Since I chose the specks -- no, I probably wouldn't pay a penny; avoiding the speck is not even worth the effort to decide to pay the penny or not. I would barely notice it; it's too insignificant to be worth paying even a tiny sum to avoid.
I suppose I too am "rounding down to zero"; a more significant harm would result in a different answer.
You're avoiding the question. What if a penny was automatically payed for you each time in the future to avoid dust specks floating in your eye? The question is whether the dust speck is worth at least a negative penny of disutility. For me, I would say yes.
Acksiom, yes, I find it strange as well. Certainly, people in our immediate community are more valuable than people we have never met in other continents. However, I don't think "community" should include beyond those who we actually interact with. It shouldn't include abstract groupings such as "state" or "nation". Supporting your high-school sports team is fine.
I don't see why they should be more valuable. From a selfish perspective, it might feel worse to lose someone you know, but from a charitable perspective, I don't value someone merely because I am familiar with them.
I think on re-reading this that Robin's initial comment was meant to be ironic, or at least a provocative extension of Eliezer's ideas.
As far as Eliezer's point, I would imagine that rabbis and other moral philosophers would agree that saving two lives is better than saving one. Beyond that the calculus of human lives is a difficult problem. Many people would say we should not sacrifice one to save two. There is this distinction between active and passive actions, which are judged very differently. It's all something of a mess.
Utilitarianism to the rescue, then.
Where does this end? If a philanthropist saves one life instead of two he is damned as any murder. Surely we in the more prosperous countries could easily save many lives by cutting back on luxuries, but we choose not to (this would no doubt apply to nearly everyone in these countries) does that make us all murderers?
Yes. We just aren't socially condemned for it.
This is really useful; thanks! I've been using Anki for little over a year now, and I've found it very useful for classes and learning programming. I really like this application, and I'd love to see any more decks that you happen to make. I'll definitely start my own next time I go back and read through the archives.
I can't make this one. Sorry to bail at the last minute. -- Paul Hobbs
It was on a wiki page that was lost in a shuffle years ago. HOWEVER! I managed to track down a copy of the page, and hosted it myself. Here's the one I was paraphrasing:
<Cale> stepcut: You know a library is good when just reading about it removes the particular task it performs from your life altogether.
It's a pretty funny quotes page, if you like Haskell. And I wouldn't feel right if I didn't include my favorite thing from that page, concerning the proper indentation of C code:
"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt." -- Blair P. Houghton
Having fought far too many segfaults, and been irritated by the lack of common data structures in libc, I can only agree.
Thank you for this.
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The reasoning here seems very broken to me (I have no opinion on the conclusion yet):
Look at a version of the reverse dial. Say that you start with 3^^^3 people having 1000000 dust-specks a second rubbed in their eye, and 0 people tortured. Each time you turn the dial up by 1, 1 person is moved over from the "speck in the eye" list over to the "tortured for 50 years" list, and the frequency is reduced by 1 spec/second. Would you turn the dial up to 1000000?
So because there is a continuum between the right answer (lots of torture) and the wrong answer (3^^^3 horribly blinded people), you would rather blind those people?