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Pavitra comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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Actually...
We know from canon that a Horcrux is really just a backup copy, so that on average you probably only about double your lifespan by making one, at best. But it seems to me that based on what Harry has been told, he should believe that a Horcrux makes you immortal and unkillable. Given this belief, in the absence of any better way of achieving immortality, the spell is considerably better than baseline.
Set up a Horcrux clinic. A pair of people come in, fill out some paperwork, flip a coin in the presence of a notary, and the winner of the coin toss kills the loser to make a Horcrux. If nobody ever cast the spell, the loser was going to die eventually anyway, and if you do it when both parties are close to dying of old age (though this would probably be a needlessly reckless strategy, all things considered) then the loser doesn't even lose all that much.
You could save half of the wizarding world from certain death.
Oh, and Harry didn't even ask whether it might be possible to substitute an animal for the human sacrifice, or make a portrait of the caster and use that as a substitute, or Transfigure a rock into a copy of the caster (under heavy precautions, of course). He displays an irrational degree of revulsion at the idea of killing people. One gets the idea that he would let five die in the trolley problem.
I got the same impression. Harry!MoR in general seems to be very good at giving rationalist speeches (and internal monologues) but rather poor when it comes to actually thinking rationally under this kind of pressure. He may not let five die in the trolley problem when it is presented in a nice philosophical form but it wouldn't surprise me at all if he encountered an analogous problem like we see here and completely fail to even look at options once he hits an emotional roadblock. It would make me hesitant to trust him.
As I understood it, Harry's revulsion wasn't against the need for a sacrifice but against Dumbledore's fear, Harry would consider the cost of a sacrifice as comparately low. Thinking about ways to lower that cost would not have convinced Dumbledore that Harry took that cost serious the way rejecting the thought outright might have.
I doubt it; he is a self-described consequentialist, and doesn't seem to be unaware of the math or unwilling to do it.
(By the way, it's completely appropriate to feel revulsion at the idea of killing the one person in the trolley problem... as long as you feel five times as much revulsion at the idea of letting the five in the trolley die.)
Edit: The bigger problem with your scenario is that, if I remember correctly, creating a Horcrux requires genuine hatred and malevolence, not just any death.
Edit 2: According to the Harry Potter Wiki, it also requires some other unspecified "horrific act".
Edit 3: I wonder whom Voldemort killed in order to Horcrux the Pioneer plaque.
That's what I mean by an irrational degree of revulsion. As far as we can tell, it doesn't even occur to him that a Horcrux trades off a finite life for an infinite one.
There are mind-altering spells. The clinic doctor can make you evil enough to cast the spell, and then do Finite Incantatem once the process is done.
Does that mean your backup copy will be of the evil you?
Haha, good point. Still, this is all in the hypothetical false world that Harry should have inferred from the information available to him, in which Horcruxes grant undyingness rather than just making backups.