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army1987 comments on The Mere Cable Channel Addition Paradox - Less Wrong Discussion
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Okay, so Parfit's paradox doesn't prove that we should make more people if our resources are constant. And it doesn't prove that we should make more people when we get more resources. But it might still prove that we should agree to make more people and more resources if it's a package deal.
More concretely, if you had a button that created (or made accessible) one additional unit of resource and a million people using that resource to live lives barely worth living, would you press that button? Grabbing only the resources and skipping the people isn't on the menu of the thought experiment. It seems to me that if you would press that button, and also press the next button that redistributes all existing resources equally among existing people, then the repugnant conclusion isn't completely dead...
Indeed, I immediately thought “what's the difference between the government giving you $50 that you can only spend on cables, and it just giving you cables?”.
There isn't one. The reason I phrased it that way was to help keep the link between the various steps in the thought experiment as clear as possible.