Re: Bound unhappiness below (was Re: What if there's an expiration date?)

From: Stuart Armstrong (dragondreaming@googlemail.com)
Date: Thu May 08 2008 - 03:08:01 MDT


> You are confusing collective utility with ethics.

Possibly. I'm seeing ethics as the utility you would want for all of humanity.

> We have already seen
> the dangers of maximizing total human utility vs. average utility. (One
> leads to a very large population, the other very small). Weighting
> utility on a nonlinear scale to fit your ethical model will just lead to
> other disasters. (I will leave it to others to come up with examples if
> you can't think of any yourself).

Yes, but so far every model I've seen leads to a disaster of some
sort. I feel this model avoids a lot of the disasters I've seen,
without introducing too many new ones. Can you think of particularly
intolerable outcomes for such a weighting?

(Population ethics is something that has long been troubling me; I
have no solution to that issue. My weighting was a suggestion for an
approximately fixed population size)

Stuart



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