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sdenheyer comments on The proper use of regret? - Less Wrong
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He's failing to distinguish between (1) "I love my children and am very glad to have them and would be very upset if they were replaced by different children" and (2) "My children are in some absolute sense the best children there could possibly be, and if they'd been different I wouldn't love them and be so glad to have them". #1 is normal and reasonable and sensible and nice. #2 is batshit insane.
I think a similar error is behind some people's alarm at the idea that the existence of physical disabilities is a bad thing that people might try to do away with ("do you want to do away with my sister, who has this disability?").
And I think a slightly less similar error is behind the repugnance of Derek Parfit's "repugnant conclusion" (you can start with some natural assumptions about what makes the world a better place, and end up with the conclusion that our world is less good than an alternative with vastly more people, all of whom have lives that are just barely worth living -- but what "just barely worth living" means is not "if they were slightly worse the people whose lives they are would prefer to be dead" but "the world is better for their existence, but only just").
None of the above has anything much to do with regret, but I do also think there's something wrong with how Caplan is thinking about regret. But I think the mistake described above is the really big one.
Doesn't he distinguish between (1) and (2)? From the article:
Kinda, but -- playing along with the assumption we're all making, namely that he means what he says and isn't just having fun -- he makes the exact same mistake between steps 3 and 4 of his argument: he goes, explicitly, from "if you offered to replace one of my children with a better one I'd say no" to "I wouldn't want anything in my past to be different because then I'd have different children".
Changing something in his past wouldn't be like taking away the children he now has and giving him replacements. It would mean change what children he's always had.
Yes. Moreover, for a structural (as opposed to indexical) approach (i.e. closer to your #2), would he not have the predisposition to regret whatever bad decisions he made, even though the decisions led to him having the kids he has, he would be less likely to have the kids he has. (Because he would have made more severely bad decisions, etc.)
You're right - in the counter-factual world where he jiggled his sperm and had a different child, he would value that child via the endowment effect. Thanks for clarifying for me.