to be honest I think that if I had that epistemic state I would probably be like "uhm I guess if I was a consistent rational agent I would do whatever the beliefs I have 1% credence in imply, but alas I'm not, and so even if I don't endorse this on a meta level I know that I'll mostly just ~ignore this set of 1% likely views and do whatever I want instead".

I'd have guessed that:

1. You'd think that, if you tried to write out all the assumptions that would mean your actions are the best actions to take, at least one would have a <1% chance of being true in your view
2. But you take those actions anyway, because they seem to you to have a higher expected value than the alternatives

Am I wrong about that (admittedly vague) claim? 

Or maybe what seems weird about my chain of cruxes is something like the fact that one that's so unlikely in my own view is so "foundational"? Or something like the fact that I've only identified ~12 cruxes (so far from writing out all the assumptions implicit in my specific priorities, such as the precise research projects I work on) and yet already one of them was deemed so unlikely by me?

(Maybe here it's worth noting that one worry I had about posting this was that it might be demotivating, since there are so many uncertainties relevant to any given action, even though in reality it can still often be best to just go ahead with our current best guess because any alternative - including further analysis - seems less promising.)

In particular one that affects one's whole life focus in a massive way.

I'm actually not very confident that dropping the first four claims would affect my actual behaviours very much. (Though it definitely could, and I guess we should be wary of suspicious convergence.) 

To be clearer on this, I've now edited the post to say:

Perhaps most significantly, as noted in the spreadsheet, it seems plausible that my behaviours would stay pretty similar if I lost all credence in the first four claims

Here's what I say in the spreadsheet I'd do if I lost all my credence in the 2nd claim: 

Maybe get back into video games, stand-up comedy, and music? 
But it feels hard to say, partly because currently I think spending lots of time on EA-aligned things and little time on video games etc. is best for my own happiness, since otherwise I'd have nagging sense that I should be contributing to things that matter. 
But maybe that sense would go away if I lost my belief that there are substantial moral reasons? Or maybe I'd want to push that updated belief aside and keep role-playing as if morality mattered a lot.

And here's what I say I'd do if I lost all my credence in the 4th claim:

If I lost belief in this claim, but thought there was a non-negligible chance we could learn about moral truths (maybe by creating a superintelligence, exploring distant galaxies, "breaking out of the simulation", or whatever), I might try to direct all efforts and resources towards learning the moral truth, or towards setting ourselves up to learn it (and then act on it) in future.

This might look pretty similar to reducing existential risk and ensuring a long reflection can happen. (Though it also might not. And I haven't spent much time on cause prioritisation from the perspective of someone who doesn't act on those first four claims, so maybe my first thoughts here are mistaken in some basic way.)

That seems like a fair comment. 

FWIW, mostly, I don't really feel like my credence is that low in those claims, except when I focus my explicit attention on that topic. I think on an implicit level I have strongly moral realist intuitions. So it doesn't take much effort to motivate myself to act as though moral realism is true.

If you'd be interested in my attempts to explain how I think about the "moral realism wager" and how it feels from the inside to kind-of live according to that wager, you may want to check out my various comments on Lukas Gloor's anti-realism sequence. 

(I definitely do think the wager is at least kind-of weird, and I don't know if how I'm thinking makes sense. But I don't think I found Lukas's counterarguments compelling.)

3. I shouldn't just ask what I should do selfishly speaking

I think the real question is, selfishly speaking, how much more do you gain from playing video games than from working on longtermism?

It could be that that's the only question I have to ask. That would happen if I work out what seems best to do from an altruistic perspective, then from a self-interested perspective, and I notice that they're identical.

But that seems extremely unlikely. It seems likely that there's a lot of overlap between what's quite good from each perspective (at least given my current knowledge), since evolution and socialisation and such have led me to enjoy being and feeling helpful, noble, heroic, etc. But it seems much less likely that the very best thing from two very different perspectives is identical. See also Beware surprising and suspicious convergence.

Another way that that could be the only question I have to ask is if I'm certain that I should just act according to self-interest, regardless of what's right from an altruistic perspective. But I see no good basis for that certainty.

This is part I said "it seems plausible that my behaviours would stay pretty similar if I lost all credence in the first four claims", rather than making a stronger claim. I do think my behaviours would change at least slightly.

2. Credence in X vs credence I should roughly act on X

That all seems fine, until you start to multiply it out. 70%^20 is 0.08%. And yet my actual confidence in the basic EA framework is probably closer to 50%.

I think maybe you mean, or what you should mean, is that your actual confidence that you should, all things considered, act roughly as if the EA framework is correct is probably closer to 50%. And that's what's decision relevant. This captures ideas like those you mention, e.g.:

• Well, what's the actual alternative? Maybe they're even less likely to be true?
• Maybe this is unlikely to be true but really important if true, so I should make a "wager" on it for EV reasons?

I think a 50% confidence that the basic EA framework is actually correct[2] seems much too high, given how uncertain we should be about metaethics, consequentialism, axiology, decision theory, etc. But that uncertainty doesn't mean acting on any other basis actually seems better. And it doesn't even necessarily mean I should focus on reducing those uncertainties, for reasons including that I think I'm a better fit for reducing other uncertainties that are also very decision-relevant (e.g., whether people should focus on longtermism or other EA cause areas, or how to prioritise within longtermism). 

