Opportunity cost is a real cost and Save as many lives as possible.

When faced with a choice, we have to understand that Opportunity cost is a real cost. However, after a choice is made, we must try to free ourselves of the retroactive burden and move forward with acceptance and Wu Wei.

“Whatever value is worth thinking about at all must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility.” (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality)

Opportunity cost is a real cost, and Attention has an opportunity cost

For this reason, I tend to not give much weight to arguments that argue against thinking in terms of optimization. If anything matters…, then optimization matters. It doesn’t mean that optimization needs to be single-minded (i.e. maximization). It only means that while there is such thing as an Opportunity Cost, optimization is desirable.

“Whatever value is worth thinking about at all must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility.” (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality)

Opportunity cost is a real cost, and Attention has an opportunity cost

This feels obvious and intuitive, but we do not always see that Opportunity cost is a real cost and choose to maximize the number of lives we save.