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Ghatanathoah comments on The Mere Cable Channel Addition Paradox - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've come up with a formalization of everything you've said here that I think is a steel man for your position. Somewhat vaguely: A population with homogeneous utility defines a point in a two-dimensional space — one dimension for population size, one for individual utility. Our preferences are represented by a total, transitive, binary relation on that space. The point of the Mere Addition Paradox is that a set of reasonable axioms rules out all preferences. The point you're making is that if we're restricted by resources to some region of that space, then we only need to think about our preferences on a one-dimensional Pareto frontier. And one can easily come up with preferences on that frontier that satisfy all the nice axioms.
Very well. Just so long as the Pareto frontier doesn't change, there is no paradox.
I think you've got it. Thanks for formalizing that for me, I think it will help me a lot in the future!
If you're interested in where I got some of these ideas from, by the way, I derived most of my non-Less Wrong inspiration from the work of philosopher Alan Carter.