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whpearson comments on Rational Terrorism or Why shouldn't we burn down tobacco fields? - Less Wrong
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I had a broader meaning of everyday life, as things everyone might do.
Even taking a literal view of the sentence, burning down fields isn't an every day kind of thing.
I was actually thinking of Anna Salamon and her back of the envelope calculations about how worth it is to donate to SIAI, with that comment. I believe she mentions donating to givewell as a baseline to compare it with. Saving a human life is fairly significant utilons itself. So it was asking me to weigh up saving a human life to donating to SIAI. So the symmetric question came to mind. Hence this post.
You phrase this as a weird dichotomy. It's more like asking you to weigh saving a life versus saving a lot of lives. Whether or not a lot of lives are actually at stake is an epistemic question, not a moral one.