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Good_Burning_Plastic comments on So you say you're an altruist... - Less Wrong
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The real question is, is the ultimate value maximizing the number of human-years? How about the quest for knowledge? Improvement of the species?
Is saving 10 people from starvation (ie, funding the continued existence of 10 people, engaging in the typical activities of a subsistence agriculturist, and experiencing the normal pleasures/pains of a subsistence agriculturist's life, of greater value than, say, funding one person working to figure out how to increase human being's peak IQ? [although, of course, fill in here the research question that you think is the most important]
I'd say that the average subsistence agriculturalist isn't contributing anything (and CAN'T contribute anything) to the most valuable activities mankind is currently engaged in.
The former may be more terminally valuable for certain value systems, but as far as I can tell the latter is more instrumentally valuable for pretty much all reasonable human value systems.