If I were actually willing to risk all of my remaining observer-moments in order to (e.g.) shelter Jews from Hitler, and my actual willingness to do that were not noticeably affected by (e.g.) signing up for cryonics, I would probably conclude that I don't actually believe that signing up for cryonics significantly increases my expected number of observer-moments, but rather was experiencing a "belief in belief" in immortality through cryonics.
Hum, no, it means that I don't use raw consequentialism/utilitarianism as my ethical framework. I consider them to be theoretically valid, but not directly usable by humans who are unable to forsee all the consequences of their act, and who have so many biases.
So while I can use consequentialism to reason on meta-ethics, and even to amend my ethical rules, I don't use it to take ethical decisions. I don't trust myself to do that. And in my current framework of ethics, sheltering Jews from Hitler is something that should be done, regardless of the risk taken by myself.
Today's post, Mere Messiahs was originally published on 02 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Superhero Bias, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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