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PhilGoetz comments on Shut Up and Divide? - Less Wrong
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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.
This still bothers me; I feel like you should have just increased H without decreasing h.
Why would you say that when you have no idea what his H or his h were in the first place?
It's intuitively difficult for us to accept, or at least to say, that having too much concern for a person is as possible as having too little.
Well, I don't have "no idea" -- I have a probability distribution informed by experience.
Having too much concern for an individual is theoretically possible I suppose, but it's not a problem anyone is terribly likely to suffer from. The reason most people don't care about most other people is not the fact that the human population is large; it's the fact that most of that large population isn't psychologically close enough for them to care.
It's possible that utilitarian calculations could argue for downgrading one's level of concern for e.g. Amanda Knox -- but I'm far more inclined to suspect rationalization of pre-existing natural indifference on the part of someone who makes a claim like that.