I suggest not only shifting the zero point, but also scaling utilities when you update on information about what’s achievable and what’s not. For example, suppose you thought that saving 1-10 people in poor countries was the best you could do with your life, and you felt like every life saved was +1 utility. But then you learned about longtermism and figured out that if you try, then in expectation you can save 1kk lives in the far future. In such situation it doesn’t make sense to continue caring about saving an individual life as much as you cared before this insight—your system 1 feeling for how good thing can be won’t be able to do its epistemological job then. It’s better to scale utility of saving lives down, so that +1kk lives is +10 utility, and +1 life is +1/100000 utility. This is related to Caring less.
However, this advice has a very serious downside—it will make it very difficult to communicate with “normies”. If a person thinks saving a life is +1 utility and tells you that there’s this opportunity to go and do it, and if you’re like “meh, +1/100000 utility”, they will see your reaction and think you’re weird or heartless or something.
I suggest not only shifting the zero point, but also scaling utilities when you update on information about what’s achievable and what’s not. For example, suppose you thought that saving 1-10 people in poor countries was the best you could do with your life, and you felt like every life saved was +1 utility. But then you learned about longtermism and figured out that if you try, then in expectation you can save 1kk lives in the far future. In such situation it doesn’t make sense to continue caring about saving an individual life as much as you cared before this insight—your system 1 feeling for how good thing can be won’t be able to do its epistemological job then. It’s better to scale utility of saving lives down, so that +1kk lives is +10 utility, and +1 life is +1/100000 utility. This is related to Caring less.
However, this advice has a very serious downside—it will make it very difficult to communicate with “normies”. If a person thinks saving a life is +1 utility and tells you that there’s this opportunity to go and do it, and if you’re like “meh, +1/100000 utility”, they will see your reaction and think you’re weird or heartless or something.