Now it looks to me as though youâre dogmatically sticking with the prior.
Are there any interventions whose estimates of (posterior) counterfactual impact do not decay to 0 in at most a few centuries? From my perspective, their absence establishes a strong prior against persistent longterm effects.
I do put a bunch of probability on âaverting near-term extinction doesnât save astronomical value for some reason or anotherâ, though the reasons tend to be ones where we never actually had a shot of an astronomically big future in the first place, and I think that thatâs sort of the appropriate target for scepticism
In general our ability to measure long term effects is kind of lousy. But if I wanted to look for interventions which donât have that decay pattern it would be most natural to think of conservation work saving species from extinction. Once weâve lost biodiversity, itâs essentially gone (maybe taking millions of years to build up again naturally). Conservation work can stop that. And with rises in conservation work over time itâs quite plausible that early saving species wonât just lead to them going extinct slightly later, but being preserved indefinitely.
I was not clear above, but I meant (posterior) counterfactual impact under expectedtotalhedonisticutilitarianism. Even if a species is counterfactually preserved indefinitely due to actions now, which I think would be very hard, I do not see how it would permanently increase wellbeing. In addition, I meant to ask for actual empirical evidence as opposed to hypothetical examples (e.g. of one species being saved and making an immortal conservationist happy indefinitely).
I think this is something where our ability to measure is just pretty bad, and in particular our ability to empirically detect whether the type of things that plausibly have long lasting counterfactual impacts actually do is pretty terrible.
I respond to that by saying âok I guess empirics arenât super helpful for the big picture question letâs try to build mechanistic understanding of things grounded wherever possible in empirics, as well as priors about what types of distributions occur when various different generating mechanisms are at playâ, whereas it sounds like youâre responding by saying something like âwell as a prior weâll just use the parts of the distribution we can actually measure, and assume that generalizes unless we get contradictory dataâ?
I respond to that by saying âok I guess empirics arenât super helpful for the big picture question letâs try to build mechanistic understanding of things grounded wherever possible in empirics, as well as priors about what types of distributions occur when various different generating mechanisms are at playâ, whereas it sounds like youâre responding by saying something like âwell as a prior weâll just use the parts of the distribution we can actually measure, and assume that generalizes unless we get contradictory dataâ?
Yes, that would be my reply. Thanks for clarifying.
Yeah, so I basically think that that response feels âspiritually frequentistâ, and is more likely to lead you to large errors than the approach I outlined (which feels more âspiritually Bayesianâ), especially in cases like this where weâre trying to extrapolate significantly beyond the data weâve been able to gather.
Are there any interventions whose estimates of (posterior) counterfactual impact do not decay to 0 in at most a few centuries? From my perspective, their absence establishes a strong prior against persistent longterm effects.
This makes a lot of sense to me too.
In general our ability to measure long term effects is kind of lousy. But if I wanted to look for interventions which donât have that decay pattern it would be most natural to think of conservation work saving species from extinction. Once weâve lost biodiversity, itâs essentially gone (maybe taking millions of years to build up again naturally). Conservation work can stop that. And with rises in conservation work over time itâs quite plausible that early saving species wonât just lead to them going extinct slightly later, but being preserved indefinitely.
I was not clear above, but I meant (posterior) counterfactual impact under expected total hedonistic utilitarianism. Even if a species is counterfactually preserved indefinitely due to actions now, which I think would be very hard, I do not see how it would permanently increase wellbeing. In addition, I meant to ask for actual empirical evidence as opposed to hypothetical examples (e.g. of one species being saved and making an immortal conservationist happy indefinitely).
I think this is something where our ability to measure is just pretty bad, and in particular our ability to empirically detect whether the type of things that plausibly have long lasting counterfactual impacts actually do is pretty terrible.
I respond to that by saying âok I guess empirics arenât super helpful for the big picture question letâs try to build mechanistic understanding of things grounded wherever possible in empirics, as well as priors about what types of distributions occur when various different generating mechanisms are at playâ, whereas it sounds like youâre responding by saying something like âwell as a prior weâll just use the parts of the distribution we can actually measure, and assume that generalizes unless we get contradictory dataâ?
Yes, that would be my reply. Thanks for clarifying.
Yeah, so I basically think that that response feels âspiritually frequentistâ, and is more likely to lead you to large errors than the approach I outlined (which feels more âspiritually Bayesianâ), especially in cases like this where weâre trying to extrapolate significantly beyond the data weâve been able to gather.