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Ghatanathoah comments on Some scary life extension dilemmas - Less Wrong Discussion
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1) I don't find utility monsters hugely counter-intuitive for total util. If you replace the standard utility monster with something like "extremely efficient simulation of many consciousnesses", then converting all our inefficient fleshy beings into a much greater number of (lets say) similarly happy other beings seems a good deal to me. The bite of a utility monster case to mean seems to arise mainly out of the fact we are choosing between one really happy being versus lots of not-so-happy beings.
2) Diminishing marginal returns with lifespan don't strike me as absurd - indeed, they strike me as obvious. A priori, there seem empirical reasons to think in the very long run added lifespan will add less value, as you will do the most important/fun things first, and so extra increments of life will add elements of less value. Perhaps more persuasive is it does capture why we are (generally) risk averse with respect to lifetime gambles (certainty of 20 more years, or half chance at 40?) If marginal returns from lifespan were increasing, then implies we should be risk seeking on these gambles, which seems wrong.
I think a more obvious reason is that your risk of developing a health problem that kills you or destroys your quality of life increases as you age. I think an implicit part of the dilemma is that these risks are largely eliminated. I also think that society is currently pretty good at generating new fun and important things to do. Maybe in the very long run it'll run out of steam, but I think adding decades or centuries of healthy years would be about as fun as your first few years of life.
Plus suggesting that lifespan has diminishing marginal returns has the rather unpleasant implication that at some point you'd get more utility by killing someone and replacing them with someone new (who will live the same amount of time as the dead person would have lived), which seems very wrong.
It seems more likely to me that this is due to the Endowment Effect. I don't know if this is a bias or if it just means that risk aversion with your life is a terminal value.
I think you'll agree that even if lifespan does have diminishing returns, it probably has smaller diminishing returns (past a certain point) than money. Yet people take insanely stupid risks to get huge amounts of money. Maybe that means that risk aversion isn't 100% correlated with diminishing marginal utility.
I don't think they're increasing, I think they're fairly constant. I think that if you add another 20 years to someone's life, then, providing they are healthy years and other factors like income and social connectedness stay constant, they will probably produce about the same amount of utility as the previous 20 years would have. In spite of this, I agree with you that it seems wrong to be risk-seeking, but I don't know why. Maybe the endowment effect again.