Derek Parfit
Article
Derek Parfit is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2022 and May 15, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “MacAskill introduces it with a riddle of Derek Parfit’s”; “Derek Parfit describes it as “listening to Muzak and eating potatoes””; “Derek Parfit was leading a renaissance in utilitarian thought”. It most often appears alongside EA, effective altruist movement, MacAskill.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: August 23, 2022
- Last seen: May 15, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- EA (2 shared issues)
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- effective altruist movement (2 shared issues)
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- MacAskill (2 shared issues)
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- Will MacAskill (2 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
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- @the_megabase (1 shared issues)
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- A Pan-Species Welfare State (1 shared issues)
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- abolitionist literature (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grantees (1 shared issues)
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- ACX MEETUP (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- AI Alignment (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Survival is also simple. MacAskill introduces it with a riddle of Derek Parfit’s. Assuming there are 10 billion people in the world, consider the following outcomes:
MacAskill concludes that there’s no solution besides agreeing to create as many people as possible even though they will all have happiness 0.001. He points out that happiness 0.001 might not be that bad. People seem to avoid suicide out of stubbornness or moral objections, so “the lowest threshold at which living is still slightly better than dying” doesn’t necessarily mean the level of depression we associate with most real-world suicides. It could still be a sort of okay life. Derek Parfit describes it as “listening to Muzak and eating potatoes”. He writes:
Inline links: eating potatoes
Turn-of-the-21st-century Oxford was an exciting place. Derek Parfit was leading a renaissance in utilitarian thought. New technologies like the personal computer, the Internet, and the Human Genome Project were inspiring a new generation of transhumanists. Out of this milieu, philosophers like Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, and Toby Ord were laying the groundwork for what would become the rationalist and effective altruist movements. Utilitarians, they argued, were charged with relieving the suffering of the world as quickly and effectively as possible. Technology offered new opportunities to do this at scale. This could be ending poverty and curing diseases (if you were well-grounded in the present moment) or creating a superintelligence to lead us to a post-scarcity future (if you were feeling more ambitious).