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gwern comments on A survey of anti-cryonics writing - Less Wrong
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800,000 out of 7 billion people? That doesn't sound like very much at all.
Please provide a list of things you consider more damaging as far as number of people directly affected per year.
Wait, I'm sorry, was this supposed to be a complete list?
It was supposed to be a convincing list which definitively shows that 800,000 people being tortured and raped by other human beings is not very much, as you claimed.
Yes, aging is bad, good for that insight. I remain convinced that human trafficking is as bad as I perceive it to be; it's right up there with war-in-general and certain epidemic diseases.
Would you change your opinion if it turned out that the figures for the number of victims are grossly exaggerated?
Would you update on new evidence? Are you a bayessian? Do you read LessWrong?
The 600,000 to 800,000 figure is cited from a 2005 report; mattnewport's articles are from 2007.
I was attempting to agree with him in the same snarky format he was using. I could have just said, "Yes."
It was only partly intended to be snarky, there was also a genuine question intended. It's not clear to me whether the 800,000 is particularly important to you. You could somewhat reasonably claim that you would still consider this a very serious issue even if only 1/10 as many people were actually affected.
I don't know where the cutoff is. The articles you linked downgraded my concern about the topic, or rather, increased my error bars to the point where I no longer feel comfortable placing it in any particular category.
I know that I regularly mock news reports if they mention fewer than 100 deaths and costs in the billions to solve/prevent in the same segment, the most recent example being the Toyota recalls. I expect I'm doing lazy cost-utility analysis.
I apologize - I'm not good at picking up sarcasm in text. </sincere>
(I value the impetus to look it up myself, however, so I don't mind.)
Before mattnewport's comment, was there any fact or important value being disputed here, or merely how much negative affect we should be feeling and expressing about that number?
I introduced a trivial fact (the number) which I felt was relevant to the comment as far as the definition of 'very few'. I am disputing a pointless definition, and honestly I don't care that much, but gwern's smug tone got me angry enough to reply to a months old discussion that hardly mattered in the first place.
It isn't. Wikipedia tells me that 100,000 people die of aging every day after decades of suffering. So unless each of that 800,000 - remembering that aging deaths are only going to go up and mattnewport's articles on that 800k being inflated, and that the rapes and tortures are not the average, but extremes, much like Uncle Tom was not the usual experience of Southern US slaves - suffers 45x more than each aging victim, aging is a much bigger problem than human trafficking.
Yes, it is a much bigger problem, and I already admitted that, and I champion that cause myself. I still think human trafficking fits somewhere above 'very few', and that for problems on the scope of aging there do not exist adjectives capable of expressing that weight of suffering. I'm also incapable of caring about one thing to the exclusion of all others.
To summarize: Defining "not very much" as "less than 100,000 per day" makes it a useless phrase.
I don't think it's useless. We should only care about the largest problems, especially when there's orders of magnitude between the largest problems and suggested-other-problems-we-should-care-about.
To steal an example from Eliezer: to divvy up your resources and mental effort among multiple causes, some of which are very small, is like seeing a spinning wheel which is 20% red and 80% blue, and thinking, 'I'll make the most money by betting 20% of the time on red and 80% of the time on blue!' Actually, one should just bet 100% of the time on blue, and win 80% of the time; the other strategy would win <80%.
To put it another way, what on earth makes you think the marginal value of your dollar or interest helps human trafficking more than aging?
Human trafficking is a durable institution driven by powerful interests and countless intersecting conditions of life, and arguably will persist as long as economic disparity means there are people who wish to move from 'poor' countries to 'rich' countries. Working against that is about as likely to help as the trillions poured down the drain of Africa.
Aging, on the other hand, is 'just' an engineering problem, which nothing prevents researchers from directly tackling, and it's not a vicious cycle of interests and desires, but a virtuous one - if you can help the first credible breakthrough be made, the free market may well do the rest (because everyone needs a cure for aging, it's the largest possible market).