Some scary life extension dilemmas

That's a very good point. I assumed that, for simplicity's sake, when discussing years added, that they would all be, on average, worthwhile years that the person whose life is being extended would want to live. So actually, rather than just "amount of years," I should have said "amount of years that contain worthwhile experiences." It seems to me that that is a pretty close approximation to the number utilitarians are trying to make go up.

I'll edit the OP to make that clearer.

The odds of dying in a plane crash are, approximately, one in one million, for a one hour flight.

Where did you get that number?

The lifespan dilemma seems very similar to drug use dilemmas in general. For instance, using the generic term "Dose" which could be about a lifespan boosting chemical or a euphoriant drug, they appear to share several premises and points.

Premise 1: The first dose is good.

Premise 2: The next dose is better.

Premise 3: Too many doses will almost certainly hurt/kill you.

Point 1: Precommitting to take a certain arbitrary number of doses can give better results than taking 0, 1 or arbitrarily large doses.

Point 2: Be extremely wary of taking doses from someone you don't trust. They may be trying to pump you for utility.

Also, similar topics appear to come up a lot in Less Wrong debates in general. For instance, the Gandhi and the murder pills dilemma.

I'm not sure if I have any conclusions about this, but it does seem noteworthy.

You can of course transform the payoffs to as to restore the situation with real utilons instead of life-years, and then you have the Lifespan Dilemma.

So it seems like I accidentally recreated the Lifespan Dilemma. That makes sense. I skipped the parts of that article that described the LD in detail because I was afraid that if I read about it I would waste huge amounts of my time unsuccessfully trying to solve it and freak out when I was unable to. Which is exactly what happened when I thought up these dilemmas.

Evidently I don't understand how this works. I was under the impression that it was irrational to treat certain and expected values differently.

On the other hand, my math is probably wrong. When I did the same calculations with a lottery that had a 1 in 136 million odds of winning and a 580 million dollar jackpot I calculated that buying a lottery ticket had an expected utility of $3. This seems obviously wrong, otherwise everyone would jump at the chance to spend $1 or $2 on a lottery ticket.

Evidently I'm even worse at math than I thought.

In general, you do not need an excuse for you to be allowed to be risk averse; risk aversion is perfectly compatible with expected utility theory. I think thought experiments along the lines of the one you propose make a compelling demonstration that humans are risk averse about almost everything. This is not inconsistent.

Thank you, for some reason I thought that it was inconsistent, that there was somehow an objective was to determine how to fit probabilities into your utility function. Your comment and others have indicated to me that this is probably not the case.

My first reply to you focused on point number 2. But in retrospect, I've realized that your point 1 has utterly horrifying implications.

I don't find utility monsters hugely counter-intuitive for total util. If you replace the standard utility monster with something like "extremely efficient simulation of many consciousnesses", then converting all our inefficient fleshy beings into a much greater number of (lets say) similarly happy other beings seems a good deal to me.

If you want a more grounded form of the utility monster thought experiment there's no need to invoke futuristic technology. You need only consider the many disutility monsters who actually exist right now, in real life. The world is full of handicapped people whose disabilities make their lives harder than normal, but still worth living. If I am not mistaken the ethical theory you are proposing would recommend killing all of them and replacing them by conceiving new healthy people.

Any ethical theory that suggests we ought to kill handicapped people (who are leading worthwhile lives) and replace them with healthy people has totally failed at being an ethical theory [1].

When people have severe health problems or disabilities we do not kill them and use the money we save to pay some young couple to conceive a replacement. We take care of them. True, we don't devote all the resources we possibly can to caring for them but we still try harder than one would expect when taking the total view.

Why do we do this? I'd suspect it would be because people's ethics are more in line with prioritarianism than utilitarianism. Helping the least well off is good even if they are bad at converting resources into utility. Helping the least well off might not have infinite value, there might be some sufficiently huge amount of regular utility that could override it. But it is really, really important.

And no, "not existing" does not count as a form of being "least well off." Human beings who exist have desires and feelings. They have future-directed preferences. If they die they cannot be replaced. Nonexistant people do not have these properties. If they ever do come into existence they will, so it makes sense to make sure the future will be a good place for future people. But since nonexistant people are replaceable it makes sense to sometimes not create them for the sake of those who already do exist.

Now, you might rightly point out that while people seem to favor "prior existance" or "person affecting" viewpoints like this, there is a certain point after which they stop. For instance, most people would find it bad if the human race went extinct in the future, even if its extinction benefited existing people. What that suggests to me is that having a decent amount of worthwhile lives in existence is an important value for people, but one that has diminishing returns relative to other values. Preventing the human race from going extinct is a good thing, but once you've assured a decent amount of people will exist other things become important.

I think that this establishes at least three different values in play, which have diminishing returns relative to each other:

1. Amount of utility (I am unsure whether that is total or average. It may be some combo of both).

2. Prioritarianism, (I am unsure as to whether that is traditional prioritarianism, or whether something like Amartya Sen's "capabilities approach" is better).

3. Number of worthwhile lives (I'm not sure whether having a large number of worthwhile lives is literally what is valuable, or if what is actually valuable is things like love, friendship, diversity, etc. that can only be achieved by having large amounts of worthwhile lives. I suspect the later).

This ethical system can explain why people are willing to not create new people in order to benefit existing people in situations where the population is large, but would not do so if it would cause the human race to go extinct. It can explain why people feel we should still share resources even in "utility monster" scenarios. And it explains why it is bad to kill handicapped people.

(1]. I know Peter Singer has gained some notoriety for suggesting it might be acceptable to kill handicapped infants. However, his argument was based on the idea that the infants had not matured enough to attain personhood yet, not on the idea that it's okay to kill a fully developed person and replace them with someone who might enjoy their life slightly more. Your ethical theory would endorse killing fully grown adult people with normal cognitive skills merely because they possess some physical disability or health problem.

A priori, there seem empirical reasons to think in the very long run added lifespan will add less value, as you will do the most important/fun things first, and so extra increments of life will add elements of less value

I think a more obvious reason is that your risk of developing a health problem that kills you or destroys your quality of life increases as you age. I think an implicit part of the dilemma is that these risks are largely eliminated. I also think that society is currently pretty good at generating new fun and important things to do. Maybe in the very long run it'll run out of steam, but I think adding decades or centuries of healthy years would be about as fun as your first few years of life.

Plus suggesting that lifespan has diminishing marginal returns has the rather unpleasant implication that at some point you'd get more utility by killing someone and replacing them with someone new (who will live the same amount of time as the dead person would have lived), which seems very wrong.

Perhaps more persuasive is it does capture why we are (generally) risk averse with respect to lifetime gambles (certainty of 20 more years, or half chance at 40?)

It seems more likely to me that this is due to the Endowment Effect. I don't know if this is a bias or if it just means that risk aversion with your life is a terminal value.

I think you'll agree that even if lifespan does have diminishing returns, it probably has smaller diminishing returns (past a certain point) than money. Yet people take insanely stupid risks to get huge amounts of money. Maybe that means that risk aversion isn't 100% correlated with diminishing marginal utility.

If marginal returns from lifespan were increasing, then implies we should be risk seeking on these gambles, which seems wrong.

I don't think they're increasing, I think they're fairly constant. I think that if you add another 20 years to someone's life, then, providing they are healthy years and other factors like income and social connectedness stay constant, they will probably produce about the same amount of utility as the previous 20 years would have. In spite of this, I agree with you that it seems wrong to be risk-seeking, but I don't know why. Maybe the endowment effect again.

Why fight the hypothetical?