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wedrifid comments on Utilitarians probably wasting time on recreation - Less Wrong Discussion
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Or maybe I'm really just not a stereotypical consequentialist movie villain? I have ethics for a start.
So you would say that in theory you support lowering third world populations, but in practice not because in general arguments in favour of genocide are almost always wrong, or just because it seems like the sort of thing a bad person would do and you don't want to be a bad person?
I'm not attacking consequentialism, I'm consequentialist myself, I'm just puzzled by the fact you seem to be assigning negative value to human lives.
I don't value increasing third world population. Most obviously because more people starving to death closer to near a Malthusian limit is a bad thing.
What do you mean "Just"?
I was attacking consequentialism, at least the kind of consequentialism that assumes that killing people is morally equivalent to not saving them (that is most kinds). Extermination and inaction are not the same thing either intellectually or morally. I can only be considered a consequentialist in the sense that I am an agent trying to maximise the value of the state of the universe where that state includes time. ie. Not just the future matters but how you get there. This allows that murder can be bad even if everything ends up the same in 5 years.
I'm not. I'm assigning negative value to squalor and death. Causing more people to be born is a very slight positive which would dominate if there were zero externalities.
I don't want to get into this discussion much further... there is far too much of a default moral high ground of "Yay! Donating to Africans is altruistic!" regardless of whether it results in better outcomes. This just means that such conversations seem like work. I'll donate to existential risk and ignore "breed more africans!" funds.
I agree that existential risk is a higher priority. I used AMF in my example because its benefits are easy to accurately quantify.
The hope is that at higher population, third world nations will break out of the Malthusian trap and transition from the shitholes they are now into healthy growing economies. The "Malthusian limit" isn't really a fixed thing anymore, since infrastructure and economic development can raise agricultural output and the sustainable population by orders of magnitude. And a lot of third-world evils - malaria included - have the additional effect of leaving lots of weakened or crippled people, which seems more like the sort of thing that drags a society down than population growth does.
On the other hand, this argument does suggest that fixing things that weaken has more value than fixing things that kill; ie, it's better to prevent a case of childhood malnutrition that leaves an intellectually stunted adult, than to prevent a case of childhood infection that leaves a corpse. I think that this conclusion is one which conventional altruists would find much more reasonable.
I don't pretend to have expertise in history but that hope seems... backwards somehow. What allowed first world countries to reach their current economic state most certainly wasn't reaching a sufficiently high population.
I have no problem just lying to conventional altruists in order to seem 'reasonable' to them. Or, preferably, not talking about (the equivalent of) politics or perhaps saying true and positive things about their 'altruism' that give the impression that I'm on their 'side' without actually having to believe anything crazy. And in cases where their 'altruistic' cause isn't even near the top of the givewell list (or existential risk related) then I'll almost certainly not say outright that they're just giving 50 bucks to take away their guilt, that'd be rude.
What's your goal here? To make them feel better? To avoid seeming like a jerk? Or to further whatever goals you consider altruistic/generally a good idea? If the last one, why lie to them? Because you think there's no way they'll see your point?
Obviously none of us speaks our minds all the time - when I see someone giving to a cause I consider inefficient, I don't shout, "Wait, I know a better way!" But if there's an opportunity, saying "I really wonder if increasing the world's population is a good idea at this point, so I favor charities that focus on quality of life rather than lives saved" seems better to me than false agreement. Jerkitude and lying are not your only options here.
To execute the role of someone with rudimentary social skills and reap the many benefits that go along with that. Sometimes evangelism (or obnoxious invalidation of people's warm-fuzzies) just isn't the most useful action in a given circumstance.
"Wedrifid" is somewhat more forthright than I in this regard.
An example would be deworming, which doesn't save many lives but does improve quality of life and school attendance rates.
But the aim isn't to create people, its to save those who are already alive. You are saying that many of those people need to die now to prevent other deaths later, sounds pretty movie-vilain to me.
Well, its not always a good argument. Bad guys stereotypically have cats, this doesn't make cat ownership wrong. Yes, this is an absurd parody, but the general point is valid, correlation does not imply causation.
They seem pretty similar from the perspective of the person on the other end.
No it doesn't. That's ridiculous. It sounds like the role of an extra who isn't playing any significant role in the movie at all. I've never once seen a movie where the villain was completely irrelevant to the plot and made no significant plot related actions. I'm afraid you've just lost the assumption of good faith. Your earlier questions could have at least been genuine confusion but now it seems you are just trying to villainise the act of not sharing your naive morality. I mean as actual literal villains who do things like create genocidal diseases.
That sounds true until you actually think about it. Someone trying to exterminate you doesn't seem anything like someone who isn't involved at all.