wedrifid comments on The utility curve of the human population - Less Wrong

5 Post author: dclayh 24 September 2009 09:00PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 25 September 2009 12:38:56PM 0 points [-]

As an example, consider a parent and young child. If you allow one of them to die, not only do you end that life, but you make the other one significantly worse off.

No. The parent was already dead. Now we just randomly 'saved' young orphan and they will live a life of squalor. By consuming from what little resources are available in her miserable circumstances the overall quality of life for her and her fellow orphans will be even worse for her presence.

My point is that it is not appropriate to draw a conclusion that the value of a random human life is superlinear at the margin by providing a specific example of a human life that has significant and obvious impact on another. It would be equally absurd to 'prove' a negative utility for saving a life by mentioning saving an axe murderer while he is in his axe-slaying prime.

Comment author: nerzhin 25 September 2009 04:41:18PM 0 points [-]

It would be equally absurd to 'prove' a negative utility for saving a life by mentioning saving an axe murderer while he is in his axe-slaying prime.

Not "equally absurd." The stated assumption is that the general case is more like the parent-child case than the axe murderer case:

But this generalizes: the marginal person (on average) produces positive net value to society (though being an employee, friend, spouse, etc.) in addition to accruing their own utilons

Also, are you actually saying the young orphan will be better off dead? Is that what she would choose, given the choice?

Comment author: wedrifid 25 September 2009 08:09:26PM *  1 point [-]

Not "equally absurd." The stated assumption is that the general case is more like the parent-child case than the axe murderer case:

True.

Also, are you actually saying the young orphan will be better off dead?

I'm saying that the marginal person on average adds negative net value to the expected utility of the universe as evaluated by me. As well as pointing out the negative utility of an orphan starving I point out that a saved life can have negative externalities as well as positive. In this case it was to the other orphans who lose some of their resources.

A negative externality that I place the more weight on is the contribution to existential risk. I do discount the far distant future but not to the extent that I don't consider existential risk at this critical stage of development to be pretty damn important.

Is that what she would choose, given the choice?

This isn't fallacious since the argument behind this line of questioning is implied rather than explicit. In most cases the reasoning is not even noticed consciously by the author or many readers.

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