TimFreeman comments on Circular Altruism - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 January 2008 06:00PM

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Comment author: TimFreeman 27 April 2011 03:56:36PM 2 points [-]

If that population of 400 or 500 people is all that's left of Homo Sapiens, then it's obvious to me that keeping 400 with probability 1 is better than keeping 500 with probability 0.9. Repopulating starting with 400 doesn't seem much harder than repopulating starting with 500, but repopulating starting with 0 is obviously impossible.

If we change the numbers a little bit, we get a different and still interesting example. I don't see an important difference between having 10 billion happy people and having 100 billion happy people. I can't visualize either number, and I have no reason to believe that having another 90 billion after the first 10 billion gives anything I care about.

Multiplying individual utility by number of people to get total utility is a mistake, IMO. I don't know what the correct solution is, but that's not it.