Re: Human lives: Do the math (was: Impact on history)

From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Mon Sep 17 2001 - 09:18:42 MDT


Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> Wrote:

>killing a hundred thousand Afghan
>citizens to prevent ten future terrosist
>attacks costing an average of
>five thousand American lives apiece would
>be bad mathematics even if it worked.

You're forgetting American math. Americans value
an American life at something like 1000 times the
value of a Third World life. Compare the press on
the WTC bombing (5000 dead) with the much lesser
press on the Rwandan massacre (800,000 dead). The
WTC catastrophe, by American math, justifies 5M
foreign deaths, i.e., a very big and nasty war,
and I think we're likely to see that. Had this
been a true WOMD and 1 million New Yorkers were dead,
American math would justify 1 billion dead muslims,
i.e., America would be willing to commit genocide
on all the Muslims of the world. The disturbing thing
is that I think it would happen.



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