From: Dani Eder (danielravennest@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Aug 27 2001 - 22:54:01 MDT
> Example: I would say
> that its impossible to use altruism as a leading
> goal and still be rational,
> mainly because I believe altruism to be irrational.
My employer (Boeing) has made an engineering
specialty of the design and optimization of complex
systems. Part of that process is the identification
of 'measures of value' against whch a system can
be optimized. The traditional three measures are
cost, schedule, and performance in the business
world, but other measures can be chosen.
I applied this process to my own life goals. One
of my most important goals is to maximize my years
of 'useful' life (years with a decent quality of
life). A consequence of this is that the continuance
of an advancing civilization is required, especially
one that is increasing life expectancy at over
1 year per calendar year, since that leads to a
non-linear increase in my years of useful life.
Whatever 'altruistic' contributions I may have made
(like being an editor of the Open Directory Project
www.dmoz.org) are really done in my own interest,
calculated thus: I contribute x amount of time to
editing the ODP. In return, I get the benefit of
the high quality directory produced by me and
~6,000 other active editors, which saves me more than
x amount of time in web serching.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger
http://phonecard.yahoo.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:37 MDT