Re: Status of Superrationality

From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 13:23:16 MDT

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    Sorry about the last incomplete message.

    On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 10:21:54AM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
    > I don't think most of us would agree that this is a truly altruistic
    > action, even among people such as I have described, who are not bothered
    > by the killing of others. Killing all but one of them is incredibly
    > harmful and is not altruistic in any meaningful sense of the word.

    There are variants of averagism that are not as vulnerable to reductio ad
    absurdum. I proposed one to Robin Hanson in the context of his
    "futarchy" idea, which requires that we agree (by a majority) on a
    measure of welfare that society should try to maximize. He had proposed a
    totalist measure (i.e. GDP), citing the same problem with averagism that
    you did. I countered that in computing per capita GDP (or in this case
    average happiness), we could count dead people in the divisor.

    > Therefore I still claim that averagism is not a legitimate form of
    > altruism.

    I think it's too early to reach that conclusion. Take the example in a
    recent thread of migrating to a better universe. Averagism says we
    shouldn't leave copies behind who would be relatively miserable. That
    doesn't seem absurd on its face.



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