Sweet! I've messaged him.
How about Dylan Balfour's 'Pascal's Mugging Strikes Again'? It's great.
I remember Toby Ord gave a talk at GPI where he pointed out the following:
Let L be long-term value per unit of resources and N be near-term value per unit of resources. Then spending 50% of resources on the best long-term intervention and 50% of resources on the best near-term intervention will lead you to split resources equally between A and C. But the best thing to do on a 0.5*(near-term value)+0.5*(long-term value) value function is to devote 100% of resources to B.
Yes, that all sounds right to me. Thanks for the tip about uniformity and fanaticism! Uniformity also comes up here, in the distinction between the Quantity Condition and the Trade-Off Condition.
Thanks! This is a really cool idea and I'll have to think more about it. What I'll say now is that I think your version of lexical totalism violates RGNEP and RNE. That's because of the order in which I have the quantifiers. I say, 'there exists p such that for any k...'. I think your lexical totalism only satisfies weaker versions of RGNEP and RNE with the quantifiers the other way around: 'for any k, there exists p...'.
Ah no, that's as it should be! is saying that is one of the very positive welfare levels mentioned on page 4.
Thanks! Your points about independence sound right to me.
Thanks for your comment! I think the following is a closer analogy to what I say in the paper:
... (read more)Suppose apples are better than oranges, which are in turn better than bananas. And suppose your choices are:
- An apple and bananas for sure.
- An apple with probability and an orange with probability , along with oranges for sure.
Then even if you believe:
- One apple is better than any amount of oranges
It still seems as if, for some large and small , 2 is better than 1. 2 slightly increases the risk you miss ou
Thanks!
And agreed! The title of the paper is intended as a riff on the title of the chapter where Arrhenius gives his sixth impossibility theorem: 'The Impossibility of a Satisfactory Population Ethics.' I think that an RC-implying theory can still be satisfactory.
Thanks!
Your point about time preference is an important one, and I think you're right that people sometimes make too quick an inference from a zero rate of pure time preference to a future-focus, without properly heeding just how difficult it is to predict the long-term consequences of our actions. But in my experience, longtermists are very aware of the difficulty. They recognise that the long-term consequences of almost all of our actions are so difficult to predict that their expected long-term value is roughly 0. Nevertheless, they think that the long-... (read more)
Hi Vaden,
Cool post! I think you make a lot of good points. Nevertheless, I think longtermism is important and defensible, so I’ll offer some defence here.
First, your point about future expectations being undefined seems to prove too much. There are infinitely many ways of rolling a fair die (someone shouts ‘1!’ while the die is in the air, someone shouts ‘2!’, etc.). But there is clearly some sense in which I ought to assign a probability of 1/6 to the hypothesis that the die lands on 1.
Suppose, for example, that I am offered a choice: either bet on a six-... (read more)
Nice post! I share your meta-ethical stance, but I don't think you should call it 'moral quasi-realism'. 'Quasi-realism' already names a position in meta-ethics, and it's different to the position you describe.
Very roughly, quasi-realism agrees with anti-realism in stating:
But, in contrast to anti-realism, quasi-realism also states:
The conjunction of (1)-(3) defines quasi-realism.
What you call 'qua... (read more)