So I think I'm much less than 50% certain that the basic EA framework is actually correct, but also that I should basically act according to the basic EA framework, and that I'll continue doing so for the rest of my life, and that I shouldn't be constantly stressing out about my uncertainty. (It's possible that some people would find it harder to put the uncertainty out of mind, even when they think that, rationally speaking, they should do so. For those people, this sort of exercise might be counterproductive.)

[2] By the framework being "actually correct", I don't just mean "this framework is useful" or "this framework is the best we've got, given our current knowledge". I mean something like "the claims it is based on are correct, or other claims that justify it are correct", or "maximally knowledgeable and wise versions of ourselves would endorse this framework as correct or as worth acting on". 

tl;dr 

1. I agree that behaviours like my actual behaviours can be the right choice even if I don't have high credence in all of these claims, and perhaps even if I had very low or 0 credence in some of them or in the conjunction, for the reasons you mention. 
2. I think it's useful to separate "my credence that X is true" from "my credence that, all things considered, I should act roughly as if X is true". I think that that's also key in "explaining the discrepancy" you point to.
3. But disagree that "the real question is, selfishly speaking, how much more do you gain from playing video games than from working on longtermism". That would only be true if it was guaranteed that what I should do is what's best for me selfishly, which would be suspicious convergence and/or overconfidence.

I'll split that into three comments.

But I should note that these comments focus on what I think is true, not necessarily what I think it's useful for everyone to think about. There are some people for whom thinking about this stuff just won't be worth the time, or might be overly bad for their motivation or happiness.

1. Where I agree with your comment

I do worry how much it might bias you, especially in the absence of equally rigorously evaluated alternatives.

Am I correct in thinking that you mean you worry how much conducting this sort of exercise might affect anyone who does so, in the sense that it'll tend to overly strongly make them think they should reduce their confidence in their bottom-line conclusions and actions? (Because they're forced to look at and multiply one, single, conjunctive set of claims, without considering the things you mention?)[1]

If so, I think I sort-of agree, and that was the main reason I consider never posting this. I also agree that each of the things you point to as potentially "explaining the discrepancy" can matter. As I note in a reply to Max Daniel above:

 (Maybe here it's worth noting that one worry I had about posting this was that it might be demotivating, since there are so many uncertainties relevant to any given action, even though in reality it can still often be best to just go ahead with our current best guess because any alternative - including further analysis - seems less promising.)

And as I note in various other replies here and in the spreadsheet itself, it's often not obvious that a particular "crux" actually is required to support my current behaviours. E.g., here's what I say in the spreadsheet I'd do if I lost all my credence in the 2nd claim: 

Maybe get back into video games, stand-up comedy, and music? 
But it feels hard to say, partly because currently I think spending lots of time on EA-aligned things and little time on video games etc. is best for my own happiness, since otherwise I'd have nagging sense that I should be contributing to things that matter. 
But maybe that sense would go away if I lost my belief that there are substantial moral reasons? Or maybe I'd want to push that updated belief aside and keep role-playing as if morality mattered a lot.

This is why the post now says:

Perhaps most significantly, as noted in the spreadsheet, it seems plausible that my behaviours would stay pretty similar if I lost all credence in the first four claims

And this is also why I didn't include in this post itself my "Very naive calculation of what my credence "should be" in this particular line of argument" - I just left that in the spreadsheet, so people will only see that if they actually go to where the details can be found. And in my note there, I say:

I'm not sure that these calculations are useful at all. They might be misleading, because of various complexities noted in this spreadsheet and the accompanying post. Maybe I should just delete this bit.

[1] Or you might've meant other things by the "it", "you", and "bias" here. E.g., you might've meant "I worry how much seeing this post might bias people who see it", or "I worry how much seeing this post or conducting this exercise might cause a bias towards anchoring on one's initial probabilities."

Glad to hear that! 

I'll be interested to see yours once it's out, partly just because this sort of thing seems interesting in general and partly in case the structure you land on is better than my one.

(I expected some confusion to be created by the fact that my approach just shows a single, conjunctive chain, and by the fact that much of the clarifications and justifications and implications are tucked away in the spreadsheet itself. And comments so far have indicated that those concerns may indeed have been justified.)

It also looks like you're actually >50% downside-focused, conditional on strong longtermism, just before suffering-focused views. 

I don't think this is quite right. 

The simplest reason is that I think suffering-focused does not necessarily imply downside-focused. Just as a (weakly) non-suffering-focused person could still be downside-focused for empirical reasons (basically the scale, tractability, and neglectedness of s-risks vs other x-risks), a (weakly) suffering-focused person could still focus on non-s-risk x-risks for empirical reasons. This is partly because one can have credence in a weakly suffering-focused view, and partly because one can have a lot of uncertainty between suffering-focused views and other views. 

As I note in the spreadsheet, if I lost all credence in the claim that I shouldn't be subscribe to suffering-focused ethics, I'd: 

Probably work on s-risks or s-risk factors (rather than other x-risks or x-risk factors - though note that these categories can overlap). 

