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You can zoom out even more to, "What's the effect on all of future humanity?" Though that's much more difficult to answer, why should we discount them for the o
by kelseyfrog 3y ago
You can zoom out even more to, "What's the effect on all of future humanity?" Though that's much more difficult to answer, why should we discount them for the only inconvenience of not being born yet?
- skybrian 3y agoYou can, but which timeline? Predicting the future is very difficult, so I prefer to stick with actually existing people. Expectant parents should probably take a different point of view, though!
- kelseyfrog 3y agoEven in the abstract, do we have any responsibility to future humanity? Does this extend to economic policy?
- MichaelZuo 3y agoAgain you have to specify specific timelines, otherwise it would be an infinite number of potential futures, with an infinite responsibility in the abstract.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoThis is a good place to remind ourselves that we shouldn't let perfect get in the way of good.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoThis doesn’t make sense, it’s not dependent on quality. You literally would have to spend an infinite amount of time pondering an infinite number of possible futures to accomplish anything, at even the lowest possible amount of ‘good’. Hence it’s physically impossible to advance a single nanometer on this line of reasoning.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoHow do you advance decisions about yourself when there's an infinite number of future possibilities for you?
- MichaelZuo 3y agoI pick a finite number of possibilities and ignore the rest? This is genuinely surprising to me, do you not understand how people make decisions?
- kelseyfrog 3y agoWhy does that work for you, but doesn't extend when considering others? Simply make n>1, no?
- MichaelZuo 3y agoI’m really not sure how else to put this… there are 8 billion plus people, each with their own, not entirely identical, desires. Just as complex as your own, some so much more complex that you literally can not keep up with them (assuming there are some bonafide super geniuses out there). How could you possibly extend this to all of them without running into an even more intractable problem?
- kelseyfrog 3y agoThis is a serious question. Why not pick a finite number of possibilities and ignore the rest?
- MichaelZuo 3y agoYes that’s my point, and because you want to ‘extend’ to ‘n>1’, this is doubly impossible without picking. i.e. you literally cannot accomplish this otherwise, even for the simplest case of n=2, with certainty. Since there’s always a non zero possibility of any chosen person becoming much smarter and wiser than you in the future. Via ignoring the infinite number of futures where they do.