Thanks for this! All interesting and I will have to think about this more carefully when my brain is fresher. I admit I’m not very familiar with the literature on Knightian uncertainty and it would probably help if I read some more about that first.
It is misleading. Work like this leads people to think that Will+Hillary and others believe that expected value calculations are the key tool for decision making. They are not. (I am assuming they only reference expected value calculations for illustrative purposes, if I am incorrect then their paper is either really poor or I really don’t get it.)
OK if I understand you correctly, what you have said is that Will and Hilary present Knightian uncertainty as axiologically different to EV reasoning, when you don’t think it is. I agree with you that ideally section 4.5 should be considering some axiologically different decision-making theories to EV.
Regarding the actual EV calculations with numbers, I would say, as I did in a different comment, that I think it is prettyclear that they only carry out EV calculations for illustrative purposes. To quote:
Of course, in either case one could debate these numbers. But, to repeat, all we need is that there be one course of action such that one ought to have a non-minuscule credence in that action’s having non-negligible long-lasting influence. Given the multitude of plausible ways by which one could have such influence, diverse points of view are likely to agree on this claim
This is the point they are trying to get across by doing the actual EV calculations.
Thanks for this! All interesting and I will have to think about this more carefully when my brain is fresher. I admit I’m not very familiar with the literature on Knightian uncertainty and it would probably help if I read some more about that first.
OK if I understand you correctly, what you have said is that Will and Hilary present Knightian uncertainty as axiologically different to EV reasoning, when you don’t think it is. I agree with you that ideally section 4.5 should be considering some axiologically different decision-making theories to EV.
Regarding the actual EV calculations with numbers, I would say, as I did in a different comment, that I think it is pretty clear that they only carry out EV calculations for illustrative purposes. To quote:
This is the point they are trying to get across by doing the actual EV calculations.