Lame parody.* My view is more like: we can reasonably expect that the inventor of the paperclip increased the number of paperclip-shaped structures that ever exist. Arguments to the contrary (according to which, e.g., nobody can reasonably expect new paperclip factories to more likely increase than decrease net paperclip production) rely on epistemic principles that would appear to rule out almost all contestable beliefs (including all philosophical beliefs).
* Edited to add: it's especially lame since I wrote an entire section distinguishing "epistemic difficulty" from cluelessness, which (if you bothered to read it) should have made clear both my sympathy for many everyday doubts, and why such doubts are no reason to embrace more radical claims of cluelessness.
Why should I trust you any more than Anti-Richard? Why should you trust you any more than Anti-Richard?
You're asking for a procedural answer to a substantive question, which simply isn't possible. I can't emphasize enough that the same questions can be raised for any philosophical question whatsoever. Why trust induction over counter-induction? Why accept anti-suffering moral views rather than pro-suffering moral views? One can always ask skeptical questions, and the only possible answers rely upon contestable judgment calls. There's no purely procedural reason why you should trust me over Anti-Richard. You need to actually look at the substantive claims being made and judge for yourself what seems most credible. There is literally no other possible answer (one might try to appeal to certain kinds of simplicity principles, but other philosophers dispute them and so they too ultimately come down to contestable judgment calls), so if you disallow such a process in general then radical skepticism swiftly follows.
This violates the reflection principle. I think you're going to need to at least give an argument if you want us to give up on this. Why would you believe something your idealized self tells you should not be believed?
Check out the Hare references I offered! He offers many arguments for (what he calls) prospectism over deferentialism. One argument I already shared: it's a straightforward implication of the contrastive account of reasons. Here's another, from p.78 of LiSW.
(Background: Alpine and Beach are two incommensurably good holidays, between which your idealized self has no preference, even when $20 is added to either option. Still, Hare argues, you plainly ought to prefer the prospect of a mystery bag containing a ticket + $20 over a mystery bag containing just the other ticket. This is because you ought to prefer deals 1 + 3 over deals 2 + 4 in the below passage, and that combination "amounts to taking the right, sweetened bag" over the left, unsweetened one. And again, this all holds despite the fact that you know that once you find out which ticket is in which bag, you will consider the two options to be incommensurable.)
re: "racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole." - I actually think this is (tendentiously) getting at a significant difference between EAs and the progressive left. This was made vivid to me when a (very left wing) Princeton philosophy professor invited me to respond to her critique of EA as "ableist" because it doesn't guarantee that disability accommodations should be prioritized for fundingif they turn out to be less cost-effective than other ways of helping people. She found this feature of EA objectionable. I think that's crazy, and we need to be clearer about how a lot of left-wing coalitional priorities violate equal consideration (explicitly favoring people from select groups) in ways that are deeply morally objectionable and unfair to (e.g.) the global poor.
I'm also baffled by the rhetorical martyrdom and self-flagellation that became popular in EA circles post-FTX. It's surely worth forcefully pushing back against misleading coverage, having some courage in our convictions, and being clear about how ignorant (or sometimes outright dishonest) a lot of the critiques are.
Something I'm a bit torn on is the question of how much it's worth going on the offensive against competing ideologies. EA is a big tent, but it's true that a lot of us think anti-capitalism is bad and stupid. Personally, I do not have a positive opinion of Naomi Klein or others who are more left than liberal, so maybe it shouldn't be surprising that she wouldn't have a high opinion of a movement that contains many people who think like me. But a dialectical asymmetry results if those on the far left are constantly criticizing those who are more center-left, while the latter mostly bite their tongues and don't spend a lot of time explaining why we think the far left is so badly misguided. It leaves the far left with a moral high ground that I don't think they deserve (given how much they, in my view, prioritize symbolism over actually helping people).
