= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
atucker comments on How To Lose 100 Karma In 6 Hours -- What Just Happened - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (214)
At the risk of sounding silly, I have a really minor question.
The 6790 people figure comes from multiplying the world's population by .0001, right? I feel like causing an existential catastrophe to occur is worse than that, not only does everyone alive die, but every human who could have lived in this part of the universe in the future is kept out of existence. Thus, intentionally trying to cause existential risk is much more serious.
Is there some particular reason that everyone is only multiplying by the world's population that I'm missing?
No, you're right — talking about currently-living people is more just the very conservative lower bound, since we don't have a good way of calculating how many people could exist in the future if existential risks are averted.
If existential risks are averted, you shouldn't count people, you should count goodness (that won't necessarily take the form of people or be commensurately influenced by different people). So the number of people (ems) we can fill the future with is also a conservative lower bound for that goodness, which knowably underestimates it.
Okay, thanks. Just making sure that I wasn't completely messing up expected utility calculations.
Not that murdering only 6790 people is okay or anything...
Yes, I wanted to make the most conservative estimation possible. The actual figure is probably far far higher, but since even the most conservative estimation involves killing thousands of people, it's bad enough as it is!