I agree that we can imagine a similar scenario where your identity is changed to a much lesser degree. But I'm still not convinced that we can straightforwardly apply the Platinum rule to such a scenario.

If your subjective wellbeing is increased after taking the pill, then one of the preferences that must be changed is your preference not to take the pill. This means that when we try to apply the Platinum rule: "treat others as they would have us treat them", we are naturally led to ask: "as they would have us treat them when?" If their preference to have taken the pill after taking it is stronger than their preference not to take the pill before taking it, the Platinum rule becomes less straightforward.

I can imagine two ways of clarifying the rule here, to explain why forcing someone to take the pill would be wrong, which you already allude to in your post:

• We should treat others as they would have us treat them at the time we are making the decision. But this would imply that if someone's preferences are about to naturally, predictably, change for the rest of their life, then we should disregard that when trying to decide what is best for them, and only consider what they want right now. This seems much more controversial than the original statement of the rule.
• We should treat others as they would have us treat them, considering the preferences they would have over their lifetime if we did not act. But this would imply that if someone was about to eat the pill by accident, thinking it was just a sweet, and we knew it was against their current wishes, then we should not try to stop them or warn them. This would create a very odd action/inaction distinction. Again, this seems much more controversial than the original statement of the rule.

In the post you say the Platinum rule might be the most important thing for a moral theory to get right, and I think I agree with you on this. It is something that seems so natural and obvious that I want to take it as a kind of axiom. But neither of these two extensions to it feel this obvious any more. They both seem very controversial.

I think the rule only properly makes sense when applied to a person-moment, rather than to a whole person throughout their life. If this is true, then I think my original objection still applies. We aren't dealing with a situation where we can apply the platinum rule in isolation. Instead, we have just another utilitarian trade-off between the welfare of one (set of) person(-moments) and another.

This was a really thought-provoking read, thank you!

I think I agree with Richard Chappell's comment that: "the more you manipulate my values, the less the future person is me".

In this particular case, if I take the pill, my preferences, dispositions, and attitudes are being completely transformed in an instant. These are a huge part of what makes me who I am, so I think that after taking this pill I would become a completely different person, in a very literal sense. It would be a new person who had access to all of my memories, but it would not be me.

From this point of view, there is no essential difference between this thought experiment, and the common objection to total utilitarianism where you consider killing one person and replacing them with someone new, so that total well-being is increased.

This is still a troubling thought experiment of course, but I think it does weaken the strength of your appeal to the Platinum rule? We are no longer talking about treating a person differently to how they would want to be treated, in isolation. We just have another utilitarian thought experiment where we are considering harming person X in order to benefit a different person Y.

And I think my response to both thought experiments is the same. Killing a person who does not want to be killed, or changing the preferences of someone who does not want them changed, does a huge amount of harm (at least on a preference-satisfaction version of utilitarianism), so the assumption in these thought experiments that overall preference satisfaction is nevertheless increased is doing a lot of work, more work than it might appear at first.

I really like this thought experiment, thank you for sharing!

Personally, I agree with you, and I think the answer to your headline question is: yes! Your reasoning makes sense to me anyway. (At least if we don't combine the Self-Sampling Assumption with another assumption like the Self-Indication Assumption as well).

I think that your example is essentially equivalent to the Doomsday argument, or the Adam+Eve paradox, see here: https://anthropic-principle.com/preprints/cau/paradoxes But I like that your thought experiment really isolates the key problem and puts precise numbers on it!

I haven't digested the full paper yet, but based on the summary pasted below, this is precisely the claim I was trying to argue for in the "Against Anthropic Shadow" post of mine that you have linked.

It looks like this claim has been fleshed out in a lot more detail here though, and I'm looking forward to reading it properly!

In the post you linked I also went on quite a long digression trying to figure out if it was possible to rescue Anthropic Shadow by appealing to the fact that there might be large numbers of other worlds containing life (this plausibly weakens the strength of evidence provided by A, which may then stop the cancellation in C). I decided it technically was possible, but only if you take a strange approach to anthropic reasoning, with a strange and difficult-to-define observer reference class.

Possibly focusing so much on this digression was a mistake though, since the summary above is really pointing to the important flaw in the original argument!

This is a fantastic answer, thank you!

I think (2) is the relevant one here. Maybe in the not too distant future there will be a massive shift in global public opinion, and the farming of animals (at least at industrial scale) will become a thing of the past. If you think most farmed animals lead lives so bad that they would be better off not being born, then the impact of this change would be huge. (And if you're a non-consequentialist vegan who doesn't like to view the issue in these terms, then it's harder to quantify the impact, but you probably care even more about doing everything possible to make this scenario happen)

I think this is what is hoped for by the vegans who prioritise outreach. The idea would be that outreach either increases the probability of this scenario becoming reality, or it means that this scenario happens sooner than it otherwise would. I think this is a conceivable way that vegan outreach could have the kind of huge, hard to measure, benefit you're talking about.

