While reading your article I had trouble continuing to take your perspective in good faith after I got to this point:
“For instance, suppose you’re given a choice between the following two options: 1: Humanity grows into a vast civilization of 10^100 people living long and happy lives, or 2: a 10% chance that humanity grows into a vast civilization of 10^102 people living long and happy lives, and a 90% chance of going extinct right now. I think almost everyone would pick option 1, and would think it crazy to take a reckless gamble like option 2. But the Linear Utility Hypothesis says that option 2 is much better. ”
It seems like selectively choosing a utility function that does not weight the negative utility of the state of ‘anti-lives’ that having NO civilization of people living long and happy lives at all in the entire universe would represent.
I think you could tune a linear relationship of these negative values and accurately get the behavior that people have regarding these options.
This seems a lot like picking the weakest and least credible possible argument to use as way to refute the entire idea. Which made it much more difficult for me to read the rest of your article with the benefit of the doubt I would have prefered to have held through out.
The Linear Utility Hypothesis does imply that there is no extra penalty (on top of the usual linear relationship between population and utility) for the population being zero, and it seems to me that it is common for people to assume the Linear Utility Hypothesis unmodified by such a zero-population penalty. Furthermore, a zero-population penalty seems poorly motivated to me, and still does not change the answer that Linear Utility Hypothesis + zero-population penalty would suggest in the thought experiment that you quoted, since you can just talk about populations large enough to dwarf the zero-population penalty.
Refuting a weak argument for a hypothesis is not a good way to refute the hypothesis, but that’s not what I’m doing; I’m refuting weak consequences of the Linear Utility Hypothesis, and “X implies Y, but not Y” is a perfectly legitimate form of argument for “not X”.
While reading your article I had trouble continuing to take your perspective in good faith after I got to this point:
“For instance, suppose you’re given a choice between the following two options: 1: Humanity grows into a vast civilization of 10^100 people living long and happy lives, or 2: a 10% chance that humanity grows into a vast civilization of 10^102 people living long and happy lives, and a 90% chance of going extinct right now. I think almost everyone would pick option 1, and would think it crazy to take a reckless gamble like option 2. But the Linear Utility Hypothesis says that option 2 is much better. ”
It seems like selectively choosing a utility function that does not weight the negative utility of the state of ‘anti-lives’ that having NO civilization of people living long and happy lives at all in the entire universe would represent.
I think you could tune a linear relationship of these negative values and accurately get the behavior that people have regarding these options.
This seems a lot like picking the weakest and least credible possible argument to use as way to refute the entire idea. Which made it much more difficult for me to read the rest of your article with the benefit of the doubt I would have prefered to have held through out.
The Linear Utility Hypothesis does imply that there is no extra penalty (on top of the usual linear relationship between population and utility) for the population being zero, and it seems to me that it is common for people to assume the Linear Utility Hypothesis unmodified by such a zero-population penalty. Furthermore, a zero-population penalty seems poorly motivated to me, and still does not change the answer that Linear Utility Hypothesis + zero-population penalty would suggest in the thought experiment that you quoted, since you can just talk about populations large enough to dwarf the zero-population penalty.
Refuting a weak argument for a hypothesis is not a good way to refute the hypothesis, but that’s not what I’m doing; I’m refuting weak consequences of the Linear Utility Hypothesis, and “X implies Y, but not Y” is a perfectly legitimate form of argument for “not X”.