June 4, 2017

Below is an article based on a transcript of "The Moral Value of Information", a popular 2017 talk by the NYU philosopher Amanda Askell. She argues that we often underestimate the value of new information or knowledge when thinking of how to do good.

The Moral Value of Information

In this article I'm going to start with making two claims. The first claim is that we generally prefer interventions with more evidential support, all else being equal. I hope you find that claim plausible and I’ll go into detail later about what it means. The second claim I’m going to argue for is that having less evidence in favor of a given intervention means that your credences about the effectiveness of that intervention are what I call “low resilience”.

This second claim has been explored in decision theory to some extent. It holds even if your credences about the effectiveness of that intervention are the same value. So, if I thought there was a 50% chance that I would get $100, there’s a difference between a low resilience 50% and a high resilience 50%.

I’m going to argue that, if your credences in a particular domain are low resilience, then the value of information in this domain is generally higher than it would be in a domain where your credences are high resilience. And, I’m going to argue that this means in many cases, we should prefer interventions with less evidential support, all else being equal. Hopefully, you’ll find that conclusion counterintuitive and interesting.

The first thing to say is that we generally think that expected value calculations are a good way of estimating the effectiveness of a given intervention. For example, lets imagine that there are two diseases: (very novelly named) Disease A and Disease B [Figure 1].

Say these two diseases are virtually impossible to differentiate. They both have the same symptoms, and they cause the same reduction in life expectancy, etc. Their key difference is that they respond very differently to different treatments, so any doctor who finds themselves with a patient with one of these conditions is in a difficult situation.

They can prescribe Drug A which costs $100. If the patient has Disease A, then Drug A will extend their life by another 10 years. If on the other hand the patient had Disease B, it won’t extend their life at all. They will die of Disease B, because Disease B is completely non-responsive to...

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