Yeah, that's an interesting challenge. One idea that makes sense to me is to split into different sub-agents when you feel like there's an in-principle tension or tradeoff between different kinds of values. For example, in a previous post I suggested different "buckets" for the broad goals of (i) pure suffering reduction, (ii) reliable global capacity growth, and (iii) high-impact long-shots. Lots of different concrete "causes" might compete within each philosophical bucket, but I wouldn't be tempted to break out a fourth bucket unless I felt like there was a deeper principle at stake (e.g. if I thought that human vs animal pure suffering reduction might be meaningfully different).
(There's a separate question of how to decide what to investigate within each bucket, which is also tricky and I'm afraid I don't have anything helpful to add there. In practice I mostly just defer to people I at least vaguely trust who seem to have looked into the area in greater depth. But as a community, we obviously benefit from people who are willing to do the hard work of novel investigations!)
I'm happy to see someone raising these challenges (and it's plausible to me that "whether EA is functioning well as a truth-seeking community deserves more attention than it’s getting"), but fwiw I remain glad that CEA in particular are leading from a position of greater confidence in EA.
I agree that "Growth is only good if EA is functioning well," but note also that missed growth would be extremely bad if EA is functioning well, so it's hardly costless to forsake potential growth. My personal view is optimistic: it seems like EA does a lot of good, and more people learning about the ideas and getting involved (perhaps taking the 🔶 10% pledge, or identifying and working on a neglected high-impact problem) would also be good. But if I'm wrong about that, I hope others would be able to bring to my attention the reasons why. So I certainly agree that maintaining a good epistemic environment and truth-seeking culture is also important!
Not really. Rule consequentialism as an ethical theory has various (implausible) implications about which acts are objectively right or wrong, that can be assessed independently of the question of whether it would be a good thing for (some, many, or all) people to use a rule-based decision procedure.
Ok, thanks for expanding upon your view! It sounds broadly akin to how I'm inclined to address Pascal's Mugging cases (treat the astronomical stakes as implying proportionately negligible probability). Astronomical stakes from x-risk mitigation seems much more substantively credible to me, but I don't have much to add at this point if you don't share that substantive judgment!
Lame parody.* My view is more like: we can reasonably expect that the inventor of the paperclip increased the number of paperclip-shaped structures that ever exist. Arguments to the contrary (according to which, e.g., nobody can reasonably expect new paperclip factories to more likely increase than decrease net paperclip production) rely on epistemic principles that would appear to rule out almost all contestable beliefs (including all philosophical beliefs).
* Edited to add: it's especially lame since I wrote an entire section distinguishing "epistemic difficulty" from cluelessness, which (if you bothered to read it) should have made clear both my sympathy for many everyday doubts, and why such doubts are no reason to embrace more radical claims of cluelessness.
You're asking for a procedural answer to a substantive question, which simply isn't possible. I can't emphasize enough that the same questions can be raised for any philosophical question whatsoever. Why trust induction over counter-induction? Why accept anti-suffering moral views rather than pro-suffering moral views? One can always ask skeptical questions, and the only possible answers rely upon contestable judgment calls. There's no purely procedural reason why you should trust me over Anti-Richard. You need to actually look at the substantive claims being made and judge for yourself what seems most credible. There is literally no other possible answer (one might try to appeal to certain kinds of simplicity principles, but other philosophers dispute them and so they too ultimately come down to contestable judgment calls), so if you disallow such a process in general then radical skepticism swiftly follows.
Check out the Hare references I offered! He offers many arguments for (what he calls) prospectism over deferentialism. One argument I already shared: it's a straightforward implication of the contrastive account of reasons. Here's another, from p.78 of LiSW.
(Background: Alpine and Beach are two incommensurably good holidays, between which your idealized self has no preference, even when $20 is added to either option. Still, Hare argues, you plainly ought to prefer the prospect of a mystery bag containing a ticket + $20 over a mystery bag containing just the other ticket. This is because you ought to prefer deals 1 + 3 over deals 2 + 4 in the below passage, and that combination "amounts to taking the right, sweetened bag" over the left, unsweetened one. And again, this all holds despite the fact that you know that once you find out which ticket is in which bag, you will consider the two options to be incommensurable.)
