Utilitarians probably wasting time on recreation

If you're curious whether the AMF is a scam, reading GiveWell's review might be helpful. After reading the review I'm pretty well convinced it's not only not a scam but that it's doing a lot of good.

Would you be in favour of releasing a more virulent strain of malaria, in order to more effectively reduce the population? If not then you may be falling prey to status-quo bias.

Or maybe I'm really just not a stereotypical consequentialist movie villain? I have ethics for a start.

Scientists have shown that we only use 10% of our time!

I'm totally going to quote that out of context.

Your emotions reveal what you really care about.

Pretend you are under the impression that you care more about X than Y. You are also under the impression that you have never faced a trade-off between X and Y. I believe you have a bias view of your own preferences. I prove this by presenting a hypothetical situation in which you recognize you would be much more bothered by losing 1 Y than 50,000 X. I have thus showed that your initial views about X and Y are bias. The bias revealed, you now realize that you do value Y a lot more than X.

I would upvote the link, but I heartily disagree that is the only worthwhile article.

If someone posted an explanation of Pythagoras' theorem, I wouldn't upvote that either, however useful it is to middle school students.

I had thought before posting that most people at Less Wrong were utilitarians.

Some amateur etymology, for those enamored of distinctions:

Most people here seem to be consequentialists, and consequentialism is merely the view that an action's goodness is defined by its outcome. Most are also 'utilitarians', seemingly meaning that they believe expected utility maximization is the correct metric for ranking outcomes, where 'utility' refers simply to the output of an agent's utility function. Probably most are also 'altruists', where altruism is the view that doing good things for others is good for oneself.

This is a departure from how the terms are used in the ethical literature. There, 'utilitarianism' tends to refer to an agent-neutral consequentialist moral theory; that is, my survival doesn't matter any more than yours. Also, 'altruism' in ethics refers to a theory that looks just like utilitarianism but discounts the agent entirely; think Christian self-sacrifice.

Our use of the term 'utility' has its roots in game theory, decision theory, and economics; our 'utilitarianism' seems to be an offshoot of that. Our use of the term 'altruism' seems to come from anthropology by way of evolutionary psychology.

Utilitarianism isn't a synonym for altruism. You can be a utilitarian and value your own happiness above that of others.

if people were following my calculations starting from partway through they would arrive at the same answers

If this is motivated by desire for trustworthiness, linking to the source of the life expectancy figures should have higher priority. (Also, how did you calculate the average? Weighed by overall population of those countries, population under ten, number of AMF clients, simply averaging the four numbers, ... ?)

I'll edit the post to use life expectancy figures from ten years ago.

If you used the ten years old data, you would most probably obtain lower expected age at death for today's ten-years olds* than for today's newborns. But it should be higher. The problem is not that the life expectancy changes during the time. The problem is that the life expectancy at birth is average of life times of all people born, while the life expectancy at age of ten is average of life times* of all people that survived until this age. The latter is higher than the former, since all children who died before their tenth birthday (and who lower the former average) are excluded from the statistics. In e.g. Zambia, about 11% of children die before age of five, so you can imagine how this influences the discussed difference. (I was unable to quickly find data for this to illustrate the difference explicitly.)

* Note that life expectancy at age x usually means the expected remaining time of life, not the expected age of death (which obviously is obtained from the former by adding x).

(Edited.)

Writing 38 instead of 38.81755 saves 6 characters, if nothing else. Keeping unnecessarily many decimals also creates impression of a high precision figure which was misleading here. I am not sure what SI and sciences have to do with that; we use the decimal system for writing numbers, our language is adopted to the decimal system (which is why it may be even preferable to say 40 instead of 38 in the present context - it's shorter when said aloud) and SI is decimal because of these facts, not the other way around.

wedrifid, to the extent that your terminal values affect your actions and hence the effect of your actions on the value of my utility function, they are my business (in the same sense that your religion is my business).

Of course they are your business in the sense that knowledge about my utility function alters your game theoretic incentives when it comes to dealing with me. When it comes down to it you may need to throw down and use social or physical force against me. And yet it remains the case that telling me what my preferences are (in any sense except an assertion that I incorrectly model myself) is a straightforward intellectual error.

In most social environments that aren't cults it is also considered rather rude to tell other people what their preferences are. If you violate my personal conceptual territory by telling me what I do, or must, intrinsically value then you can should expect to be told to because you are being a . It is (if done particularly aggressively) a rather degrading act, somewhat along the lines of 'objectification' - it acts to remove the recipients independent identity and relevance as an agent of personal social-political relevance.

When playing chess and I capture your queen in such a way as I guarantee that I can achieve checkmate in 7 it is ridiculous to tell me that I have just made a bad move. I can be assumed* to be implicitly valuing winning the chess game. It takes a rather esoteric reinterpretation of language to say that I am making a bad move due to it not being a move that achieves your goals. It would just mean that you would have to invent new words for the purpose of communicating with others.

* Barring exceptional external circumstances. I recall, for example, a (cricket) World Cup wherein it was in Australia's best interest to lose a particular game in order to be in a better place to win the series.

Please explain what you mean by this.

Among other things, I'm saying that telling people (or aggressively making assumptions about) what their terminal values must be is an error that is intellectual and/or social in nature. That is what this post does.

"None of your business" seems like a label you've made up for "Things I don't want you to question me on".

Really? I don't think you are being reasonable. I didn't make up the label for a start. I was speaking colloquial English.