Nisan comments on Open thread, 24-30 March 2014 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Metus 25 March 2014 07:42AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (156)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Nisan 25 March 2014 08:26:20PM 4 points [-]

Earth produces a long and prosperous civilization. After nearly all the resources are used up, the lean and hardscrapple survivors reason, "let's figure out how to squeeze the last bits of computation out of the environment so that our children will enjoy a better life than us before our species goes extinct". But from our perspective, those children won't have as much welfare as the vast majority of human lives in our future, so those children being born would bring our average down. We would will the hardscrapple survivors to not produce more people.