Of course there's a whole argument to be had here. I'm sure lots of people would find this scenario so implausible as to not be worth considering (or they would think it will only happen if and when we get good cheap lab grown meat, or that we can't do anything to influence if and when it happens... etc).

I wasn't really trying to start that argument with this question, but just asking what someone who wants to give some weight to this argument in their donations should do.

Sure, but once you've assumed that already, you don't need to rely any more on an argument about shifts to P(X_1 > x) being cancelled out by shifts to P(X_n > x) for larger n (which if I understand correctly is the argument you're making about existential risk).

If P(X_N > x) is very small to begin with for some large N, then it will stay small, even if we adjust P(X_1 > x) by a lot (we can't make it bigger than 1!) So we can safely say under your assumption that adjusting the P(X_1 > x) factor by a large amount does influence P(X_N > x) as well, it's just that it can't make it not small.

The existential risk set-up is fundamentally different. We are assuming the future has astronomical value to begin with, before we intervene. That now means non-tiny changes to P(Making it through the next year) must have astronomical value too (unless there is some weird conspiracy among the probability of making it through later years which precisely cancels this out, but that seems very weird, and not something you can justify by pointing to global health as an analogy).

I don't see why the same argument holds for global health interventions....?

Why should X_N > x require X_1 > x....?

Thanks a lot for this answer! That sounds very plausible.

I think a lot depends here on whether:

i) We think there may well be a meaningful effect for vegan education initiatives but we can't measure it in a controlled experiment, or

ii) We think there is no meaningful effect for currently popular vegan education initiatives.

(By 'meaningful', I basically mean an effect big enough that I might consider donating, which is admittedly a bit vague)

I think CC makes a good point. Whichever of these possibilities is true, it feels like there is still scope for someone interested in vegan outreach to do something useful with their donations. If (i), then we could fund research into alternative non-experimental ways of comparing existing vegan outreach interventions (EAs are often happy funding things on the basis of weaker evidence than RCTs). If (ii), then we could fund research to investigate alternative kinds of interventions that haven't been considered yet (or has everything been considered?) If unsure between (i) and (ii), we can do both!

Maybe there is already research on these questions that we could use as well. I've been doing some more digging and found this survey of vegans, linked to from Faunalytics: https://vomad.life/survey/#about-your-veganism This seems like a decent non-experimental way of finding out which factors might influence someone to go vegan.

On the basis of this survey, maybe some effective vegan outreach interventions would be:

• Funding advertising campaigns for Veganuary
• Funding the production and/or marketing of vegan documentaries
• Funding the production and/or marketing of online videos with a vegan message

hroughCorrect me if I am wrong, but I think you are suggesting something like the following. If there is a 99 % chance we are in future 100 (U_100 = 10^100), and a 1 % (= 1 - 0.99) chance we are in future 0 (U_0 = 0), i.e. if it is very likely we are in an astronomically valuable world^[1], we can astronomically increase the expected value of the future by decreasing the chance of future 0. I do not agree. Even if the chance of future 0 is decreased by 100 %, I would say all its probability mass (1 pp) would be moved to nearby worlds whose value is not astronomical. For example, the expected value of the future would only increase by 0.09 (= 0.01*9) if all the probability mass was moved to future 1 (U_1 = 9).

The claim you quoted here was a lot simpler than this.

I was just pointing out that if we take an action to increase near-term extinction risk to 100% (i.e. we deliberately go extinct), then we reduce the expected value of the future to zero. That's an undeniable way that a change to near-term extinction risk can have an astronomical effect on the expected value of the future, provided only that the future has astronomical expected value before we make the intervention.

It is not that I expect us to get worse at mitigation.

But this is more or less a consequence of your claims isn't it?

The cost of moving physical mass increases with distance, and I guess the cost of moving probability mass increases (maybe exponentially) with value-distance (difference between the value of the worlds).

I don't see any basis for this assumption. For example, it is contradicted by my example above, where we deliberately go extinct, and therefore move all of the probability weight from U_100 to U_0, despite their huge value difference.

Or I suppose maybe I do agree with your assumption (as can't think of any counter-examples I would actually endorse in practice) I just disagree with how you're explaining its consequences. I would say it means the future does not have astronomical expected value, not that it does have astronomical value but that we can't influence it (since it seems clear we can if it does). 

(If I remember our exchange on the Toby Ord post correctly, I think you made some claim along the lines of: there are no conceivable interventions which would allow us to increase extinction risk to ~100%. This seems like an unlikely claim to me, but it's also I think a different argument to the one you're making in this post anyway.)

Here's another way of explaining it. In this case the probability p_100 of U_100 is given by the huge product:

P(making it through next year) X P(making it through the year after given we make it through year 1) X ........ etc

Changing near-term extinction risk is influencing the first factor in this product, so it would be weird if it didn't change p_100 as well. The same logic doesn't apply to the global health interventions that you're citing as an analogy, and makes existential risk special.

In fact I would say it is your claim (that the later factors get modified too in just such a special way as to cancel out the drop in the first factor) which involves near-term interventions having implausible effects on the future that we shouldn't a priori expect them to have.