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Vaniver comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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What's your discount rate?
(That is, if I offered you $100 now, or $X a year from now, what is the lowest value of X that would make you choose the latter option?)
Assuming I have a good expectation that you're equally likely to deliver in each scenario, my discount rate is about 1.3, I think. (That is, $X = $130.) (Edit: On consideration, it's closer to 2.0 in light of the fact that I expect to have significantly more money next year than this year (for whatever value of "this year" we're using), so the marginal utility of each dollar goes down, etc. It would be 1.3 or so if I expected to have the same amount of money next year as this year; 1.3 is the more relevant value.)
I'm guessing I know what point you're trying to make here, but let me go ahead and say that most of the reason murder in general ought to be illegal is because you're killing a person. Babies probably will be people, but they're not yet; you're not doing harm to a person by infanticide any more than you are by using contraception.
I would love to loan you money at 20% interest. Send me a private message if you're interested.
When playing chess, how many moves ahead do you look?
A man produces about 47 billion sperm a year; a woman releases 13 eggs a year; a couple that tries to become pregnant over the course of a year will have a 75% chance of live birth pregnancy if the female is 30. So each feasible sperm-egg combination over the course of a year has about a trillionth chance of making it to a live birth. *
As soon as conception happens, then you've got a zygote which is very likely to make it to live birth. And once it makes it to live birth, it's very likely to make it to adulthood. So there seems to be a very bright line at conception. (Contraceptives prevent conception; condoms by preventing sperm from entering, the pill by preventing ovulation, and so on.)
(I should note that I think there are sound reasons to treat a risk that will end one out of a trillion people chosen at random as less of a concern than a risk that is certain to end a certain person, and that this line of reasoning depends heavily on this premise, but it would take too long to go into those reasons here. I can in another comment if you're interested.)
*Noting that 'potential resulting individual DNAs' are individually much less likely than just sperm-egg combinations.
One or two, but for me deciding which move to make is practically instinct, less lookahead. Also I'm not entirely sure how this is relevant.
We seem to be arguing from different axioms. For me, it seems that if you're confident that having more people in the world is a net positive, then as a necessary conclusion the moral thing to do is to try to have as many children as possible. If you're not sure of this, I don't undersand how you can conclude it's a moral wrong to destroy something which is not yet a person but merely has the potential to become one. For what reason is this latter situation immoral?
What role should the future play in decision-making?
It is not clear to me that prohibiting murder derives from that position or mandates birth.
By quantification of "merely." If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 90% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems almost as bad to end them as it would be to end them once they were awake. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 5% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems not nearly as bad to end them. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 1e-6 chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems that ending them has little moral cost.
If infants are nearly guaranteed to become people, then failing to protect them because we are impatient does not strike me as wisdom.
Expected values are important. Obviously. Couldn't you have asked that, instead of bandying about with discount rates and chess?
I don't think prohibiting murder is the thing to do because having more people in the world is a net positive. I think it's the thing to do because prohibiting murder is a net positive, for reasons I've gone in to elsewhere and will happily repeat for you if you'd like. But I don't see that prohibiting infanticide has the same positives. If the reason you're against infanticide is that you think increasing the number of people in the world is gives a positive expected value, that's fine - but then shouldn't you be having as many children as possible? If not, I'm having trouble seeing what relevance it is that a fetus is going to be a person.
I believe this addresses the rest of your post, also.
From the NIH:
So your bright line should be heartbeat, or at least zygote implantation. This does not significantly affect your conclusions.
The jump from 1e-12 to .5 seems brighter to me than the jump from .5 to .8. (.5 is also historically significant, as only about half of born children would live to see puberty for much of human history.)