Although in many respects I feel I am of like mind with Hopefully Anonymous, I am not as fully committed to maximizing life (my own or anybody’s) as he is. For right now I would rather not die but continue living. However, I do not rule out that I might at some point or in some circumstances prefer death (the current lifespan found in first world countries is unusual and many cultures have glorified death, so I don’t think it can be said that such commitment to survival is universal). This does not mean I have any misgivings about Eliezer’s work toward life-extension though.
I personally would rather live in a society oriented around goals such as the ones Hopefully Anonymous describes than one based on principles. That being said, I don’t think goals can be objectively determined and I would not necessarily have complete trust in the institutions whose responsibility it is to seek those goals. Following a previous Stirnerite egoist, Benjamin Tucker, I would prefer if people could voluntarily form contractually arranged societies seeking whichever goals they see fit (or being based on principles, as many seem to prefer those and I do not begrudge them their preference). I doubt this one would result in one model of society and would instead be what Keith Preston has referred to as “panarchy”.
The situation Hopefully Anonymous describes in which everyone is better off is usually referred to as “Pareto optimal”. One of the troubles with Pareto optimality (besides being nearly impossible to attain, as the randomly selected individual whose health is adversely affected could be worse off than he might have been otherwise) is that “better” is inherently subjective, which is why I favor voluntarily agreed to contracts. Because I do not consider any normative statements/beliefs to have any objective truth value, I can’t very well go around calling people “irrational” for them, but I certainly can have a very low opinion of them, just as I do for those who like music I despise. I do think that people often do a poor job of thinking about positive facts and in that sense can be called “irrational”, and if they were Bayesian rational I suspect many normative beliefs would also be different (in the direction of consequentialism). I suspect though that is partly because I am imagining the type of person I would expect to be Bayesian rational contrasted with my stereotype of especially irrational people and confusing correlation with causation to some extent. Counterfactuals of this type can often be misleading and bring to mind the saying that “If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle”.
If my word was law a lot of things would be different about society, but forced medical experiments rank rather low on the list. I do not take the libertarian non-aggression principle as an “axiom” that is never to be violated, but I think very highly of it with regard to reducing conflict. No matter how much one might think that the people simply ought to act like the New Socialist/[insert here] Man, in reality they often don’t and whining about how unenlightened they are won’t change the stubborn reality.
Finally, I do not know if I want my own society to be creating public goods when we might be able to free-ride off the discoveries of others.
Although in many respects I feel I am of like mind with Hopefully Anonymous, I am not as fully committed to maximizing life (my own or anybody’s) as he is. For right now I would rather not die but continue living. However, I do not rule out that I might at some point or in some circumstances prefer death (the current lifespan found in first world countries is unusual and many cultures have glorified death, so I don’t think it can be said that such commitment to survival is universal). This does not mean I have any misgivings about Eliezer’s work toward life-extension though.
I personally would rather live in a society oriented around goals such as the ones Hopefully Anonymous describes than one based on principles. That being said, I don’t think goals can be objectively determined and I would not necessarily have complete trust in the institutions whose responsibility it is to seek those goals. Following a previous Stirnerite egoist, Benjamin Tucker, I would prefer if people could voluntarily form contractually arranged societies seeking whichever goals they see fit (or being based on principles, as many seem to prefer those and I do not begrudge them their preference). I doubt this one would result in one model of society and would instead be what Keith Preston has referred to as “panarchy”.
The situation Hopefully Anonymous describes in which everyone is better off is usually referred to as “Pareto optimal”. One of the troubles with Pareto optimality (besides being nearly impossible to attain, as the randomly selected individual whose health is adversely affected could be worse off than he might have been otherwise) is that “better” is inherently subjective, which is why I favor voluntarily agreed to contracts. Because I do not consider any normative statements/beliefs to have any objective truth value, I can’t very well go around calling people “irrational” for them, but I certainly can have a very low opinion of them, just as I do for those who like music I despise. I do think that people often do a poor job of thinking about positive facts and in that sense can be called “irrational”, and if they were Bayesian rational I suspect many normative beliefs would also be different (in the direction of consequentialism). I suspect though that is partly because I am imagining the type of person I would expect to be Bayesian rational contrasted with my stereotype of especially irrational people and confusing correlation with causation to some extent. Counterfactuals of this type can often be misleading and bring to mind the saying that “If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle”.
If my word was law a lot of things would be different about society, but forced medical experiments rank rather low on the list. I do not take the libertarian non-aggression principle as an “axiom” that is never to be violated, but I think very highly of it with regard to reducing conflict. No matter how much one might think that the people simply ought to act like the New Socialist/[insert here] Man, in reality they often don’t and whining about how unenlightened they are won’t change the stubborn reality.
Finally, I do not know if I want my own society to be creating public goods when we might be able to free-ride off the discoveries of others.