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bgrah449 comments on Costs to (potentially) eternal life - Less Wrong
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We value saving lives who have a high expected time until death, so yes, we value saving nine-year-olds more than ninety-year-olds. This would presumably become reversed if the child had 1/10th the expected time until death as the old man.
The real answer is it doesn't matter - not everyone will enroll.
Our expenditures on safety and disaster preparedness would increase, but you're probably overrating the relative benefit, because the tragedy from accidents would increase suddenly while our ability to mitigate them lags - we would be playing catch-up on safety measures for a long time.
At least to the extent that this preference comes from deliberative knowledge, rather than free-floating norms about the value of children, or instinct.
Yes, to that extent. The amount that we value the child's life does start with an advantage against the amount we value the old man's life, which is why I chose a drastic ratio.
If you mean that humans intuitively measure things on a comparative scale, and thus increasing the value of an outcome that you failed to get can make you feel worse than not having had the chance in the first place -- yes, I agree that it is descriptively true. But the consequentialist in me says that that emotion runs skew to reality. On reflection, I won't choose to discount the value of potential-immortality just because it increases the relative tragedy of accidental death.