(Since there didn't seem to be one for this month, and I just ran across a nice quote.)
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.
- Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up (or down) separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Depends what "it" is.
If the alternatives are killing 10 people efficiently at a cost of $100 a head vs. killing ten people inefficiently at a cost of $1000 a head, then killing them inefficiently is worse: I've not only killed 10 people, I've wasted $9000 worth of resources that could have been used to do something actually useful.
But if I've been given a $10,000 killing budget, then it's clearly better for the world if I spend this inefficiently and only manage to kill 10 people rather than 100.
this seems to convolute the example with personal moralities that have no bearing on the actual, objective "task" and how efficiently or inefficiently it is accomplished. if the goal is to kill people, your moral qualms don't make it "better" to kill less. you are still performing poorly relative to the task.
this does highlight a problem with the original quote. "useless" is rather ambiguous as the reader has to decide whether to tie "use" to the utility of the task relative to what it is trying to accomplish versus the reader's personal goals. the same applies to the equally ambiguous word, "should."