Not sure whether new posts count for the commentary competition, but this seemed too long to paste here as a literal comment!
re: "racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole." - I actually think this is (tendentiously) getting at a significant difference between EAs and the progressive left. This was made vivid to me when a (very left wing) Princeton philosophy professor invited me to respond to her critique of EA as "ableist" because it doesn't guarantee that disability accommodations should be prioritized for funding if they turn out to be less cost-effective than other ways of helping people. She found this feature of EA objectionable. I think that's crazy, and we need to be clearer about how a lot of left-wing coalitional priorities violate equal consideration (explicitly favoring people from select groups) in ways that are deeply morally objectionable and unfair to (e.g.) the global poor.
I'm also baffled by the rhetorical martyrdom and self-flagellation that became popular in EA circles post-FTX. It's surely worth forcefully pushing back against misleading coverage, having some courage in our convictions, and being clear about how ignorant (or sometimes outright dishonest) a lot of the critiques are.
Something I'm a bit torn on is the question of how much it's worth going on the offensive against competing ideologies. EA is a big tent, but it's true that a lot of us think anti-capitalism is bad and stupid. Personally, I do not have a positive opinion of Naomi Klein or others who are more left than liberal, so maybe it shouldn't be surprising that she wouldn't have a high opinion of a movement that contains many people who think like me. But a dialectical asymmetry results if those on the far left are constantly criticizing those who are more center-left, while the latter mostly bite their tongues and don't spend a lot of time explaining why we think the far left is so badly misguided. It leaves the far left with a moral high ground that I don't think they deserve (given how much they, in my view, prioritize symbolism over actually helping people).
Yeah, that's an interesting challenge. One idea that makes sense to me is to split into different sub-agents when you feel like there's an in-principle tension or tradeoff between different kinds of values. For example, in a previous post I suggested different "buckets" for the broad goals of (i) pure suffering reduction, (ii) reliable global capacity growth, and (iii) high-impact long-shots. Lots of different concrete "causes" might compete within each philosophical bucket, but I wouldn't be tempted to break out a fourth bucket unless I felt like there was a deeper principle at stake (e.g. if I thought that human vs animal pure suffering reduction might be meaningfully different).
(There's a separate question of how to decide what to investigate within each bucket, which is also tricky and I'm afraid I don't have anything helpful to add there. In practice I mostly just defer to people I at least vaguely trust who seem to have looked into the area in greater depth. But as a community, we obviously benefit from people who are willing to do the hard work of novel investigations!)
I think Stefan Schubert & Lucius Caviola's Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians is pretty good!
I'm happy to see someone raising these challenges (and it's plausible to me that "whether EA is functioning well as a truth-seeking community deserves more attention than it’s getting"), but fwiw I remain glad that CEA in particular are leading from a position of greater confidence in EA.
I agree that "Growth is only good if EA is functioning well," but note also that missed growth would be extremely bad if EA is functioning well, so it's hardly costless to forsake potential growth. My personal view is optimistic: it seems like EA does a lot of good, and more people learning about the ideas and getting involved (perhaps taking the 🔶 10% pledge, or identifying and working on a neglected high-impact problem) would also be good. But if I'm wrong about that, I hope others would be able to bring to my attention the reasons why. So I certainly agree that maintaining a good epistemic environment and truth-seeking culture is also important!
Not really. Rule consequentialism as an ethical theory has various (implausible) implications about which acts are objectively right or wrong, that can be assessed independently of the question of whether it would be a good thing for (some, many, or all) people to use a rule-based decision procedure.
Ok, thanks for expanding upon your view! It sounds broadly akin to how I'm inclined to address Pascal's Mugging cases (treat the astronomical stakes as implying proportionately negligible probability). Astronomical stakes from x-risk mitigation seems much more substantively credible to me, but I don't have much to add at this point if you don't share that substantive judgment!