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paper-machine comments on Ambitious utilitarians must concern themselves with death - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Mitchell_Porter 25 October 2012 10:41AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 29 October 2012 05:08:03PM 0 points [-]

I don't want to get provoked into arguing too strongly for antinatalism, because I do think it is futile to prioritize it. I am an antinatalist, but I am also a transhumanist, and the antinatalism definitely comes second, because there is no prospect of the human race just deciding to stop reproducing, whereas it would take a disaster to stop some sort of singularity from occurring, so efforts on that front have more meaning.

One interesting thought experiment I had, once, while contemplating antinatalism -- depending on your estimate of when the singularity occurs, it's very interesting to try and determine just how stringently antinatalism would have to be followed for the extinction of humanity to occur before the singularity happened.

Of course, how antinatalism spreads in the next century or so influences how many people are around to immanentize the eschaton, but the margin of error on your everyday singularity estimate is already too large to bother with second-order effects.