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Jiro comments on On Caring - Less Wrong
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Daniel grew up as a poor kid, and one day he was overjoyed to find $20 on the sidewalk. Daniel could have worked hard to become a trader on Wall Street. Yet he decides to become a teacher instead, because of his positive experiences in tutoring a few kids while in high school. But as a high school teacher, he will only teach thousand kids in his career, while as a trader, he would have been able to make millions of dollars. If he multiplied his positive experience with one kid by a thousand, it still probably wouldn't compare with the joy of finding $20 on the sidewalk times a million.
Because Daniel has been thinking of scope insensitivity, he expects his brain to misreport how much he actually cares about large numbers of dollars: the internal feeling of satisfaction with gaining money can't be expected to line up with the actual importance of the situation. So instead of just asking his gut how much he cares about making lots of money, he shuts up and multiplies the joy of finding $20 by a million....
Um, that's nonsense. His brain does not misreport how much he actually cares -- it's just that his brain thinks that it should care more. It's a conflict between "is" and "should", not a matter of misreporting "is".
After which he goes and robs a bank.
You do realize that what I said is a restatement of one of the examples in the original article, except substituting "caring about money" for "caring about birds"? And snarles' post was a somewhat more indirect version of that as well? Being nonsense is the whole point.
Yes, I do, and I think it's nonsense there as well. The care-o-meter is not broken, it's just that your brain would prefer you to care more about all these numbers. It's like preferring not have a fever and saying the thermometer is broken because it shows too high a temperature.