I am a Predoctoral Research Fellow in Economics at the Global Priorities Institute. I read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Warwick, led the local EA group, co-moderated our first fellowship. Previously, I interned at the European Parliament and the Future of Life Institute working on the EU AI White Paper consultation. I learned about outer space governance during a research project with the German foreign service. I am funded by BERI to collaborate with GovAI researching the Brussels Effect of EU AI regulation.
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Hi Frank, I am not sure I completely understand your questions.
Are you talking about interspecies comparisons of utility (differences)? I.e., how can we determine whether these 20 insects are happier than this one human
or (about utility differences) that giving food to 20 insects results in more additional utility than giving the food to one human?
Literature I can recommend is:
Dawkins, M.S. (1990). From an Animal's Point of View: Motivation, Fitness, and Animal Welfare. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13(1), pp.1–9.
Fleurbaey, M., and Hammond P.J. (2004). Interpersonally Comparable Utility. In: Barberà, S., Hammond, P.J., and Seidl, C. (eds) Handbook of Utility Theory. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-7964-1_8
Budolfson, M. and Spears, D. (2020). Quantifying Animal Well-being and Overcoming the Challenges of Interspecies Comparisons. In: Bob Fischer (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics
Roberts, K. (1997). Objective Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility. Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 14, pp. 79–96.
There is also a forum post about the topic here by Jason Schukraft.
Or are you just generally talking about Social Choice Theory?
Happy to help if this does not yet answer your question.
(The Commission just opened its public consultation, which I encourage European NGOs, scientists, and citizens to weigh in on.)
Perhaps just to clarify the procedure. This is the Inception Impact Assessment Consultation where feedback is acquired on priorities and legislative paths. As written in the Inception Impact Assessment, another Consultation for 12 (rather than 7) weeks will be opened in the second half of 2021.
For this consultation, a good answer would take a precise stance on the different options outlined in the Inception Impact Assessment.
adding:
- corporal punishment (especially of minors, by parents, in schools etc)
- rape in marriages /marital rape
- "marry your rapist" laws
- human trafficking
- with-hunt (though I am not aware of the # of affected individuals)
I also want to note that the things I have added and many others added are still ongoing. It would be naive to say that these are only moral catastrophes of the past.
A few more controversial moral catastrophes:
- religion (arguably counterfactually responsible for at least a few wars and a few really unhealthy cultural traditions, though it is hard to say whether the counterfactual would have been much better)
- no available education for everyone - under certain moral philosophy (I am thinking of Mill, in particular), the access to academic thought and literary texts, critical thinking is of critical importance. Billions were barred from it.
Yes, I agree with you that they should be different but are related, so thanks for your edits. Beckstead uses at least the QWIRC keyboard as an example for trajectory changes in his Phd as far as I remember.
As far as I understand, Beckstead and other EAs also refer to this as a "trajectory change". Hence, I would find it useful to mention this name in the tag page.
Also see the response from CSER here.
Hi Edo, instead of the leaked document, you might want to link to the official publication which is here. The European Commission published simultaneously the Coordinated Plan on AI. Some readers unfamiliar with the EU legislative process might assume that the details of the regulation are almost fixed, which is not the case. During the next months/years, the Council and the European Parliament will work on the proposal and will have trilogue meetings.
I am confused as to how this relates to trajectory changes (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/trajectory-changes). When Beckstead (2013) talks about ripple effects, I understand him to talk about trajectory changes, ie., a certainclass of interventions which might be very effective for longtermists, compared to x-risk mitigation. Independent of this and whether one agrees with longtermism, it might be still relevant to think about info hauards, replacability (the bullet point). I would suggest that the first paragraph should be moved to trajectory changes instead. Sorry, if I have overseen something.
I have read all except one post you linked to. I don't understand how your post related to the two posts about children and would appreciate a comment. I agree with your argument that "EA jobs provide scarce non-monetary goods" and that it is hard to get hired by EA organisations. However, it is unclear to me that any of these posts provide a damaging critique to EA. I would be surprised if anyone managed to create a movement without any of these dynamics. However, I would also be excited to see working tackling these putative problems such as the non-monetary value of different jobs.
Great, thanks for writing this. I wished you had included a concise and short summary of the article in your post rather than your evaluation. This would have provided more information to people who don't read the article. I read parts of the original article.