Honest question being new to EA… is it not problematic to restrict our attention to possible futures or aspects of futures which are relevant to a single issue at a time? Shouldn’t we calculate Expected Utility over billion year futures for all current interventions, and set our relative propensity for actions = exp{α * EU } / normalizer ?
Yes, I agree that it’s problematic. We “should” do the full calculation if we could, but in fact we can’t because of our limited capacity for computation/thinking.
But note that in principle this situation is familiar. E.g. a CEO might try to maximize the long-run profits of her company, or a member of government might try to design a healthcare policy that maximizes wellbeing. In none of these cases are we able to do the “full calculation”, albeit my a less dramatic margin than for longtermism.
And we don’t think that the CEO’s or the politician’s effort are meaningless or doomed or anything like that. We know that they’ll use heuristics, simplified models, or other computational shortcuts; we might disagree with them which heuristics and models to use, and if repeatedly queried with “why?” both they and we would come to a place where we’d struggle to justify some judgment call or choice of prior or whatever. But that’s life—a familiar situation and one we can’t get out of.
Yes, I agree that it’s problematic. We “should” do the full calculation if we could, but in fact we can’t because of our limited capacity for computation/thinking.
But note that in principle this situation is familiar. E.g. a CEO might try to maximize the long-run profits of her company, or a member of government might try to design a healthcare policy that maximizes wellbeing. In none of these cases are we able to do the “full calculation”, albeit my a less dramatic margin than for longtermism.
And we don’t think that the CEO’s or the politician’s effort are meaningless or doomed or anything like that. We know that they’ll use heuristics, simplified models, or other computational shortcuts; we might disagree with them which heuristics and models to use, and if repeatedly queried with “why?” both they and we would come to a place where we’d struggle to justify some judgment call or choice of prior or whatever. But that’s life—a familiar situation and one we can’t get out of.