jkaufman comments on How to choose a country/city? - Less Wrong

11 Post author: joaolkf 02 November 2013 01:48AM

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Comment author: joaolkf 04 November 2013 09:01:41AM *  2 points [-]

You're being excessively confrontational.

You are right. I'm very sorry about that. I mildly panicked seeing that the first comments of an extremely personally relevant post were concentrated on the Swedish issue, which wasn't the core of my question.

This is the list from their website.

Yes, I know. It's missing Kristian, and I believe some research associates are not collaborating with FHI anymore.

If other people have pointers to evidence on this I would be curious.

Any trolley problem study will give you the proportion on the normal population. It's about 80% deontological, 20% utilitarian. Eric Schwitzgebel studies will give you the proportion among philosophers and among ethicists. The evidence for transhumanists is anecdotal. Although I've been one for 6 years, have directed a transhumanist NGO and have met many old timers, I've never met a deontological transhumanist in my life.

Comment author: jkaufman 04 November 2013 02:33:14PM 2 points [-]

I mildly panicked seeing that the first comments of an extremely personally relevant post were concentrated on the Swedish issue, which wasn't the core of my question.

Sorry about that. I'm interested in this tangent, but if you're not I'm fine dropping it.

Any trolley problem study will give you the proportion on the normal population.

I don't think trolley problems are a good measure of how consequentialist random people are. They're designed to push us far past our intuitions, to figure out if we still say consequentialist things when it means actively deciding who lives and dies, as well as overriding our generally very strong "don't kill people" heuristic.

A similar test, in the opposite direction, would be something like "would it be ok for someone to steal food if they would otherwise starve to death?" This pushes people away from "stealing is wrong" towards evaluating outcomes. They may or may not think the societally corrosive effects of stealing outweigh a starvation death postponed, but my experience is they'll generally consider it in terms of consequences.