It would be pretty weird to argue that human lives decay in utility based on how many there are.
Well, suppose there’s mind uploads, and one mind upload is very worried about himself so he runs himself multiply redundant with 5 exact copies. Should this upload be a minor utility monster?
3^^^3 is far more than there are possible people.
If you found out that the universe was bigger than you thought, that there really were far more humans in the universe somehow, would you just stop caring about human life?
Bounded doesn’t mean it just hits a cap and stays there. Also, if you scale all utilities that you can effect down it changes nothing about actions (another confusion—mapping the utility to how much one cares).
And yes there are definitely cases where money are worth small probability of saving lives, and everyone agrees on such—e.g. if we find out that an asteroid has certain chance to hit Earth, we’d give money to space agencies, even when chance is rather minute (we’d not give money to cold fusion crackpots though). There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with spending a bit to avert a small probability of something terrible happening. The problem arises when the probability is overestimated, when the consequences are poorly evaluated, etc. It is actively harmful for example to encourage boys to cry wolf needlessly. I’m thinking people sort of feel innately that if they are giving money away—losing—some giant fairness fairy is going to make the result more likely good than bad for everyone. World doesn’t work like this; all those naive folks who jump on opportunity to give money to someone promising to save the world, no matter how ignorant, uneducated, or crackpotty that person is in the fields where correctness can be checked at all, they are increasing risk, not decreasing.
Well, suppose there’s mind uploads, and one mind upload is very worried about himself so he runs himself multiply redundant with 5 exact copies. Should this upload be a minor utility monster?
3^^^3 is far more than there are possible people.
Bounded doesn’t mean it just hits a cap and stays there. Also, if you scale all utilities that you can effect down it changes nothing about actions (another confusion—mapping the utility to how much one cares).
And yes there are definitely cases where money are worth small probability of saving lives, and everyone agrees on such—e.g. if we find out that an asteroid has certain chance to hit Earth, we’d give money to space agencies, even when chance is rather minute (we’d not give money to cold fusion crackpots though). There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with spending a bit to avert a small probability of something terrible happening. The problem arises when the probability is overestimated, when the consequences are poorly evaluated, etc. It is actively harmful for example to encourage boys to cry wolf needlessly. I’m thinking people sort of feel innately that if they are giving money away—losing—some giant fairness fairy is going to make the result more likely good than bad for everyone. World doesn’t work like this; all those naive folks who jump on opportunity to give money to someone promising to save the world, no matter how ignorant, uneducated, or crackpotty that person is in the fields where correctness can be checked at all, they are increasing risk, not decreasing.