private_messaging comments on A (small) critique of total utilitarianism - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 26 June 2012 12:36PM

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Comment author: private_messaging 26 June 2012 02:46:43PM *  0 points [-]

I don't think it's even linearly combinable. Suppose there were 4 copies of me total, pair doing some identical thing, other pair doing 2 different things. The second pair is worth more. When I see someone go linear on morals, that strikes me as evidence of poverty of moral value and/or poverty of mathematical language they have available.

Then the consequentialism. The consequences are hard to track - got to model the worlds resulting from uncertain initial state. Really really computationally expensive. Everything is going to use heuristics, even jupiter brains.

There's also measuring and shut-up-and-multiplying the wrong thing: e.g., seeing people willing to pay about the same in total to save 2000 birds or 20,000 birds and claiming this constitutes "scope insensitivity." The error is assuming this means that people are scope-insensitive, rather than to realise that people aren't buying saved birds at all, but are paying what they're willing to pay for warm fuzzies in general - a constant amount.

Well, "willing to pay for warm fuzzies" is a bad way to put it IMO. There's limited amount of money available in the first place, if you care about birds rather than warm fuzzies that doesn't make you a billionaire.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 June 2012 12:46:55PM *  0 points [-]

Well, "willing to pay for warm fuzzies" is a bad way to put it IMO. There's limited amount of money available in the first place, if you care about birds rather than warm fuzzies that doesn't make you a billionaire.

The figures people would pay to save 2000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds were $80, $78 and $88 respectively, which oughtn't be so much that the utility of money for most WEIRD people would be significantly non-linear. (A much stronger effect IMO could be people taking --possibly subconsiously-- the “2000” or the “20,000” as evidence about the total population of that bird species.)