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All agents are considered equal,
If I contract a neurodegenerative illness, which will gradually reduce my cognitive function, until I end up in a vegetative state, do I retain agent-ness throughout, or at some point lose equal footing with healthy me in one go? Neither seems a good description of my slow slide from fully human to vegetable.
...with their individual utility units converted to some social standard. For example, Agent Alpha receives 100 Alpha-Utils from the average day, where Agent Beta receives 200 Beta-Utils from the average day. Both of t
I want to criticise either the idea that diminishing returns is important, or, at least, that dollar values make sense for talking about them.
Suppose we have a monster who likes to eat. Each serving of food is just as tasty as the previous, but he still gets diminishing returns on the dollar, because the marginal cost of the servings goes up.
We also have nematodes, who like to eat, but not as much. They never get a look in, because as the monster eats, they also suffer diminished utilons per dollar.
So the monster is serving the 'purpose' of the utility mon...
Do you have a more original source. I've heard about this, and would be interested to know if/how a causal link was established between flossing and heart disease
A concern regarding this kind of test when applied to groups (Christians vs Atheists, for instance) rather than individuals is that one umbrella term may take more views than another, making the guessing game more/less tricky.
Nevertheless, this is a neat idea, particularly for particular people rather than groups as a whole.
At the time of writing, it had more upvotes than the OP... surely that's not right?
The affective death spiral is isomorphic to this thread.
The map is the mind-killer
Seems Legit
Mindkiller Alert!
The yield of a tax at 0% is 0. The yield of tax at 100% is also close to zero, as nobody will do anything to earn money that will be taxed at 100% (i.e. ensure all earnings dodge that tax). Therefore the set of policies that give maximum tax yield do not have a tax rate of 100%, and increasing tax rates beyond that reduce tax yield.
This analysis is subject to some caveats, and where the optimal rate is is a very complicated and politically charged question, of course, and this is already completely off topic.
I suspect what you mean by desire utilitarianism is what wikipedia calls preference utilitarianism, which I believe is the standard term.
Aren't you using different measures of what 'saving a life' is, anyway? The starving-child-save gives you about 60 years of extra life, whereas the FAI save gives something rather more.
Apple uses the WAITW when commenting on the Apple vs Samsung case:
"In a statement the firm [apple] thanked the jury for sending 'a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right' "
Have you adjusted for the likely event that you have become more rational, and what you have actually observed may have been LW becoming at a lower level relative to you, whilst staying relatively flat or even improving?
I think the salient point here is whether we are talking about a theft close to the archetype, such as mugging or burglary, or one further from it, such as Robin Hood enacting his redistribution scheme, or the government taxing.
So when we have "X is the mindkiller", that's okay if "X" happens to be party politics, or factions disagreeing in a fricticious boardroom meeting. A fringe example of mind-killing might be a recurring disagreement between spouses over whether to buy skinned or unskinned milk (you can still have entrenched positi...
If you can think of left-wing WAITWs that are as well-known and catchy as "abortion is murder!", I will happily edit the post to include them
"Property is theft"
Is an example of the left using the WAITW.
I agree. Perhaps I should have put this as a reply to the grandparent instead?
Why do you (and the author of the grandparent) think ancient people were just as skeptical as us? I'm not even sure that different cultures today are equally skeptical.
Perhaps if you do the radiator experiment where you have turned the metal plate round, you will find that in different cultures (or even situations) people will be more or less likely to be skeptical of the situation in front of them.
I don't find it surprising it is that "conservative" comes to mean different things. It's always struck me as an odd term: someone who hadn't heard the term before would think a "conservative" party would just be a "status quo bias" party.
If you have two different countries, with different political histories, you would expect labels to mean different things. We currently view libertarians as closer to conservatives than to liberals, yet libertarians regularly seem closely aligned to 19th century writers such as Bastiat, who w...
If I wanted to do that, I would phrase things differently, to avoid the connotation issues (of, for example, Taxation is Theft!):
"We think burglary is bad, but tax is good, yet they have some similarities. Are we right to judge them differently?" or even "I think the things that make burglary bad are X Y and Z, but X is shared by taxation, and Y is partly shared by taxation. I conclude that taxation is not as bad as burglary, but still a bit bad"
"Denying euthanasia is Torture!"
Given the majority of legislators are male, for abortion: "Forced pregnancy is mysogyny!" though that may be too tenuous.
That people buy more, less healthy food when they are hungry is pretty well backed up, I understand. (Googling gives this right away)
My experience is that how food tastes changes massively depending on my hunger, so you need to bear in mind that "how good my favourite food tastes" will likely be "not very" when you've just eaten.
For example, I play sport for about 3 hours on Sundays, and immediately after (before l... (read more)