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drethelin comments on Utilitarians probably wasting time on recreation - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (82)
This is trivial and useless. It's obvious without math that if you spend time helping people instead of having fun, more people will be helped and you will have less fun. This is a trade off that almost no one makes or will make. In the time it took me to to reply to this post, I could've gone to AMF and donated money via paypal, but I didn't. Did you? How much money do you have in your bank account and why isn't it in AMF's bank account?
This is true, but it is not the only point of the post. I thought the post was an attempt to quantify these consequences--to find the marginal cost (in lives) of time. Isn't this a more worthwhile pursuit than the one you've cited?
I assumed this was the impetus for the post. The author must know this already, or s/he would not have titled the post so provocatively.
No, it's the kind of example a professor of economics might tell his students when explaining opportunity costs or when trying to convince them that deep down they really are very self-interested.
If someone posted an explanation of Pythagoras' theorem, I wouldn't upvote that either, however useful it is to middle school students.
That is not a comparable example. Pythagoras' theorem is not relevant to this site. By contrast, altruism and optimal charity are frequent topics of discussion on this site.
And yet an explanation of Bayes' theorem gets referenced and linked commonly.
My standard for top level posts is a little higher than my standard for comments.
Actually the one I'm thinking of is an off-site article, but if it was here it would be a post to main. And there's a main post explaining the same thing, that was rather well-received.
It is obvious that the trade off is there--I thought that people weren't taking the option of helping people at their own expense because they didn't know that that option caused more benefit overall than the option of having fun at others' expense. The reason that people who know about efficient charity aren't helping people at their own expense is instead apparently an objection to utilitarianism in general. I had thought before posting that most people at Less Wrong were utilitarians.
As for your questions, I'm a high school student, so I want to spend my money on college to increase my chances of making much more money later in life so that I can donate more to efficient charities.
Some amateur etymology, for those enamored of distinctions:
Most people here seem to be consequentialists, and consequentialism is merely the view that an action's goodness is defined by its outcome. Most are also 'utilitarians', seemingly meaning that they believe expected utility maximization is the correct metric for ranking outcomes, where 'utility' refers simply to the output of an agent's utility function. Probably most are also 'altruists', where altruism is the view that doing good things for others is good for oneself.
This is a departure from how the terms are used in the ethical literature. There, 'utilitarianism' tends to refer to an agent-neutral consequentialist moral theory; that is, my survival doesn't matter any more than yours. Also, 'altruism' in ethics refers to a theory that looks just like utilitarianism but discounts the agent entirely; think Christian self-sacrifice.
Our use of the term 'utility' has its roots in game theory, decision theory, and economics; our 'utilitarianism' seems to be an offshoot of that. Our use of the term 'altruism' seems to come from anthropology by way of evolutionary psychology.
Utilitarianism isn't a synonym for altruism. You can be a utilitarian and value your own happiness above that of others.
It's worth noting that this is a departure from the way these terms are commonly used in the ethics literature.
You're right, thanks for pointing that out.
Ah, thank you. Now I know more proper uses of the words "utilitarian" and "altruist", that should help me communicate.
Edit: Just read thomblake's comment. Now I'm back to using "utilitarian" to mean "altruistic value-maximizer".