I partly share your pessimism. I hope we’ll have occasions to discuss specific proposals soon!
I would be surprised if such interventions were the ones increasing welfare the most cost-effectively.
If you define cost-effectiveness as something close to “what’s best in expectation according to my specific favorite among all the plausible ways of comparing welfare across individuals”, I agree. I would also be surprised. I’m just—as you probably have realized—very sympathetic to Anthony and Mal’s arguments (in the above-linked posts) that this is not what we should look for when we seek cost-effectiveness.
I saw you already discussed this and adjacent cruxes with them. I might write something relevant to this (precise vs imprecise beliefs, etc.) in the very context of moral weights at some point. I’ll reach back to you then, and maybe we’ll be able to hit finer-grained cruxes and advance this discussion. :)
If you define cost-effectiveness as something close to “what’s best in expectation according to my specific favorite among all the plausible ways of comparing welfare across individuals”, I agree.
Yes, that is how I was thinking about it, with the caveat that the specific favourite would involve weighting many ways of comparing welfare by their plausibility, at least implicitly.
I saw you already discussed this and adjacent cruxes with them. I might write something relevant to this (precise vs imprecise beliefs, etc.) in the very context of moral weights at some point. I’ll reach back to you then, and maybe we’ll be able to hit finer-grained cruxes and advance this discussion. :)
I [Jim] think maybe we should be more uncertain about inter-species tradeoffs than you seem to be, here.
I agree I have underestimated the uncertainty in comparisons between the individual (expectedhedonistic) welfare per unit time of different species. I now recommend decreasing this uncertainty.
I partly share your pessimism. I hope we’ll have occasions to discuss specific proposals soon!
If you define cost-effectiveness as something close to “what’s best in expectation according to my specific favorite among all the plausible ways of comparing welfare across individuals”, I agree. I would also be surprised. I’m just—as you probably have realized—very sympathetic to Anthony and Mal’s arguments (in the above-linked posts) that this is not what we should look for when we seek cost-effectiveness.
I saw you already discussed this and adjacent cruxes with them. I might write something relevant to this (precise vs imprecise beliefs, etc.) in the very context of moral weights at some point. I’ll reach back to you then, and maybe we’ll be able to hit finer-grained cruxes and advance this discussion. :)
Yes, that is how I was thinking about it, with the caveat that the specific favourite would involve weighting many ways of comparing welfare by their plausibility, at least implicitly.
Thanks for letting me know!
I agree I have underestimated the uncertainty in comparisons between the individual (expected hedonistic) welfare per unit time of different species. I now recommend decreasing this uncertainty.
Interesting, thanks for the update!