But maybe still work on non-s-risk x-risks, such as extinction risks. (This depends on how much more important I'd now believe reducing suffering is; the importance, tractability, and neglectedness of specific intervention options; and my comparative advantage.) [emphasis added]

That said, it is true that I'm probably close to 50% downside-focused. (It's even possible that it's over 50% - I just think that the spreadsheet alone doesn't clearly show that.) 

And, relatedly, there's a substantial chance that in future I'll focus on actions somewhat tailored to reducing s-risks, most likely by researching authoritarianism & dystopias or broad risk factors that might be relevant both to s-risks and other x-risks. (Though, to be clear, there's also a substantial chunk of why I see authoritarianism/dystopias as bad that isn't about s-risks.)

This all speaks to a weakness of the spreadsheet, which is that it just shows one specific conjunctive set of claims that can lead me to my current bottom-line stance. This makes my current stance seems less justified-in-my-own-view than it really is, because I haven't captured other possible paths that could lead me to it (such as being suffering-focused but thinking s-risks are far less likely or tractable than other x-risks). 

And another weakness is simply that these claims are fuzzy and that I place fairly little faith in my credences even strongly reflecting my own views (let alone being "reasonable"). So one should be careful simply multiplying things together. That said, I do think that doing so can be somewhat fruitful and interesting.

Suffering-focused and downside-focused views, which you cover after strong longtermism, still support work to reduce certain x-risks, specifically s-risks. [...] Some AI safety work could look very good to both downside- and upside-focused views, so you might find you have more credence in working on that specifically.

FWIW, I agree with both of these points, and think they're important. (Although it's still the case that I'm not currently focused on s-risks or AI safety work, due to other considerations such as comparative advantage.)

I'm unsure of my stance on the other things you say in those first two paragraphs.

By x-risks, do you mean primarily extinction risks?

No, though I did worry people would misinterpret the post as meaning extinction risks specifically. As I say in the post:

This spreadsheet [...] does not capture:

• [...]
• Which specific x-risks one should focus on
  • E.g., extinction due to biorisk vs unrecoverable dystopia due to AI
  • See also

Other relevant notes from the spreadsheet itself, from the "In the coming century or so" cell:

Perhaps it'd make more sense to separate out the question of whether to focus on x-risks from the question of whether to focus on doing/supporting direct work done this century.

And perhaps it'd make sense to also add a separate question about whether to prioritise work that's fairly directly relevant to x-risks from work on existential risk/security factors (e.g., perhaps, moral circle expansion or improving institutions). Currently this spreadsheet doesn't address that question.

And perhaps it'd make sense to add a separate question about extinction risk vs other x-risks. (At the moment, I mean x-risks to be inclusive of risks of unrecoverable collapse or unrecoverable dystopia.) [emphasis added]

And FWIW, here's a relevant passage from a research agenda I recently drafted, which is intended to be useful both in relation to extinction risks and in relation to non-extinction existential risks:

Why should someone do research related to non-extinction existential risks?

My answer to this question mirrors the answer I gave above: 

• In my view, we’re currently very uncertain about how the likelihood and tractability of extinction and non-extinction existential risks compare, such that:
  • Both categories of risks should get substantial attention
  • Decisions to specialise for work on one category of risks or the other should probably focus more on how neglected each category is and what one’s comparative advantage is, rather than how likely and tractable each category of risks is
• There appears to be a substantially larger amount of rigorous work done and planned on extinction risk than on non-extinction existential risk
  • Perhaps especially when it comes to the risk of an unrecoverable dystopia, rather than the risk of an unrecoverable collapse) [Footnote:  Some of the relatively small amount of work that has been done on these topics to date can be found here, here, and here.]

Note that that section is basically about what someone who hasn't yet specialised should now specialise to do, on the margin. I'm essentially quite happy for people who've already specialised for reducing extinction risk to keep on with that work.

I think this means that the rational metaethical choice for me is realism, and that I should believe this fully (unless I have reason to believe that there is further evidence that I haven't considered or don't understand) [emphasis added]

Are you saying you should act as though moral realism is 100% likely, even though you feel only slightly more convinced of it than of antirealism? That doesn't seem to make sense to me? It seems like the most reasonable approaches to metaethical uncertainty would involve considering not just "your favourite theory" but also other theories you assign nontrivial credence to, analogous to the most reasonable-seeming approaches to moral uncertainty.

I haven't read those links, but I think that that approach sounds pretty intuitive and like it's roughly what I would do anyway. So I think this would leave my credence at 0.01. (But it's hard to say, both because I haven't read those links and because, as noted, I feel unsure what the claim even means anyway.)

(Btw, I've previously tried to grapple with and lay out my views on the question Can we always assign, and make sense of, subjective probabilities?, including for "supernatural-type claims" such as "non-naturalistic moral realism". Though that was one of the first posts I wrote, so is lower on concision, structure, and informed-ness than my more recent posts tend to be.)

(Also, just a heads up that the links you shared don't work as given, since the Forum made the punctuation after the links part of the links themselves.)