Pentashagon comments on Jews and Nazis: a version of dust specks vs torture - Less Wrong

16 Post author: shminux 07 September 2012 08:15PM

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Comment author: Pentashagon 11 September 2012 05:03:52AM 0 points [-]

I noticed something similar in another comment. CEV must compare the opportunity cost of pursuing a particular terminal value at the expense of all other terminal values, at least in a universe with constrained resources. This leads me to believe that CEV will suggest that the most costly (in terms of utility opportunity lost by choosing to spend time fulfilling a particular terminal value instead of another) terminal value be abandoned until only one is left and we become X maximizers. This might be just fine if X is still humane, but it seems like any X will be expressible as a conjunction of disjunctions and any particular disjuctive clause will have the highest opportunity cost and could be removed to increase overall utility, again leading to maximizing the smallest expressible (or easiest to fulfill) goal.