You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

crap comments on Some scary life extension dilemmas - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: Ghatanathoah 01 January 2013 06:41PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (39)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: crap 03 January 2013 11:33:01AM *  2 points [-]

Look. Simple utilitarianism doesn't have to be correct. It looks like a wrong idea to me. Often, when reasoning informally, people confabulate wrong formal sounding things that loosely match their intuitions. And then declare that normative.

Is a library of copies of one book worth the same to you? Is a library of books of 1 author worth as much? Does variety ever truly count for nothing? There's no reason why u("AB") should be equal to u("A")+u("B"). People pick + because they are bad at math , or perhaps bad at knowing when they are being bad at math. edit: When you try to math-ize your morality, poor knowledge of math serves as Orwellian newspeak, it defines the way you think. It is hard to choose correct function even if there was any, and years of practice on too simple problems make wrong functions pop into your head.

Comment author: Incorrect 03 January 2013 07:33:42PM 0 points [-]

The lifespan dilemma applies to all unbounded utility functions combined with expected value maximization, it does not require simple utilitarianism.