Sorry for the late reply, I haven’t commented much on LW and it didn’t appreciate the time it would take for someone to reply to me, so I missed this until now. If I reply to you, Ape in the coat, does that notify dr_s too?
Whenever I say “lives saved” this is shorthand for “future lives saved from nonexistence.” This is not the same as saving existing lives, which may cause profound emotional pain for people left behind, and some may consider more tragic than future people never being born.[6]
I assume a zero-discount rate for the value of future lives, meaning I assume the value of a life is not dependent on when that life occurs.
It seems pretty obvious to me that in almost any plausible scenario, the lifespan of a distant future entity with moral weight will be very different from what we currently think of as a natural life span (rounded to 100 years in the post I linked), but making estimates in terms of “lives saved from non existence” where life = 100 years is useful for making comparisons to other causes like “lives saved per $1,000 via malaria bed nets.” It also seems appropriate for the post not to assume a discount rate and to leave that to the reader to apply themselves on top of the estimates presented.
I prefer something like “observer moments that might not have occurred” to “lives saved.” I don’t have strong preferences between a relatively small number of entities having long lives or more numerous entities having shorter lives, so long as the quality of the life per moment is held constant.
As for dr_S’s “How bad can a life be before the savings actually counts as damning” this seems easily resolvable to me by just allowing “people” of the far future the right to commit suicide, perhaps after a short waiting period. This would put a floor on the suffering they experience if they can’t otherwise be guaranteed to have great lives.
Sorry for the late reply, I haven’t commented much on LW and it didn’t appreciate the time it would take for someone to reply to me, so I missed this until now. If I reply to you, Ape in the coat, does that notify dr_s too?
If I understand dr_s’s quotation, I believe he’s responding to the post I referenced. How Many Lives Does X-Risk Work Save from Non-Existence includes pretty early on:
It seems pretty obvious to me that in almost any plausible scenario, the lifespan of a distant future entity with moral weight will be very different from what we currently think of as a natural life span (rounded to 100 years in the post I linked), but making estimates in terms of “lives saved from non existence” where life = 100 years is useful for making comparisons to other causes like “lives saved per $1,000 via malaria bed nets.” It also seems appropriate for the post not to assume a discount rate and to leave that to the reader to apply themselves on top of the estimates presented.
I prefer something like “observer moments that might not have occurred” to “lives saved.” I don’t have strong preferences between a relatively small number of entities having long lives or more numerous entities having shorter lives, so long as the quality of the life per moment is held constant.
As for dr_S’s “How bad can a life be before the savings actually counts as damning” this seems easily resolvable to me by just allowing “people” of the far future the right to commit suicide, perhaps after a short waiting period. This would put a floor on the suffering they experience if they can’t otherwise be guaranteed to have great lives.