Next weekend at EAGx Australia I'll be doing a live 80,000 Hours Podcast recording with philosopher Alan Hájek, who has spent his life studying the nature of probability, counterfactuals, Bayesianism, expected value and more.
What should I ask him?
He's he author of among other papers:
- Waging war on Pascal's wager
- The reference class problem is your problem too
- Interpretations of probability
- Arguments for—or against—Probabilism?
- Most counterfactuals are false
- The nature of uncertainty
Topics he'd likely be able to comment on include:
- problems with orthodox expected utility theory, especially involving infinite and undefined utilities or expectations
- risk aversion, whether it’s justified, and how best to spell it out
- how to set base rate priors for unknown quantities
- his heuristics for doing good philosophy (about which he has lots to say) / how to spot bad philosophical arguments
See more about Professor Hájek here: https://philosophy.cass.anu.edu.au/people/professor-alan-h-jek
I'm confused about separability, i.e,. the assumption that my actions shouldn't depend on whether there is a separate world somewhere we can't reach.
For instance, if there was a separate Earth unreachably far away, I would intuitively be more in favor of taking riskier actions which would have a high upside (e.g., utopia) but also a chance of killing all humans—because there is a backup planet.
Am I just confused here? If not, are there any proofs of utilitarianism which don't rely on separability? (e.g., I think Harsanyi's does?).
Thanks Michael, seems that I was just a bit confused here.