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ArisKatsaris comments on On saving the world - Less Wrong
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You could think of the "utilities" in your utilitarianism. Why would one unit of global utility that you can sacrifice be able to produce 10^80 - ish units of utility gain? It's unlikely to come across an unit of utility that you can so profitably sacrifice (if it is bounded and doesn't just exponentially stack up in influences ad infinitum). This removes the anthropic considerations from the leverage problem.
Since utility isn't an inherent concept in the physical laws of the universe but just a calculation inside our minds, I don't see your meaning here: You don't "come across" a unit of utility to sacrifice, you seek it out. An architect that seeks to design a skyscraper is more likely to succeed in designing a skyscraper than a random monkey doodling.
To estimate the architect's chances of success I see no point in starting out by thinking "how likely is a monkey to be able to randomly design a skyscraper?".
It seems to me that there's considerably less search in "not buy a porche" than in "build a skyscraper".
Let's suppose you value paperclips. Someone takes 10 paperclips from you, unbends them, but makes 10^90 paperclips later thanks to their use of 10 paperclips. In this hypothetical universe, these 10 paperclips are very special, and if someone gives you coordinates of a paperclip and claims it's one of those legendary 10 paperclips (that are going to be turned into 10^90 paperclips), you'd be wise to be quite skeptical - you need evidence that the paperclips you're looking at are so oddly located within the totality of paperclips. edit: or if someone gives you papers with paperclip marks left on them and says it's the papers that were held together by said legendary paperclips.
edit2: albeit i do agree - if we actually seek out something, we may be able to overcome very large priors against. In this case though, the issue is that we have a claim that our existing intrinsic values are in a necessarily very unusual relation to the vast majority of what's intrinsically valuable.