Why should I care about similarities to pCEV when valuing people?
It seems to me that this matters in case your metaethical view is that one should do pCEV, or more generally if you think matching pCEV is evidence of moral correctness. If you don’t hold such metaethical views, then I might agree that (at least in the instrumentally rational sense, at least conditional on not holding any metametalevel views that contradict these) you shouldn’t care.
> Why is the first example explaining why someone could support taking money from people you value less to give to other people, while not supporting doing so with your own money? It’s obviously true under utilitarianism
I’m not sure if it answers the question, but I think it’s a cool consideration. I think most people are close to acting weighted-utilitarianly, but few realize how strong the difference between public and private charity is according to weighted-utilitarianism.
> It’s weird to bring up having kids vs. abortion and then not take a position on the latter. (Of course, people will be pissed at you for taking a position too.)
My position is “subsidize having children, that’s all the regulation around abortion that’s needed”. So in particular, abortion should be legal at any time. (I intended what I wrote in the post to communicate this, but maybe I didn’t do a good job.)
> democracy plans for right now I’m not sure I understand in what sense you mean this? Voters are voting according to preferences that partially involve caring about future selves. If what you have in mind is something like people being less attentive about costs policies cause 10 years into the future and this leads to discounting these more than the discount from caring alone, then I guess I could see that being possible. But that could also happen for people’s individual decisions, I think? I guess one might argue that people are more aware about long-term costs of personal decisions than of policies, but this is not clear to me, especially with more analysis going into policy decisions.
> As to your framing, the difference between you-now and you-future is mathematically bigger than the difference between others-now and others-future if you use a ratio for the number of links to get to them. Suppose people change half as much in a year as your sibling is different from you, and you care about similarity for what value you place on someone. Thus, two years equals one link. After 4 years, you are now two links away from yourself-now and your sibling is 3 from you now. They are 50% more different than future you (assuming no convergence). After eight years, you are 4 links away, while they are only 5, which makes them 25% more different to you than you are. Alternately, they have changed by 67% more, and you have changed by 100% of how much how distant they were from you at 4 years. It thus seems like they have changed far less than you have, and are more similar to who they were, thus why should you treat them as having the same rate.
That’s a cool observation! I guess this won’t work if we discount geometrically in the number of links. I’m not sure which is more justified.
There is lots of interesting stuff in your last comment which I still haven’t responded to. I might come back to this in the future if I have something interesting to say. Thanks again for your thoughts!
It seems to me that this matters in case your metaethical view is that one should do pCEV, or more generally if you think matching pCEV is evidence of moral correctness. If you don’t hold such metaethical views, then I might agree that (at least in the instrumentally rational sense, at least conditional on not holding any metametalevel views that contradict these) you shouldn’t care.
> Why is the first example explaining why someone could support taking money from people you value less to give to other people, while not supporting doing so with your own money? It’s obviously true under utilitarianism
I’m not sure if it answers the question, but I think it’s a cool consideration. I think most people are close to acting weighted-utilitarianly, but few realize how strong the difference between public and private charity is according to weighted-utilitarianism.
> It’s weird to bring up having kids vs. abortion and then not take a position on the latter. (Of course, people will be pissed at you for taking a position too.)
My position is “subsidize having children, that’s all the regulation around abortion that’s needed”. So in particular, abortion should be legal at any time. (I intended what I wrote in the post to communicate this, but maybe I didn’t do a good job.)
> democracy plans for right now
I’m not sure I understand in what sense you mean this? Voters are voting according to preferences that partially involve caring about future selves. If what you have in mind is something like people being less attentive about costs policies cause 10 years into the future and this leads to discounting these more than the discount from caring alone, then I guess I could see that being possible. But that could also happen for people’s individual decisions, I think? I guess one might argue that people are more aware about long-term costs of personal decisions than of policies, but this is not clear to me, especially with more analysis going into policy decisions.
> As to your framing, the difference between you-now and you-future is mathematically bigger than the difference between others-now and others-future if you use a ratio for the number of links to get to them.
Suppose people change half as much in a year as your sibling is different from you, and you care about similarity for what value you place on someone. Thus, two years equals one link.
After 4 years, you are now two links away from yourself-now and your sibling is 3 from you now. They are 50% more different than future you (assuming no convergence). After eight years, you are 4 links away, while they are only 5, which makes them 25% more different to you than you are.
Alternately, they have changed by 67% more, and you have changed by 100% of how much how distant they were from you at 4 years.
It thus seems like they have changed far less than you have, and are more similar to who they were, thus why should you treat them as having the same rate.
That’s a cool observation! I guess this won’t work if we discount geometrically in the number of links. I’m not sure which is more justified.
There is lots of interesting stuff in your last comment which I still haven’t responded to. I might come back to this in the future if I have something interesting to say. Thanks again for your thoughts!