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Robin Hanson's avatar

Peter, I'll look out for a chance to disagree about the repugnant conclusion.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Robin, I'm a bit disappointed that you only analyzed the initial disagreement, which seems to result from a relatively common communications problem.I'd be more impressed by an analysis why people disagree with you over the "repugnant conclusion" of utilitarianism, which seems likely to cause some important and persistent policy disagreements.My intuition causes me to disagree with most people and say that what we should try to maximize is some combination of total welfare and average welfare, weighted according to whatever set of preferences evolution happens to have built us to value. This doesn't satisfy me the way a less arbitrary rule created by a wise deity would, but until I can find such an external source of a rule for what to maximize, it's hard for me to see why I should abandon the values evolution appears to have given me.

Matthew, here are some play-money prediction market contracts on SENS milestones:http://www.ideosphere.com/f...http://www.ideosphere.com/f...http://www.ideosphere.com/f...But long-term contracts on that exchange (and probably all play-money markets) tend to be biased to be too close to 50%.

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