DSimon comments on Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others... - Less Wrong
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Excessive selfishness, sure. Some degree of selfishness is required as self-defense, currently, otherwise all your own needs are subsumed by supplying others' wants.. Even in a completely symmetric society with everybody acting more for others' good than their own is worse than one where everybody takes care of their own needs first -- because each individual generally knows their own needs and wants better than anyone else does.
I don't know the needs and wants of the future. I can't know them particularly well. I have worse and worse uncertainty the farther away in time that is. Unless we're talking about species-extinction level of events, I damn well should punt to those better informed, those closer to the problems.
Not to me. Heck. I'm not entirely sure what it means to care about a person who doesn't exist yet, and where my choices will influence which of many possible versions will exist.
Expected-utility calculation already takes that into effect. Uncertainty about whether an action will be beneficial translates into a lower expected utility. Discounting, on top of that, is double counting.
Knowledge is a fact about probabilities, not utilities.
Let's hope our different intuitions are resolvable.
Surely it's not much more difficult than caring about a person who your choices will dramatically change?