Thanks for the thorough response! I agree with a lot of what you wrote, especially the third section on Epistemic Learned Helplessness: “Bayesianism + EUM, but only when I feel like it” is not a justification in any meaningful sense.
On Priors
I agree that we can construct thought experiments (Pascal’s Mugging, acausal trade) with arbitrarily high stakes to swamp commonsense priors (even without religious scenarios or infinite value, which are so contested I think it would be difficult to extract a sociological lesson from them).
On Higher Order Evidence
I still think a lot of speculative conclusions we encounter in the wild suffer from undiscovered evidence and model uncertainty, and even barring this we might want to defer taking action until we’ve had a chance to learn more.
Your response jumps over these cases to those where we have “~all the evidence we’re ever going to have,” but I’m skeptical these cases exist. Even with religion, we might expect some future miracles or divine revelations to provide new evidence; we have some impossibility theorems in ethics, but new ideas might come to light that resolve paradoxes or avoid them completely. In fact, soteriological research and finding the worldview that best acausally benefits observers are proposals to find new evidence.
But ok, yes, I think we can probably come up with cases where we do have ~all the evidence and still refrain from acting on speculative + fanatical conclusions.
Problem 1: Nicheness
From here on, I’m abandoning the justification thing. I agree that we’ve found some instances where the Fourth Principle holds without Bayesian + EUM justification. Instead, I’m getting more into the semantics of what is a “norm.”
The problem is that the support for this behavior among EAs comes from niche pieces of philosophy like Pascal’s Mugging, noncausal decision theory, and infinite ethics, ideas that are niche not just relative to the general population, but also within EA. So I feel like the Fourth Principle amounts to “the minority of EAs who are aware of these edge cases behave this way when confronted with them,” which doesn’t really seem like a norm about EA.
Problem 2: Everyone’s Doing It
(This is also not a justification, it’s an observation about the Fourth Principle)
The first three principles capture ways that EA differs from other communities. The Fourth Principle, on the other hand, seems like the kind of thing that all people do? For example, a lot of people write off earning to give when they first learn about it because it looks speculative and fanatical. Now, maybe EAs differ from other people on which crazy train stop they deem “speculative,” and I think that would qualify as a norm, but relative to each person’s threshold for “speculative,” I think this is more of a human-norm than an EA-norm.
Would love your thoughts on this, and I’m looking forward to your April post :)
Thanks for the thorough response! I agree with a lot of what you wrote, especially the third section on Epistemic Learned Helplessness: “Bayesianism + EUM, but only when I feel like it” is not a justification in any meaningful sense.
On Priors
I agree that we can construct thought experiments (Pascal’s Mugging, acausal trade) with arbitrarily high stakes to swamp commonsense priors (even without religious scenarios or infinite value, which are so contested I think it would be difficult to extract a sociological lesson from them).
On Higher Order Evidence
I still think a lot of speculative conclusions we encounter in the wild suffer from undiscovered evidence and model uncertainty, and even barring this we might want to defer taking action until we’ve had a chance to learn more.
Your response jumps over these cases to those where we have “~all the evidence we’re ever going to have,” but I’m skeptical these cases exist. Even with religion, we might expect some future miracles or divine revelations to provide new evidence; we have some impossibility theorems in ethics, but new ideas might come to light that resolve paradoxes or avoid them completely. In fact, soteriological research and finding the worldview that best acausally benefits observers are proposals to find new evidence.
But ok, yes, I think we can probably come up with cases where we do have ~all the evidence and still refrain from acting on speculative + fanatical conclusions.
Problem 1: Nicheness
From here on, I’m abandoning the justification thing. I agree that we’ve found some instances where the Fourth Principle holds without Bayesian + EUM justification. Instead, I’m getting more into the semantics of what is a “norm.”
The problem is that the support for this behavior among EAs comes from niche pieces of philosophy like Pascal’s Mugging, noncausal decision theory, and infinite ethics, ideas that are niche not just relative to the general population, but also within EA. So I feel like the Fourth Principle amounts to “the minority of EAs who are aware of these edge cases behave this way when confronted with them,” which doesn’t really seem like a norm about EA.
Problem 2: Everyone’s Doing It
(This is also not a justification, it’s an observation about the Fourth Principle)
The first three principles capture ways that EA differs from other communities. The Fourth Principle, on the other hand, seems like the kind of thing that all people do? For example, a lot of people write off earning to give when they first learn about it because it looks speculative and fanatical. Now, maybe EAs differ from other people on which crazy train stop they deem “speculative,” and I think that would qualify as a norm, but relative to each person’s threshold for “speculative,” I think this is more of a human-norm than an EA-norm.
Would love your thoughts on this, and I’m looking forward to your April post :)