Charlie_Guthmann
Bio
Talk to me about cost benefit analysis !
Posts 9
Comments160
only skimmed your post so not sure if helpful but I wrote this a while ago. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zLi3MbMCTtCv9ttyz/formalizing-extinction-risk-reduction-vs-longtermism
Also you might find this helpful
Great work - tangential and sort of a philosophical complaint about these happiness studies, but I worry that for some % of the people getting pinged about how they feel right now, they do include a bit of the "life satisfaction" in what number they choose. I wonder if others have this same worry? I think the life satisfaction stuff is a pretty poor measurement because I think it largely just turns into a measurement of envy and jealousy.
Lots of discussion about people misinterpreting what barely worth living means on the individual utility axis, which I do think could be part of the issue. I also believe that there is a hidden assumption most people make here: that all the lives barely worth living are "similar" (or alternatively: it's easier to imagine 10000 people being similar than 10). I think there is another dimension in population utility functions that most people care about - the diversity of the world. It's easy to imagine the very good lives as a variety of distinct lives and the millions of just barely good lives all being the same sort of potato farmer. If you clarified that all of the barely worth living lives were extremely different, and gave people time to reflect on and believe that it is possible for 1 million lives to be very different, I wonder if many people would feel the conclusion is less repugnant. Whether or not having diversity be an input in your population utility function is a separate question.
Also, I found your post about utility functions to be helpful, thanks.
Need to work through the entire chain of effects here but I think (granted that a wild animal is a moral patient), crushing it for a near instant death is probably just about the least painful way it can die.