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?
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?