I agree that even NU may imply rejecting NU in its present form, because it does not feel like a psychologically realistic theory to constantly apply in everyday life; we are more motivated to move towards goals and subgoals that do not carry explicit reminders of extreme suffering on the flip side.
I do feel that I am very close to NU whenever I consider theoretical problems and edge-cases that would outweigh extreme suffering with anything else than preventing more extreme suffering. In practice, it may be more applicable (and ironically, more useful according to NU) to replace NU with asymptotically approaching uncompromising compassion, or an equivalent positive-language narrative, while taking huge grains of epistemic humility whenever it starts to feel like a good idea to override any explicit preferences of others.
Epistemic humility is also why I cannot imagine a situation where I would push The Button, because I cannot imagine how I could know with a certainty that it works (so I cannot derive an intuition out of that thought experiment).
Thanks for the perspective.
I agree that even NU may imply rejecting NU in its present form, because it does not feel like a psychologically realistic theory to constantly apply in everyday life; we are more motivated to move towards goals and subgoals that do not carry explicit reminders of extreme suffering on the flip side.
I do feel that I am very close to NU whenever I consider theoretical problems and edge-cases that would outweigh extreme suffering with anything else than preventing more extreme suffering. In practice, it may be more applicable (and ironically, more useful according to NU) to replace NU with asymptotically approaching uncompromising compassion, or an equivalent positive-language narrative, while taking huge grains of epistemic humility whenever it starts to feel like a good idea to override any explicit preferences of others.
Epistemic humility is also why I cannot imagine a situation where I would push The Button, because I cannot imagine how I could know with a certainty that it works (so I cannot derive an intuition out of that thought experiment).