You’re confusing two messages. One is that building a fallout shelter is not a good way to optimize personal safety. The other is that optimizing society safety is, for some unspecified reason, more-virtuous than optimizing personal safety.
I consider both those arguments relevant to this post. What I’m saying is that building fallout shelters is unlikely to be optimal for personal safety because there is generally much lower-hanging fruit. Further, in the event that building fallout shelters is optimal for personal safety, your efforts would be likely better spent elsewhere because pursuing personal-level solutions for society-level hazards is highly inefficient.
I omitted the obvious third argument against fallout shelters (that they increase the odds of nuclear war, albeit only slightly) because I evaluated it as likely to make people think that this post was actually about fallout shelters.
The first point is historically wrong. In the time when people in the US built fallout shelters, most people who built them thought it was more likely than not that there would be a nuclear war soon. They made the correct calculation given this assumption.
I’m not sure that that’s reasonable to say. As I pointed out, personal safety is personal, and thus your decision to build a fallout shelter is subject to a wide range of confounding factors. I believe that it is likely that most people who built fallout shelters could have purchased expected years of survival for cheaper, even on a personal level. Typically fallout shelters seem extremely unlikely to actually be the lowest-hanging fruit in someone’s life.
The second point is simply a referral back to a set of presumptions about ethics (selfishness is bad) that should themselves be argued over, rather than the examples here.
I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that that was a given on this site, given previousdiscussionshere. There’s probably an argument to be made that all such actions are merely purchasing fuzzies and that protecting yourself is purchasing utilons, but I’d like to think that we’re better than that.
The argument that you shouldn’t build a fallout shelter because the life you’d live after civilization was destroyed wouldn’t really be worth living is contrary to what we know about happiness. It is a highly-suspect argument for other reasons as well.
I’m aware of the studies and arguments used to claim that happiness will reset regardless of what happens to you, but I think that a full-scale nuclear war falls outside the outside view’s domain.
I wasn’t one of the downvoters, but I’ll hazard a guess.
pursuing personal-level solutions for society-level hazards is highly inefficient.
Viscerally for me, this immediately flags as not being right. I might not understand what you mean by that statement though. It’s very difficult to make an impact on the probability of society-level hazards occuring, one way or the other, so if you think there’s a non-trivial chance of one of them occuring a personal-level solution seems like the obvious choice.
I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that that was a given on this site, given previous discussions here. There’s probably an argument to be made that all such actions are merely purchasing fuzzies and that protecting yourself is purchasing utilons, but I’d like to think that we’re better than that.
I think you’re significantly overestimating the uniformity of LW readers. The high-impact posters seem to have similar ethical views but I imagine most of the readers arrive here through an interest in transhumanism. On the scale from pathological philanthropists to being indifferent to the whole world burning if it doesn’t include you subjectively experiencing it I bet the average reader is a lot closer to the latter than you would like. I certainly am. I care on an abstract, intellectual level, but it’s very very difficult for me to be emotionally impacted by possible futures that don’t include me. I think a lot of people downvote when you make assumpions about them (that turn out to be incorrect).
That being said, I don’t have a problem with anything you wrote.
Viscerally for me, this immediately flags as not being right. I might not understand what you mean by that statement though. It’s very difficult to make an impact on the probability of society-level hazards occuring, one way or the other, so if you think there’s a non-trivial chance of one of them occuring a personal-level solution seems like the obvious choice.
What I am trying to say is that preparing personal defenses for society-level issues is very expensive per expected lifespan gained/dollar relative to preparing personal defenses for personal-level issues. Further, it is possible to actually remove the harm from many personal-level issues completely through personal precautions, while the same is not really likely for societal-level issues.
If you learn a better way of running and don’t injure your knees, the knee injuries never happen. If you build a bomb shelter and are in your shelter when the nuclear war happens and the shelter holds up and you have sufficient supplies to wait out the radiation, society is still essentially destroyed, you just happened to live through it. Most, if not all, of the overall harm has not been mitigated.
I also think the difficulty of making an impact on the probability of society-level hazards occurring is overestimated by most, but that’s a separate issue.
On the scale from pathological philanthropists to being indifferent to the whole world burning if it doesn’t include you subjectively experiencing it I bet the average reader is a lot closer to the latter than you would like… I think a lot of people downvote when you make assumpions about them (that turn out to be incorrect).
