“Sublinear Utility in Population and other Uncommon Utilitarianism” by Alice Blair

Content warning: Anthropics, Moral Philosophy, and Shrimp

This post isn't trying to be self contained, since I have so many disparate thoughts about this. Instead, I'm trying to put a representative set of ideas forward, and I hope that if people are interested we can discuss this more in the comments. I also plan to turn this into a (probably small) sequence at some point.

I've had a number of conversations about moral philosophy where I make some claim like

Utility is bounded and asymptotically sublinear in number of human lives, but superlinear or ~linear in the ranges we will ever have to care about.

Common reactions to this include:

• "Wait, what?"
• "Why would that be the case?"
• "This doesn't make any sense relative to my existing conceptions of classical utilitarianism, what is going on here?"

So I have gotten the impression that this is a decently [...]

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Outline:

(02:11) Aside: Utilitarianism

(02:28) The More Mathy Pointer

(03:15) Duplicate Simulations

(05:50) Slightly Different Simulations

(07:31) Utility Variation with Population

(07:51) More is Better

(08:06) In Some Domains, More is Superlinearly Better

(08:41) But Value Space is Limited

(09:21) What About The Other Animals?

(10:55) What Does this Mean About Classical EA?

(11:58) Other Curiosities

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 13th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NRxn6R2tesRzzTBKG/sublinear-utility-in-population-and-other-uncommon

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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