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Larks comments on Transparency and Accountability - Less Wrong
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Comments (141)
But you didn't do that. A calculation involves both quantitative and qualitative/structural assumptions, and you slanted all of your qualitative choices toward making your point.
You used a discount rate of 0. (That is, a hypothetical life a hundred generations from now deserves exactly as much of my consideration as people alive today). That totally discredits your calculation.
You used a definition of 'saving a life' which suggests that we ought to pay women to get pregnant, have children, and then kill the infant so they are free to get pregnant again. Count that as one life 'saved'.
You didn't provide estimates of the opportunity cost in 'human lives' of diverting resources toward colonizing the universe. Seems to me those costs could be enormous - in lives at the time of diversion, not in distant-future lives.
Appart from the issue JGWeissman brings up, even if you supposed that the lives saved all occurred 300 years in the future, a reasonable discount rate would still only give you a couple of orders of magnitude.
For example, 1.05^300 = 2.3 * 10^6
Which is nowhere near enough.
Edit: there are discount rates that would give you the result you want, but it still seems pritty plausible that, assuming Astronomical Waste, SIAI isn't a bad bet.
Sounds about right to me.
Huh? You think 6 is "a couple"? I wish I had your sex life!
But 5% per annum is far too high. It discounts the next generation to only a quarter of the current generation. Way too steep.
Double huh? And huh? some more. You wrote:
You imagine (conservatively) that there are a potential 10^18 lives to save 300 years into the future? Boy, I really wish I had your sex life.
If people 300 years from now are whole brain emulations or AIs, then they could reproduce like software with high population densities.
Alternatively, if the human-size brains were all sucked into the matrix long ago, there may well be about 1 person per-planet.