DiGiovanni states:

We aren’t justified in c-preferring any action over any other

A single counterexample of a pair of actions where one is c-preferred over the other would suffice to disprove his claim.

It seems noteworthy that none of the solutions attempted this.

Interesting post, thanks Richard.

Am I correct in understanding you to be suggesting "starting a nuclear war" as an example of something so obviously c-dispreferable that only a "radical skeptic" would disagree? 

If not, do you have an example of a pair of actions such that only a radical skeptic could doubt the c-preferability of one of them?

The stochastic dominance point is helpful, ty

Thanks! Not sure I agree with "heuristic": Stockfish's stopping rule is a heuristic, but it's backed by a theorem (Cantelli) that holds with no distributional assumptions. What is distribution-dependent is the estimate of  that feeds into it, and I agree that some skepticism is warranted there.

The chess analogy is meant to show the framework is implementable, not merely theoretical. That moves the question from "are expected values well-defined?" to "what is  and how large is  relative to it?" I consider that progress because the answer isn't uniformly "suspend judgment": some parameter values license acting, others clearly don't.

Thanks! The Cantelli bound is a basic result of probability theory, so I think it's hard to change chess such that it would no longer apply at all. 

But an experiment I would be interested to do is to run an engine with varying parameters and see how much this changes performance. If the "deliberate until you don't see many sign flips" approach only works because we have a precisely-tuned definition of "many", then I do think this weakens the analogy.

There are even AI-safety-pun-based sports teams!

Thanks! Tbc, I agree that there are persistence effects; I just don't think they are so strong that we can reasonably expect that slight changes in starting conditions result in a completely different world.  

if we were to travel back in time and alter starting conditions just slightly, it seems reasonable to expect that the world today would be completely different.

This is possible, but seems pretty unclear to me. cf The Gods of Straight Lines:

a few short years after the bombs stopped falling in 1945, the world economy returned to trend as if nothing had happened.

In 1776, America rebelled in the name of freedom and democracy: the origin myth of the modern world order. And yet, somehow, unrebellious Canada ended up just as free and democratic. An unrebellious America likely would have too.

For two decades, North Vietnam battled under the banner of communism, and won against all odds. And yet, somehow, Vietnam is now the most pro-capitalist country in the world.

$35/attendee is an extremely impressive cost. Thanks for doing this and writing it up!

Thanks for writing this Sarah and best wishes for the new position! 

I have been pretty pleased with the 2026 Forum output (particularly the unawareness event caused me to think more about my own work than most other things, maybe more than any other online event in 2026). Kudos to the rest of the team, and to your leadership for enabling that.