Stuart_Armstrong comments on Shut Up and Divide? - Less Wrong

60 Post author: Wei_Dai 09 February 2010 08:09PM

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Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 11 February 2010 04:29:02PM 4 points [-]

Put it this way: I had concern level H for humanity, and h for a given individual. However, H was very far from being 6 billion times h. Now, this is closer to being the case; for this to happen, H has gone up while h has gone down.

Comment author: komponisto 11 February 2010 04:41:18PM 2 points [-]

This still bothers me; I feel like you should have just increased H without decreasing h.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 12 February 2010 11:00:29AM 0 points [-]

Actually, h has increased on average; it's just that h has decreased for the immediately available examples. i.e. I care much less about Amanda Fox or a single salient example, but more about general, systematic effects that might cause great harm to people that I don't hear about.

Comment author: komponisto 12 February 2010 03:04:35PM *  1 point [-]

Amanda Fox

I assume you mean Amanda Knox.

Also, do you really care less about (i.e. assign less utility to the welfare of) someone like Amanda than previously, or is it just that you try to avoid strong emotional reactions to such individual cases?

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 12 February 2010 03:45:25PM 1 point [-]

Let's look at it this way: if I had cash to hand, and was given the option: pay X to solve this particular salient injustice, then I'd be less inclined to do it than before.

On the other hand, if I was given the option: pay X to solve this particular class of injustices, then I'd be more inclined to do it than before.

Emotional involvement follows a similar trend.