Can you elaborate? As I said, it doesn't mean we don't talk about immigration, just not around her. Similarly, if someone had an eating disorder, we wouldn't talk about triggering stuff in front of her.

Good point about that. I think it's a matter of trade-offs - my take is that anything that an aspiring rationalist I trust classifies as a community hazard is a community hazard. For instance, one rationalist I know had a traumatic experience with immigration into the US, and as a result has PTSD around immigration discussions. This makes immigration discussions a community hazard issue in our local LW meetup, due to her particular background. It wouldn't be in another setting. So we hold immigration discussions when she's not there.

However, the broad point is taken, and I think especially the issue of arguments for one set of positions being classified as a community hazard - important to keep this in mind to prevent groupthink and become an echo chamber.

One meta-hazard would be that "community hazards" could end up defined far too broadly, encompassing anything that might make some people feel uncomfortable and simply become a defense for sacred values of the people assessing what should constitute "community hazards".

Or worse, that the arguments for one set of positions could get classified as "community hazards" such that, to use a mind-killing example, all the pro-life arguments get classified as "community hazards" while the pro-choice ones do not.

So it's probably best to be exceptionally conservative with what you're willing to classify as a "community hazard"

It makes a huge difference whether the dust speck choices add up or not. If they do, OrphanWilde's objection applies and the only path to survival is to be tortured.

If they don't, so each one of me gets one dust speck total, then dust specks for sure. All of the copies of me (whether there are one or 3^^^3 of us) are experiencing what amounts to a choice between individually being dust-specked or individually being tortured. We get what we ask for either way, and no one else is actually impacted by the choice.

There's no need to drag average utilitarianism in.

This seems like a weird mishmash of other hypotheticals on the site, I'm not really seeing the point of parts of your scenario.

Historically speaking, I agree, yet it's conceivable that a malicious actor might militarise some powerful technology, and classing its use as an extreme act of terrorism sounds about right.

When you own equity, you can profit in two different ways. One way is to receive some of the cash that the company generates, traditionally in the form of dividends. That's known as the dividend yield. The other is price appreciation.

These two ways are interlinked, of course, in many ways. Price change depends on the company's cash flows. A popular nowadays way of distributing cash to shareholders is share buybacks (they are more tax efficient) which work through share price.

To get back to the original point, many "sin" companies (e.g. tobacco) pay dividends. If the price at which you can buy the stock is "cheap" (= "consistently undervalued"), your dividend yield is higher even without any price appreciation.

Let's take a stylized example. Company XYZ's shares are traded at $100 and the company pays $5/year dividend. The dividend yield is 5%. Now let's say it has been targeted for divestment and the share price dropped to $50. At this point if you buy the shares you will get the dividend yield of 10% without any need to hope for a price increase.

Terrorists are a rounding error. Sure, some day they'll take out a city with a nuke but in history cities have been wiped out many many times without taking their parent civilization with them.

That is a good point. The stock market is probably more competitive than whatever market the company is in, so, for every one moral investor, there are infinite more that are amoral.

Again, that is a good point, and I already had it in mind when I posted my reply. The person I was replying to did not articulate it correctly.

Still, I do not think the original question should be dismissed outright. The fact is that not even the stock market is perfectly competitive. There are not infinite players in either side. For instance, if you look at Islamic countries, you can find countries where close to 100% are religious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country. I can imagine how a religious figure could possibly bankrupt a company by talking to banks alone and draining the company out of capital (without ever talking to customers). My point is that even in highly competitive markets maybe activists can have an influence. I find it very unlikely. I still think dismissing that question outright is anti-scientific.

There are actually Sin Funds that target stock of companies like tobacco, fossil fuel companies etc and invest in them on the basis that they're likely slightly undervalued due to other "moral" investors avoiding them.

If they continue to be consistently undervalued because of that mechanism, then a Sin Fund should see no gain in growth as a result of it. What the Sin Fund needs is for morals to shift in the direction of those firms, or for investors to start caring less about morals.

My guess (which is no more than a guess) is that the reverse is likely to happen with tobacco (as smoking declines) and fossil fuels (as other sources of energy get lots of support and start taking away market share from fossil fuels), but other varieties of "sin" might go the other way (e.g., I think pornography is much less disapproved-of than 20 years ago and I would expect that trend to continue). But my guess is also that these things are pretty well priced in already.