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Lumifer comments on The Bedrock of Fairness - Less Wrong
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It's a lot of resources from the perspective of a single person, but I was thinking at a slightly larger scale. By "easy", I mean that manageable groups of people can do it repeatedly and be confident of success. Really, the fact that sentient minds can be valued in terms of resources at all is sufficient for my argument. (That value can then be ignored when assessing productivity, as it's a sunk cost.)
You seem to be looking in the wrong place with your "that people ought to earn every resource themselves" example - my opinion is that the people who have resources should not give those resources to people who won't make good use of them. That the people who lack resources will then have to earn them if they're to survive is an unavoidable consequence of that (and is my real goal here), but those aren't the people that I think ought to be changing things.
As for what strategies people actually follow, I think most people do what I'm saying they should do, on an individual level. Most people protect their resources, and share them only with those who they expect to be able to return the favor. On the group level, though, people lose track of how much things actually cost, and support things like welfare that help people regardless of whether they're worth the cost of keeping alive.
"whether they're worth the cost of keeping alive." and this highlights the differences in our views.
our point of difference is in this whole basis of using practical "worth" as The way of deciding whether or not a person should live/die.
I can get trying to minimise the birth of new people that are net-negative contributors to the world... but from my perspective, once they are born - it's worth putting some effort into supporting them.
Why? because it's not their fault they were born the way they are, and they should not be punished because of that. They need help to get along.
Sometimes - the situation that put them in their needy state occurred after they were born - and again is still not their fault.
Another example to point out why I feel your view is unfair to people: Imagine somebody who has worked all their lives in an industry that has given amazing amounts of benefit to the world.. but has only just now become obsolete. That person is now unemployed and, due to being near retirement age, unemployable. It's an industry in which they were never really paid very well, and their savings don't add up to enough to cover their ongoing living costs for very long.
Eventually, there will come a time when the savings run out and this person dies of starvation without our help.
I consider this not to be a fair situation, and I'd rather my tax-dollars went to helping this person live a bit longer, than go to the next unnecessary-war (drummed up to keep the current pollies in power).
I've just made the unpleasant discovery that being downvoted to -4 makes it impossible to reply to those who replied to me (or to edit my comment). I'll state for the record that I disagree with that policy... and proceed to shut up.
It's quite possible, only requiring payment in your own karma points. If you're karma-broke, well....
Seeing as how what I was saying was basically "let the poor starve", this ending seems strangely appropriate.