Knowing about scope insensitivity and diminishing marginal returns doesn’t just mean that you donate charitable dollars to “existential risks that few other people are working on”, instead of “The Society For Curing Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies”. It means you know that eating half a chocolate brownie appears as essentially the same pleasurable memory in retrospect as eating a whole brownie, so long as the other half isn’t in front of you and you don’t have the unpleasant memory of exerting willpower not to eat it.
If you mainly value brownie-eating memories, this is perfectly reasonable advice. If you instead you eat brownies for the experience, it is unhelpful, since eating half a brownie means the experience is either half as long or less intense.
From Yudkowsky’s Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians:
If you mainly value brownie-eating memories, this is perfectly reasonable advice. If you instead you eat brownies for the experience, it is unhelpful, since eating half a brownie means the experience is either half as long or less intense.
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