Shut up and multiply

You know what? This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.

—Circular Altruism

Due to scope neglect, framing effects, and other cognitive biases, the result of an expected utility calculation may be intuitively unappealing, perhaps even horrifying. And yet, intuition is not the most reliable guide for what policies will actually produce the best results, particularly in cases where we can actually do calculations with the relevant quantities. The ability to shut up and multiply, to trust the math even when it feels wrong is a key rationalist skill. The specific application of Shut Up and Multiply to the Torture versus Dust Specs case has proven quite contentious.

Blog posts

• One Life Against the World
• Circular Altruism, The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism"
• Money: The Unit of Caring
• Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately
• Torture vs. Dust Specks

External links

• Is Valuing Life Undervaluing it? by Katja Grace
• You Can Put a Dollar Value on Human Life by Yvain
• The Value of a Life by Nate Soares
• Critical discussion by "A scientists Thesis" on Tumblr
• Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't undestand ethics by Sean Goedeke

See also

• Scope insensitivity
• Fuzzies, utils
• Pascal's mugging
• Bite the bullet
• Rationality
• Utilitarianism, expected utility