I thought Lydia’s post was great.

• i copied most of it below:

I think quantifying vitae is a pretty brilliant move. In particular, I think having a better conceptual & empirical understanding of a quantified vita will give (especially EA) organizations a better sense of how to optimize for it.

As a quick first-pass sketch, Lydia’s definition of a vita seems decent, except:

each specified at 2025 “coastal-elite” service levels.

…why?

2025 coastal-elite seems like (a) a pretty arbitrary point, and (b) a substantially higher point than how I’d style my answer to the question “Do we have enough resources for everyone on the planet.” Like, I realize we’ll probably need to pick some line in the sand, and so whatever line we pick will likely be arbitrary to some degree, but to the extent that Lydia had any sort of reason for picking this one, it’d be cool to know why.

But my biggest point of disagreement is that it seems like Lydia is totally underestimating distributive concerns. This is both a question of operations (”is our civilization capable of distributing vitae to everyone?”) and also a question of incentives (”assuming our civilization is capable of such distribution, will the relevant actors actually do so?”).

Lydia:

If we live in a world with 10 VPP, I’m not at all worried about whether I personally am employed or not, because I can rely on benevolence and altruism to spot me a vita and help me out.

Then, in a footnote:

I think this stands for as long as humans are similar enough to each other that our elite can’t conscience hoarding vitae when some people have <1.

I’m really not sure about that at all? For example, there are subpopulations of humans where there are >10 VPP — e.g. luxury hotels in very poor countries — and where plenty of the humans (e.g. the cleaning staff) living there have <1 vita.

Another way of putting this is that — yes, I agree with her conditional, but I think the bar for “humans are similar enough” is descriptively-and-not-normatively much higher (e.g. speaking the same language, having the same skin color, etc) than she seems to think.

Lydia:

If we have abundant VPP, looking after everyone is just a redistributive question.

“Just” is doing way, way too much work here.