Do you mean the assignment of a value of life or the general principle of assignment of values to everything? In either case, both of those seem sorta like no-brainers (which, I imagine, is why no one is discussing them).
It seems to me that the most relevant thing in this post was the idea of a bias against recognizing underuse in general. It actually reminds me of when I was introduced to Robin’s idea of the danger of excess medical care in that most people (myself included, at the time) had a bias against recognizing the harms done by extra treatment.
You’d be surprised. There are plenty of people who refuse to assign a value on life, feeling that doing so would somehow diminish a life’s importance, or be immoral. (This type of person seems to be overrepresented in the humanities...)
Well, it also seems like a no-brainer to me the Breatharianism is insane, but I know people certainly subscribe to it. What I meant by that was more that it seems well-established among LessWrong readers.
At least the seasoned Less Wrong readers. But we should never write our posts only to the established audience—newcomers to the site should also find something of value.
This is degenerating into mere politics. The part that was interesting to LW was:
Do you mean the assignment of a value of life or the general principle of assignment of values to everything? In either case, both of those seem sorta like no-brainers (which, I imagine, is why no one is discussing them).
It seems to me that the most relevant thing in this post was the idea of a bias against recognizing underuse in general. It actually reminds me of when I was introduced to Robin’s idea of the danger of excess medical care in that most people (myself included, at the time) had a bias against recognizing the harms done by extra treatment.
You’d be surprised. There are plenty of people who refuse to assign a value on life, feeling that doing so would somehow diminish a life’s importance, or be immoral. (This type of person seems to be overrepresented in the humanities...)
Well, it also seems like a no-brainer to me the Breatharianism is insane, but I know people certainly subscribe to it. What I meant by that was more that it seems well-established among LessWrong readers.
At least the seasoned Less Wrong readers. But we should never write our posts only to the established audience—newcomers to the site should also find something of value.