I had enormous dirty fun with this while on holiday. I got talking to a very smart (ex-LLNL nuclear engineer) ninety-year-old who was also very right wing. He proposed to me that the Government should harvest the organs of homeless people in order to give them to combat veterans. What he wanted me to say, of course, was that this proposal was outrageous and wrong, that human life was of greater value than that, and so on, so he could then say that these people were a drain on society and the people who'd made such sacrifices were more important, and so on.
Instead I said "Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy the organs from people in the third world? If you wanted to capture homeless people and take their organs, you'd need some sort of legal procedure to decide who was eligible, and there'd be appeals and so on, and it would all cost about as much as sentencing someone to death in the USA does now, which I'd guess must be hundreds of thousands of dollars at least. There must be plenty of people in poorer countries who would sacrifice their lives for a fraction of that money to feed their families in perpituity. There would be no use of force, no mistaken killings, and their organs would be higher quality. I'm not aware of a problem with getting organs for veterans, but if there is, that seems like a more efficient way to solve it."
His response? He went and got his CV so I'd be impressed at what a smart fellow he was!
You may be able to get an even better kidney-for-the-buck ratio (and increased moral outrage) with a lottery system: get $5.000 for a one-in-ten chance of losing a kidney; or $50.000 for a one-in-ten chance of being killed and having all your organs harvested.
That would be like signing up for a particularly high-risk job, like soldier.
There are many pleasant benefits of improved rationality:
I'd like to mention two other benefits of rationality that arise when working with other rationalists, which I've noticed since moving to Berkeley to work with Singularity Institute (first as an intern, then as a staff member).
The first is the comfort of knowing that people you work with agree on literally hundreds of norms and values relevant to decision-making: the laws of logic and probability theory, the recommendations of cognitive science for judgment and decision-making, the values of broad consequentialism and x-risk reduction, etc. When I walk into a decision-making meeting with Eliezer Yudkowsky or Anna Salamon or Louie Helm, I notice I'm more relaxed than when I walk into a meeting with most people. I know that we're operating on Crocker's rules, that we all want to make the decisions that will most reduce existential risk, and that we agree on how we should go about making such a decision.
The second pleasure, related to the first, is the extremely common result of reaching Aumann agreement after initially disagreeing. Having worked closely with Anna on both the rationality minicamp and a forthcoming article on intelligence explosion, we've had many opportunities to Aumann on things. We start by disagreeing on X. Then we reduce knowledge asymmetry about X. Then we share additional arguments for multiple potential conclusions about X. Then we both update from our initial impressions, also taking into account the other's updated opinion. In the end, we almost always agree on a final judgment or decision about X. And it's not that we agree to disagree and just move forward with one of our judgments. We actually both agree on what the most probably correct judgment is. I've had this experience literally hundreds of times with Anna alone.
Being more rational is a pleasure. Being rational in the company of other rationalists is even better. Forget not the good news of situationist psychology.