private_messaging comments on On saving the world - Less Wrong
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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.