We have votes because we want to maximize utility for the voters. Allowing easily manufactured people to vote creates incentives to manufacture people.
So the answer to this depends on your belief about utilitarianism. If you aggregate utility in such a way that adding more people increases utility in an unbounded way, then you should do whatever you can to encourage the creation of more people regardless of whether their votes cause harm to existing people, so it is good to create incentives for their creation and you should let them vote. (You also get the Repugnant Conclusion.) If you aggregate utility in some way that produces diminishing returns and avoids the Repugnant Conclusion, then it is possible that at some point creating more new people is a net negative. If so, you'd be better off precommitting to not let them vote because not letting them vote prevents them from being created, increasing utility.
Note: Most people, insofar as they can be described as utilitarian at all, will fall into the second category (with the precommitment being enforced by their inherent inability to care much for people who they cannot see as individuals).
This also works when you substitute "allowing unlimited immigration" for "creating unlimited amounts of people", Your choice of how to aggregate utility also affects whether it is good to trade off utility among already existing people just like it affects whether it is good to create new people.
Yes, agreed with all this.
And yes, like most people, I don't have a coherent understanding of how to aggregate intersubjective utility but I certainly don't aggregate it in ways that cause me to embrace the Repugnant Conclusion. (By contrast, on consideration I do seem to embrace Utility Monsters, distasteful as the prospect feels on its face.)
Your choice of how to aggregate utility also affects whether it is good to trade off utility among already existing people just like it affects whether it is good to create new people.
Well, not "just like.&...
It's that time of year again.
If you are reading this post, and have not been sent here by some sort of conspiracy trying to throw off the survey results, then you are the target population for the Less Wrong Census/Survey. Please take it. Doesn't matter if you don't post much. Doesn't matter if you're a lurker. Take the survey.
This year's census contains a "main survey" that should take about ten or fifteen minutes, as well as a bunch of "extra credit questions". You may do the extra credit questions if you want. You may skip all the extra credit questions if you want. They're pretty long and not all of them are very interesting. But it is very important that you not put off doing the survey or not do the survey at all because you're intimidated by the extra credit questions.
It also contains a chance at winning a MONETARY REWARD at the bottom. You do not need to fill in all the extra credit questions to get the MONETARY REWARD, just make an honest stab at as much of the survey as you can.
Please make things easier for my computer and by extension me by reading all the instructions and by answering any text questions in the simplest and most obvious possible way. For example, if it asks you "What language do you speak?" please answer "English" instead of "I speak English" or "It's English" or "English since I live in Canada" or "English (US)" or anything else. This will help me sort responses quickly and easily. Likewise, if a question asks for a number, please answer with a number such as "4", rather than "four".
Last year there was some concern that the survey period was too short, or too uncertain. This year the survey will remain open until 23:59 PST December 31st 2013, so as long as you make time to take it sometime this year, you should be fine. Many people put it off last year and then forgot about it, so why not take it right now while you are reading this post?
Okay! Enough preliminaries! Time to take the...
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2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey
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Thanks to everyone who suggested questions and ideas for the 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey. I regret I was unable to take all of your suggestions into account, because of some limitations in Google Docs, concern about survey length, and contradictions/duplications among suggestions. I think I got most of them in, and others can wait until next year.
By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.