MugaSofer comments on Don't Build Fallout Shelters - Less Wrong

26 Post author: katydee 07 January 2013 02:38PM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 January 2013 11:54:47PM *  5 points [-]

You're confusing two messages. One is that building a fallout shelter is not a good way to optimize personal safety. The other is that optimizing society safety is, for some unspecified reason, more-virtuous than optimizing personal safety.

The first point is historically wrong. In the time when people in the US built fallout shelters, most people who built them thought it was more likely than not that there would be a nuclear war soon. They made the correct calculation given this assumption.

The second point is simply a referral back to a set of presumptions about ethics (selfishness is bad) that should themselves be argued over, rather than the examples here.

The argument that you shouldn't build a fallout shelter because the life you'd live after civilization was destroyed wouldn't really be worth living is contrary to what we know about happiness. It is a highly-suspect argument for other reasons as well.