One definite exception is “should I say that many-worlds is true?”
Eliezer’s claimed exception is “Average utilitarianism suddenly looks a lot more attractive—you don’t need to worry about creating as many people as possible, because there are already plenty of people exploring person-space. You just want the average quality of life to be as high as possible, in the future worlds that are your responsibility.”
This argument doesn’t seem very strong to me. I could just as well say, “I don’t need to worry about a high average quality of life, because the average is fixed, and is as high as it can be in any case. I just want to see as many people in my world as I can, in the worlds that are my responsibility.”
It looks to me like Eliezer already preferred average utilitarianism even before knowing about many-worlds, or at least independently of this fact, and is using many-worlds to justify his preference.
Eliezer has argued in the past against discount rates: and with some reasonableness, whether this is ultimately correct or not (I don’t know.) But the principles of this argument would imply that we also should discount the value of people in the worlds we are not in; and so given that the average utility over all worlds is constant, average utilitarianism implies that our choice of worlds does not matter, which implies that none of our choices matter.
Besides (in the usual single world): is Eliezer willing to kill off everyone except the happiest person, therefore raising the average?
One definite exception is “should I say that many-worlds is true?”
Eliezer’s claimed exception is “Average utilitarianism suddenly looks a lot more attractive—you don’t need to worry about creating as many people as possible, because there are already plenty of people exploring person-space. You just want the average quality of life to be as high as possible, in the future worlds that are your responsibility.”
This argument doesn’t seem very strong to me. I could just as well say, “I don’t need to worry about a high average quality of life, because the average is fixed, and is as high as it can be in any case. I just want to see as many people in my world as I can, in the worlds that are my responsibility.”
It looks to me like Eliezer already preferred average utilitarianism even before knowing about many-worlds, or at least independently of this fact, and is using many-worlds to justify his preference.
Eliezer has argued in the past against discount rates: and with some reasonableness, whether this is ultimately correct or not (I don’t know.) But the principles of this argument would imply that we also should discount the value of people in the worlds we are not in; and so given that the average utility over all worlds is constant, average utilitarianism implies that our choice of worlds does not matter, which implies that none of our choices matter.
Besides (in the usual single world): is Eliezer willing to kill off everyone except the happiest person, therefore raising the average?