Not everyone is fertile. I can't make either, currently.

But my point is that someone still has to take the cost of raising the child. So a utilitarian might try to convince more people to make tulpas instead of making more babies.

But someone still has to raise the kid at some point, and besides, not everyone can make sperm.

This seems like a non sequitur.

Anyway, creating tulpas is presumably much cheaper than raising an actual child, for anyone. So once the low hanging fruit in donating money to a charity that increases actual population or whatever, creating tulpas will be a much more efficient way of increasing the population, assuming they 'count' in the utility function separately and everything.

I like this sort of attitude a lot more than other attitudes I see on gender here. If there are intelligence differences between different groups of people, I want to believe that so that I can help fix that and make everyone as intelligent as is right (once more important issues are solved, of course). But it seems to be more common for people to stop once they notice a difference, and just conclude that that group is inferior.

So it looks like the Pascal's mugger problem can be reduced to two problems that need to be solved anyway for an FAI: how to be optimally rational given a finite amount of computing resources, and how to assign probabilities for mathematical statements in a reasonable way.

Does that sound right?

On a slightly related note, vibrators like the Hitachi Magic Wand are probably a superstimulus for women analogous to porn for men. (of course, anyone can enjoy either type, but that is less common)

Also I agree with your general comment about self improvements, especially since it is hard to find techniques/habits that work for everyone.

I don't see how your P1 is a statement over all minds, it looks more like a statement over most arguments.

I've had a similar idea that perceived self status was the primary difference between skill/comfort at public speaking. I think the theory might be a good first approximation, but that there is a lot more going on too.

Yeah this only makes sense for preference utilitarianism, I should have mentioned that.

It is strange to be sure. I wonder what the aggregated preferences of humanity would look like. I wouldn't be to surprised if it ended up being really similar to the aggregated preferences of current humans. Also, adding some sort of EV to this would probably make any issue here go away. But in any case, it seems to be an open problem on how to chose the starting set of utility functions in a moral way. Once things were running, it might work pretty well, especially once death is solved.

Why not just plan for whatever the current set of utility functions is? In the context of a FAI, it probably wouldn't want the aggregate utility function to change anyway. But again, deciding which functions to aggregate seems to be unsolved.

I had a small thought the other day. Average utilitarianism appeals to me most it the various utilitarianisms I have seen, but has the obvious drawback of allowing utility to be raised simply by destroying beings with less than average utility.

My thought was that maybe this could be solved by making the individual utility functions permanent in some sense, i. e. killing someone with low utility would still cause average utility to decrease if they would have wanted to live. This seems to match my intuitions on morality better than any other utilitarianism I have seen.

One strange thing is that the preferences of our ancestors still would count just as much as any other person, but I had already been updating in this direction after reading an essay by gwern called the narrowing moral circle. I wasn't able to think of anything else too weird, but I haven't thought too much about this yet.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else has explored this idea already, or if anyone has any thoughts about it.