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Eugine_Nier comments on Don't Build Fallout Shelters - Less Wrong
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The point is that it takes less money to increase the utility of someone living in a third-world country by a fixed amount than to increase the utility of some living in a first world country by the same amount.
Yes, that's exactly what is being said. You calculate the value of both types of lives, divide by the costs, and go for whichever provides the highest resulting payoff.
In other words, you have not naively assigned the same utility to every life saved, and you have calculated things in proportion to your best guess as to their actual expected utility. You shut up and multiply. This is exactly what the sentence you objected to was trying to say.
Perhaps you already grok this principle so well that you were assuming the sentence was meant to say something else? Otherwise I'm confused why you feel the need to make that point.
That's true, but the discount factor still applies. Helping people in the third world is cheap enough relative to helping people in the first world that it makes up for the reduced utility per year of life saved.
The same discount factor applies to helping yourself in probability branches where you experience disasters, at the expense of ones where you don't.