In his discussion of "cryocrastination", AndrewH makes a pretty good point. There may be some better things you can do with the money you'd spend on cryonics insurance. The sort of people who are into cryonics would probably accept that donating it to the Singularity Institute is probably, all in all, a higher utility use of however many dollars. Andrew's conclusion is that you should figure out what maximizes utility and do it, regardless of how small a contribution is involved. He's right, but I want to use the same example to push a point that is very slightly different, or maybe a little more general, or maybe the exact same one but phrased differently.
Consider an argument frequently made when politicians are discussing the budget. I frequently hear people say it would cost between ten and twenty billion dollars a year to feed all the hungry people in the world. I don't know if that's true or not, and considering the recent skepticism about aid it probably isn't, but let's say the politicians believe it. So when they look at (for example) NASA's budget of fifteen billion dollars, they say something like "It's criminal to be spending all this money on space probes and radio telescopes when it could eliminate world hunger, so let's cut NASA's budget."
You see the problem? When we cut NASA's budget, it doesn't immediately go into the "solve world hunger" fund. It goes into the rest of the budget, and probably gets divided among the Congressman Johnson Memorial Fisheries Museum and purchasing twelve-thousand-dollar staplers.
The same is true of cryocrastination. Unless you actually take that money you would have spent on cryonics and donate it to the Singularity Institute, it's going into the rest of your budget, and you'll probably spend it on coffee and plasma TVs and famous statistician trading cards and whatever else.
I find myself frequently making this error in the following way: a beggar asks me for money, and I want to give it to them on the grounds that they have activated my urge to help people. Then think to myself "I can't justify giving the money to this beggar when it would help many more people if I gave it to a responsible charity." So I say no, and forget all about it, and never give the money to anyone. Even though (from a charity point of view) I know of a superior alternative to giving the money to the beggar, I would still be better off just giving the beggar the money!
All this means that for any entity that does not use its resources with maximum efficiency, the opportunity cost of spending a certain amount of resources should not be calculated as what you'd get earn from the best possible use of those resources, but what you'll earn from the use of those resources which you expect to actually occur.
Did it promote you thinking that way?
And what do you mean by "promote", anyway?
Hm. I think I'm beginning to see something about the whole social status and offense thing that I didn't see before.
See, that sentence doesn't "promote" in the sense of "encourage others to think" or "put that idea in their heads". It simply is a statement that would make sense to people who already have the idea of women being trophies in their head.
IOW - if you don't on some level already have the idea in your head (and I do not), the statement can't mean that to you, so it clearly means something else.
And this is independent of whatever the original speaker actually meant. In other words, it could easily be that Roko meant something that is not what either I or Alicorn took him to mean -- we are each simply using whatever interpretation of his words "makes sense" in our own model of the world. To me, women are not trophies, and the statement does not say that, so it's impossible for me to take it that way.
At the same time, I can see how somebody who does think of women as trophies might take Roko's statement as implicitly supporting their position. And further, that someone else, who is sensitized to the existence of a faction of people who think that way, might then treat Roko's statement as explicitly supporting that position, or defining him as a member of that fashion.
After all, in that person's world, the "trophies" definition is more emotionally salient (albeit negative), and our brains are biased to retrieve the most emotional (especially negative) interpretations of current events... leading to it being as impossible for them to take seriously the idea that the comment was innocent, as it is for me to take seriously the idea that it was objectifying.
Hm. Interesting.
Interesting. I agree with you that the effects of statements are independent of the original speaker's intentions. (At least in the sense of not being necessarily related; I would expect the two to be statistically dependent). For that reason I can easily accept that the comment was innocently intended, but at the same time think that such statements, in general, are not innocent in effect, and that they should ideally be reduced.
However, I don't agree with this at all:
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