This post is too low on interesting or useful new content, relative to reiteration of a standard ideological view about altruism. It would be different if the post described an interesting new argument, or a new more efficient means of helping people.
How could you justify a pleasant dinner with your family or a relaxing weekend at the beach when that meant more people living in pain?
Really, this is just a particular form of “what if you had super-high productivity, orders of magnitude higher than almost anyone else on Earth.” If I had these powers, and knew they couldn’t be duplicated through research and study, I would sell them at high prices. To extract as much of the surplus as possible, I would use the “financial aid” price-discrimination system employed by elite universities, demanding tax returns and other information to determine ability to pay, and then extracting a large portion of that potential in exchange for healing.
If one has to “lay on hands” only briefly, the expected annual revenue (provided one didn’t get kidnapped or imprisoned) would be in the trillions of dollars. Even if a healing took a couple of hours, revenue would be in the tens of billions (driven primarily by the super-rich).
In this situation I would probably work 70-100 hour work weeks, and use a budget of billions of dollars to make quality of life while working as high as feasible, e.g. healing on the beach while getting massages, eating gourmet meals, hearing reports of scientific research projects I had commissioned, and so forth. And then a majority of the revenues would go towards improving global prospects.
It would be different if the post described an interesting new argument
Hmm. I left out context that is more important than I thought it was: this post is a response to two different people in different conversations speculating in person about what they would do if they had powers like this. They both thought they would have an obligation to help people, but didn’t think they had an obligation to in normal life.
I don’t think it was a scale issue so much as being about magic or specialness.
This post is too low on interesting or useful new content, relative to reiteration of a standard ideological view about altruism.
The opportunity to help others is is not taken advantage of by either altruists or egoists as much as it would fulfill their values. When people continue to act contrary to their values, it’s good to continue remind them.
This post is too low on interesting or useful new content, relative to reiteration of a standard ideological view about altruism. It would be different if the post described an interesting new argument, or a new more efficient means of helping people.
Really, this is just a particular form of “what if you had super-high productivity, orders of magnitude higher than almost anyone else on Earth.” If I had these powers, and knew they couldn’t be duplicated through research and study, I would sell them at high prices. To extract as much of the surplus as possible, I would use the “financial aid” price-discrimination system employed by elite universities, demanding tax returns and other information to determine ability to pay, and then extracting a large portion of that potential in exchange for healing.
If one has to “lay on hands” only briefly, the expected annual revenue (provided one didn’t get kidnapped or imprisoned) would be in the trillions of dollars. Even if a healing took a couple of hours, revenue would be in the tens of billions (driven primarily by the super-rich).
In this situation I would probably work 70-100 hour work weeks, and use a budget of billions of dollars to make quality of life while working as high as feasible, e.g. healing on the beach while getting massages, eating gourmet meals, hearing reports of scientific research projects I had commissioned, and so forth. And then a majority of the revenues would go towards improving global prospects.
One of the research projects should definitely be finding out how more people can have healing powers.
Hmm. I left out context that is more important than I thought it was: this post is a response to two different people in different conversations speculating in person about what they would do if they had powers like this. They both thought they would have an obligation to help people, but didn’t think they had an obligation to in normal life.
I don’t think it was a scale issue so much as being about magic or specialness.
The opportunity to help others is is not taken advantage of by either altruists or egoists as much as it would fulfill their values. When people continue to act contrary to their values, it’s good to continue remind them.
In general, people don’t act contrary to their values so much as their stated values are a simplified approximation of their actual values.