Thanks for persisting with me. I appreciate it!
Unfortunately I still don't feel as though I've gotten an explanation of your position as much as another restatement of it. You seem to have just reiterated that you can't see much difference between the cases, rather than actually explaining how they are relevantly similar.
I've tried to explain why I don't see the comments about beggars and women as equivalent according to my (perhaps idiosyncratic) definition of objectification. The discussion about beggars seemed to me to assume that beggars are people with interests, and that we are generally concerned to further those interests - the question was how best to do that. This stands in stark contrast to talk about "getting" women, which (I think) promotes thinking about them as prizes whose main value is their instrumental value to the men "getting" them.
This seems to me to provide a clear distinction between the two conversations. You seem to disagree, but I still can't tell exactly why. Is it that:
In order to try to make some progress here, could you perhaps tell me (a) which of these you believe, and (b) why you believe it? (Alternatively, if you don't think any of these is the source of our disagreement, then perhaps you could let me know what you think the actual source is.)
Thanks!
ETA: I realise that you appear to state at the beginning of your previous comment that it's 1(a), but the rest of your comment suggests to me that it might actually be something else, and in any event, I'm still not sure why you think 1(a) (if you do).
well, i think some of the posts about women were considered offensive because they discussed how you could 'get' them, or manipulate them with some tricks; then here i saw some somewhat generalizing comments here about beggars (some were written after my first post of course), about how they don't necessarily want to work, have mental problems but, given the right incentives, might be pushed in the right direction - or the idea that you understand what they think. I felt that in a few posts, and that is why I wrote the comment in the first place.
Regarding...
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.