich on my brother's chest, hoping he would grab it and ran into the water and saved her. 

She was fine and I got to finish my sandwich.

Regarding the direct example 

I feel like it's self-subverting. There's an old canard about https://www.watersafetymagazine.com/drowning-doesnt-look-like-drowning/ Given how staggeringly disproportionate the utility losses are in this scenario I think even a 1% chance of my assumption that 'I have 15 seconds to undress' would lead to death means I should act immediately.

In general when thinking about superfast reflex decisions vs thought out decisions: Obey the reflex unless your ability to estimate the probabilities involved has really low margins of error. My gut says X but my slow, super weak priors-that-have-never-been-adjusted-by-real-world-experience-about-this-first-time-in-my-life-situation say Y... Yeah just go with X. Reflect on the outcome later and maybe come up with a Z that should have been the gut/reflex response.

There's an old video game Starcraft 2 advice from Day9 that's surprisingly applicable in life: Plan your game before the game, in game follow the plan even if it seems like it's failing, after the game review and adjust your plan. Never plan during the game, speed is of the essence and the loss of micro and macro speed will cost you more than a bad plan ... (read more)

Humans don't swim very well wearing lots of clothing. Take off your suit before going into the water.

Trying to summarize for those of us not fond of long-winded parables.

• A single moral agent is a bad model of a human,
• Multiple agents with individual utilities/rules/virtues is a more accurate model.
• It's useful to be aware of this, because Tarski, or else your actions don't match your expectations.

I unfortunately have very little of substance to add, but a strong upvote was not quite enough.

There is something in here of Iron Hufflepuff, and I'm exceedingly grateful to Eliezer for dignifying and validating it so unequivocally in this meta-parable.  I expect to link to this fairly frequently over the next decade.

An interesting difference between the drowning child situation and the "could donate to effective charity to save children's lives" situation is that the person who happens to be walking by that pond has a non-transferable opportunity to save a child's life for $500 (or whatever the cost of the clothes are, plus some time cost, and the inconvenience of getting wet and muddy). In the case of effective charity, even if one declines to donate, other people will still have the same opportunity. In the case of the drowning child, the fact that you are the only one who can act makes jumping in to save the child somehow seem more urgent. If you don't save the child, then you'd be somehow "wasting" a valuable opportunity. For a mostly selfish person who values all lives other than their own at less than $500, the opportunity would be valuable to others but useless for themselves.

If the going rate is $1000 to save a child through effective charity, then a mostly altruistic person would be willing to pay a mostly selfish person $600 to compensate for the costs of their clothes. There would have to be some "honour" involved, since the selfish person couldn't exactly unsave the child after the fact. If they could make the deal work anyway, then the mostly selfish person would have succeeded in selling non-transferable opportunity for $100, and it would be worthwhile for them to save the drowning child.

My objection lies in the second part of the drowning child parable. The part where someone geographically distant is considered identical to the child in front of me, and money is considered identical to the actions of saving. It's some sort of physics being the same everywhere intuition being inappropriately applied. Of course distance in time, space, or inference create uncertainty. Of course uncertainty reduces expected value and possibly even brings the sign of the action into question if the expected variance is high enough.

not selfish and unselfish components in their utility function, but parts of themselves in some less Law-aspiring way than that

Utility functions don't model all agents; we should look at a larger space. I expect it to better model not just a human but also a council of humans or a multiverse of acausal traders. I expect this also to say how an AGI should handle uncertainty about preferences.

There should be a natural way to aggregate a distribution of agents into an agent, obeying the obvious law that an arbitrarily deeply nested distribution comes out the ... (read more)

In case anyone else, like me, followed the link near the start of OP to the story from which this is excerpted, and is wondering whether (having had a bunch of updates on 2021-10-24 but none since) it's likely to be dead: I had a look at its pattern of updates and it's very bursty, with gaps on the order of 1-3 weeks between bursts, so the current ~1w of no updates is not strong evidence against there being more future updates to come.

(It seems like the majority of fictional works posted online end up being abandoned, and I generally prefer not to read things of non-negligible length that stop in mid

The Watcher spoke on, then, about how most people have selfish and unselfish parts—not selfish and unselfish components in their utility function, but parts of themselves in some less Law-aspiring way than that.

I guess it's appropriate that children there learn about utility functions before learning about multiplication.

I reject the parable/dilemma for another reason: in the majority of cases, I don't think it's ethical to spend so much money on a suit that you would legitimately hesitate to save a drowning child if it put the suit at risk?

If you're so rich that you can buy tailor-made suits, then sure, go save the child and buy another suit. If you're not... then why are you buying super-expensive tailor-made suits? I see extremely few situations where keeping the ability to play status games slightly better would be worth more than saving a child's life.

(And yes, there'... (read more)

I prefer hypocrisy to cruelty. 

More gennerally I think this just misses the point of drowning child.  The argument is not that you have this set of preferences and therefore you save the child, the argument is that luxury items are not of equal moral worth to the life of a child.  This can be made consistent with taking off your suit first if think the delay has a sufficiently small probability of leading to the death of child and you think the death of a child and the expensive suit are comparable.