Squark comments on Compartmentalizing: Effective Altruism and Abortion - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (80)
I mostly agree, however there have to be scenarios in which another person is a net negative, if we're to avoid the repugnant conclusion. Moreover, in the case of abortion we're considering an undesired child which might mean psychological damage both to the child and the unwilling parent. To take an extreme example, consider pregnancy from rape.
According to UDT we have to compute the expectation value of the utility function over the whole "a priori" Tegmark IV multiverse (without conditioning on observations). A natural way to model this is considering the Solomonoff measure on the space of infinite sequences of bits (each such sequence is a "universe") . Thus the expectation value is an integral over all such sequences. It is natural to require the utility function to be bounded in order for the integral to converge (avoiding Pascal's mugger). Since each universe enters the integral together with its time translated versions, the resulting time asymptotics is 2^{-Kolmogorov complexity of t} which decays only slightly faster than 1/t. This result doesn't depend on the details of the time discount in the "bare" utility function: it is a universality result. See also this.