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Notes -
There's a line from Scott's What We Owe the Future review that really stood out to me:
Catching that for the first time really had me hoping he would explore that a little bit more, but in context it seemed to be little more than a quip. So it falls to me to try to explore it.
I don't think it's an accident that utilitarian altruists start out with hypothetical scenarios about bodily harm to children. I think, in effect, it's an attempt to manipulate the audience: to condition them into a rare mode, one meant for extreme emergencies, and then lock them in that mode for the rest of their lives. To catch people in their very most self-sacrificial state and make them keep that up forever.
It seems to me rather like if someone heard about a mother, with a burst of strength, lifting a burning car off her toddler, and thinking "wow! Super-strength is within human capacity! All we have to do is get into the mindset of a mother whose children are in immediate mortal danger and stay like that all the time and who knows what wonders we'll all be capable of afterward! We could carry pianos one-handed; build houses alone in but a day! All that stands in our way is that, for whatever reason, we're not in the right mindset! Well, we'd better fix that!"
Do you think that would work? I don't. First of all, there'd be no chance of actually getting people far enough to try it. Second of all, even if people did try it, what would result is not a glorious utopia full of Herculeans, but instead a bunch of miserable or dead people with rapidly-ruined bodies. The world would not be stronger, richer, happier, more vivacious for it, but weaker, poorer, more miserable, and more dead.
Moving back from the matter of super-strength to altruistic economic productivity removes the vividly gory details of exploded muscles and limbs torn apart, but I do wonder if it wouldn't be similarly ruinous to try to change the equilibrium in which humans operate to the greatest extremum achieved, especially without a very thorough understanding of why we're not already always up there in the first place.
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