It doesn’t dissolve the paradox if it doesn’t show that you can construct a preference function over populations that doesn’t have any counterintuitive properties (while the repugnant conclusion argument implies it must have at least one counterintuitive property). At best, it shows that the relevant choices are unlikely to be faced in reality, such that even a “bad” preference function performs decently in the real world. But that doesn’t resolve the philosophical problem, much less dissolve it.
I don’t think it even shows that the relevant choices are unlikely to be faced in reality, since situations where you can get more resources by having a higher population are really common. (Consider: a higher population contains more workers)
It dissolves the RC for me, because it answers the question “What kind of cognitive algorithm, as felt from the inside, would generate the observed debate about “the Repugnant Conclusion”?” [grabbed from your link, substituted “free will” for “repugnant conclusion”].
I feel after reading that post that I do no longer feel that the RC is counterintuitive, and instead it feels self evident; I can channel the repugnancy to aberrant distributions of resources.
But granted, most people I have talked to do not feel the question is dissolved through this. I would be curious to see how many people stop being intuitively confused about RC after reading a similar line of reasoning.
The point about more workers ⇒ more resources is also an interesting thought. We could probably expand the model to vary resources with workers, and I would expect a similar conclusion for a reasonable model to hold: optimal sum of utility is not achieved in the extremes, but in a happy medium. Either that or each additional worker produces so much that even utility per capita grows as workers goes to infinity.
I don’t see how the post says anything about the cognitive algorithm generating the repugnant conclusion? It’s just saying the choices are unlikely to be faced in reality. I think people thinking through the repugnant conclusion are not necessarily thinking about resources, they might just be thinking about happiness levels (that’s how it’s usually stated, anyway).
Here’s a simple model. Total amount of resources = population + sqrt(population). Now we get a repugnant conclusion, it’s better to have as high a population as possible, and everyone is living off of 1 + epsilon resources.
The movement I was going through when thinking about the RC is something akin to “huh, happiness/utility is not a concept that I have an intuitive feeling for, so let me substitute happiness/utility for resources. Now clearly distributing the resources so thinly is very suboptimal. So let’s substitute back resources for utility/happiness and reach the conclusion that distributing the utility/happiness so thinly is very suboptimal, so I find this scenario repugnant.”
Yeah, the simple model you propose beats my initial intuition. It feels very off though. Maybe its missing diminishing returns and I am rigged to expect diminishing returns?
It doesn’t dissolve the paradox if it doesn’t show that you can construct a preference function over populations that doesn’t have any counterintuitive properties (while the repugnant conclusion argument implies it must have at least one counterintuitive property). At best, it shows that the relevant choices are unlikely to be faced in reality, such that even a “bad” preference function performs decently in the real world. But that doesn’t resolve the philosophical problem, much less dissolve it.
I don’t think it even shows that the relevant choices are unlikely to be faced in reality, since situations where you can get more resources by having a higher population are really common. (Consider: a higher population contains more workers)
It dissolves the RC for me, because it answers the question “What kind of cognitive algorithm, as felt from the inside, would generate the observed debate about “the Repugnant Conclusion”?” [grabbed from your link, substituted “free will” for “repugnant conclusion”].
I feel after reading that post that I do no longer feel that the RC is counterintuitive, and instead it feels self evident; I can channel the repugnancy to aberrant distributions of resources.
But granted, most people I have talked to do not feel the question is dissolved through this. I would be curious to see how many people stop being intuitively confused about RC after reading a similar line of reasoning.
The point about more workers ⇒ more resources is also an interesting thought. We could probably expand the model to vary resources with workers, and I would expect a similar conclusion for a reasonable model to hold: optimal sum of utility is not achieved in the extremes, but in a happy medium. Either that or each additional worker produces so much that even utility per capita grows as workers goes to infinity.
I don’t see how the post says anything about the cognitive algorithm generating the repugnant conclusion? It’s just saying the choices are unlikely to be faced in reality. I think people thinking through the repugnant conclusion are not necessarily thinking about resources, they might just be thinking about happiness levels (that’s how it’s usually stated, anyway).
Here’s a simple model. Total amount of resources = population + sqrt(population). Now we get a repugnant conclusion, it’s better to have as high a population as possible, and everyone is living off of 1 + epsilon resources.
The movement I was going through when thinking about the RC is something akin to “huh, happiness/utility is not a concept that I have an intuitive feeling for, so let me substitute happiness/utility for resources. Now clearly distributing the resources so thinly is very suboptimal. So let’s substitute back resources for utility/happiness and reach the conclusion that distributing the utility/happiness so thinly is very suboptimal, so I find this scenario repugnant.”
Yeah, the simple model you propose beats my initial intuition. It feels very off though. Maybe its missing diminishing returns and I am rigged to expect diminishing returns?