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Vaniver comments on Alan Carter on the Complexity of Value - Less Wrong
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My understanding was that if two equally rational people have the same information they will draw the same conclusions. So if someone draws the same conclusion as you, that's evidence in your favor, but only very mild evidence since you don't know for sure if they're as rational as you and if they had the exact same info as you. I do think that might be a weak opening and am thinking of changing it.
It's perfectly true. People with severe medical problems need huge amount of resources merely to satisfy their preferences of "not being dead" and "not being sick." A normal person require far less resources to satisfy that preference. So people with severe medical problems are "reverse utility monsters." This is true regardless of whether you are a preference or happiness utilitarian, since obviously you need to be alive to be happy at all and healthy to reach your full happiness potential (FYI I'm a preference utilitarian).
Normal_Anomaly made most of the points I was going to, so I won't elaborate on this.
AAT is very specific. Independent invention is evidence for the attractiveness of an idea (and thus, one hopes, its truthfulness) but it's unrelated to AAT.
Sure. But you're telling me that two healthy individuals are equally efficient at converting resources into happiness? What evidence is there that the Brahmin is not ten times as capable of happiness as the Untouchable?
You need to have common knowledge of each other's estimates, common knowledge of each other's rationality, and common priors.
I thought you didn't need common priors, and I was wrong. Editing. (I might have had in mind Hanson's result that if you agree on the method to generate priors, then that's enough.)
I have edited my post to remove the reference to AAT per your and JGWeissman's advice.
In Carter's paper he was discussing a hypothetical pleasure wizard so good at converting resources into happiness that it was better to give it all the resources in the world and let everyone else just have enough for a life barely worth living. It seems unlikely that such an extreme pleasure wizard exists, although it's quite possible for there to be some variation among people considered "normal." The psychological unity of humankind provides some evidence against extreme pleasure wizards' existence, although it's far from conclusive.
Preference utilitarianism makes things more complicated since someone may be inefficient at producing happiness, but efficient at satisfying some of their other preferences. However, since being alive and healthy are nearly universal preferences, I think that it's still accurate to call someone with severe illness a reverse pleasure wizard, even if you value preference satisfaction rather than happiness.
Even if you're right and Carter was mistaken in stating that pleasure wizards don't exist, that doesn't alter his main point, which is that equality is valuable for its own sake, and therefore it is immoral to give all resources to pleasure wizards, no matter how efficient they are.