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