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Stabilizer comments on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have trouble with the statement "In the end, we're all insignificant." I mean I get the sentiment, which is of awe and aims to reduce pettiness. I can get behind that. But I have trouble if someone uses it in an argument, such as: "Why bother doing X; we're all insignificant anyway."
Because, if you look closely, "significance" is not simply a property of objects. It is, at the very least, a function of objects, agents and scales. For example you can say that we're all insignificant on the cosmic scale; but we're also all insignificant on the microscopic scale. We're also insignificant for some trees in the middle of the rainforest or an alien in another galaxy. We're almost completely insignificant to some random person in the past, present or future, but much more significant to the people around us.
To put differently, given two actions A & B with expected utilities U & V, you should choose A over B iff U > V. Only the relative ordering of U & V is meaningful, not the absolute difference (the utility function can be scaled arbitrarily anyway).
Good point. I guess you could rephrase some of the existential angst over insignificance as despairing at the tiny amounts of utility we can manipulate given a utility function scaled to the entire world/universe/whatever.