I hope that you are wrong here, but it seems quite plausible that you are right.
The high-impact posters seem to have similar ethical views but I imagine most of the readers arrive here through an interest in transhumanism. On the scale from pathological philanthropists to being indifferent to the whole world burning if it doesn’t include you subjectively experiencing it I bet the average reader is a lot closer to the latter than you would like. I certainly am. I care on an abstract, intellectual level, but it’s very very difficult for me to be emotionally impacted by possible futures that don’t include me.
Really? Hmm. That seems like a problem we should be fixing.
You might want to work harder on distinguishing between what is moral and what is best for the individual’s happiness.
EDIT: Actually, you did so perfectly well. PhilGoetz appears to be arguing against helping other people, without providing any arguments for this position. Strange.
I consider both those arguments relevant to this post. What I’m saying is that building fallout shelters is unlikely to be optimal for personal safety because there is generally much lower-hanging fruit. Further, in the event that building fallout shelters is optimal for personal safety, your efforts would be likely better spent elsewhere because pursuing personal-level solutions for society-level hazards is highly inefficient.
I omitted the obvious third argument against fallout shelters (that they increase the odds of nuclear war, albeit only slightly) because I evaluated it as likely to make people think that this post was actually about fallout shelters.
I’m not sure that that’s reasonable to say. As I pointed out, personal safety is personal, and thus your decision to build a fallout shelter is subject to a wide range of confounding factors. I believe that it is likely that most people who built fallout shelters could have purchased expected years of survival for cheaper, even on a personal level. Typically fallout shelters seem extremely unlikely to actually be the lowest-hanging fruit in someone’s life.
I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that that was a given on this site, given previous discussions here. There’s probably an argument to be made that all such actions are merely purchasing fuzzies and that protecting yourself is purchasing utilons, but I’d like to think that we’re better than that.
I’m aware of the studies and arguments used to claim that happiness will reset regardless of what happens to you, but I think that a full-scale nuclear war falls outside the outside view’s domain.
Can I get an explanation for the downvotes here?
I wasn’t one of the downvoters, but I’ll hazard a guess.
pursuing personal-level solutions for society-level hazards is highly inefficient.
Viscerally for me, this immediately flags as not being right. I might not understand what you mean by that statement though. It’s very difficult to make an impact on the probability of society-level hazards occuring, one way or the other, so if you think there’s a non-trivial chance of one of them occuring a personal-level solution seems like the obvious choice.
I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that that was a given on this site, given previous discussions here. There’s probably an argument to be made that all such actions are merely purchasing fuzzies and that protecting yourself is purchasing utilons, but I’d like to think that we’re better than that.
I think you’re significantly overestimating the uniformity of LW readers. The high-impact posters seem to have similar ethical views but I imagine most of the readers arrive here through an interest in transhumanism. On the scale from pathological philanthropists to being indifferent to the whole world burning if it doesn’t include you subjectively experiencing it I bet the average reader is a lot closer to the latter than you would like. I certainly am. I care on an abstract, intellectual level, but it’s very very difficult for me to be emotionally impacted by possible futures that don’t include me. I think a lot of people downvote when you make assumpions about them (that turn out to be incorrect).
That being said, I don’t have a problem with anything you wrote.
Thanks for the reply!
What I am trying to say is that preparing personal defenses for society-level issues is very expensive per expected lifespan gained/dollar relative to preparing personal defenses for personal-level issues. Further, it is possible to actually remove the harm from many personal-level issues completely through personal precautions, while the same is not really likely for societal-level issues.
If you learn a better way of running and don’t injure your knees, the knee injuries never happen. If you build a bomb shelter and are in your shelter when the nuclear war happens and the shelter holds up and you have sufficient supplies to wait out the radiation, society is still essentially destroyed, you just happened to live through it. Most, if not all, of the overall harm has not been mitigated.
I also think the difficulty of making an impact on the probability of society-level hazards occurring is overestimated by most, but that’s a separate issue.
I hope that you are wrong here, but it seems quite plausible that you are right.
Really? Hmm. That seems like a problem we should be fixing.
You might want to work harder on distinguishing between what is moral and what is best for the individual’s happiness.
EDIT: Actually, you did so perfectly well. PhilGoetz appears to be arguing against helping other people, without providing any arguments for this position. Strange.