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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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You are confusing type I goods (goods which have intrinsic value, i.e. are valued for their own sake) with type II goods (goods which have only extrinsic value, i.e. are valued for their ability to produce/acquire type I goods). Your own pleasure and your own lack of suffering are type I goods. The pleasure and lack of suffering of anonymous random sentient creatures is not a type I good, but it is often (but not always) a type II good.

This is a common cynical misinterpretation of utility functions. Even if humans were utilitarian, the point of utilitarianism is to maximize utility, not to maximize one's own subjective feeling of utility. I help others because they need help, not in order to experience the fuzzies associated with helping others. If there was a drug that gave me that feeling, I would not take it.

I started taking adderall recently in order to concentrate better. It gives me a feeling identical to what I feel when I accomplish something difficult. It's a great feeling, but means nothing to me without the substance of an actual accomplishment behind it. The most important thing to me in life is accomplishing great things, yet I take Adderall only very rarely.

Shrimp aren't type 1 goods for me, but people who share my values (which is nearly all of them to some extent) are.

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