Cyan comments on A Normative Rule for Decision-Changing Metrics - Less Wrong

1 Post author: FrankAdamek 05 August 2009 05:07AM

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Comment author: Alicorn 05 August 2009 11:12:38PM *  1 point [-]

I don't think this eliminates much real inconvenience, although it might soothe ruffled feathers in very superficial discussions. If you can have fractional people, that creates the following problems:

  • The temptation to do math with them.
  • The same sort of icky skeeviness you get when you read history books and note that at one time, for population count purposes, blacks counted as 3/5 of a person each.
  • Disagreement about whether someone is 1/2 or 5/8 of a person could easily get as heated as disagreement about whether they are a person or not.
  • Depending on what factors increase or decrease personhood, widespread acceptance of a belief in fractional people could lead to attempts to game the system and be "personier".
Comment author: Cyan 05 August 2009 11:24:23PM *  2 points [-]

The idea of fractional people is less common that the idea that personhood is a cluster of properties in thingspace, and various beings partake of those properties to a greater or lesser extent.

This seems to carve reality at its joints more than the idea of fractional people, but is certainly still problematic.

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