Thanks for collating all of this here in one place. I should have read the later posts before I replied to the first one. Thank you too for your bold challenge. I feel like Kant waking from his ‘dogmatic slumber’. A few thoughts:
Humanity is an ‘interactive kind’ (to use Hacking’s term). Thinking about humanity can change humanity, and the human future.
Therefore, Ord’s ‘Long Reflection’ could lead to there being no future humans at all (if that was the course that the Long Reflection concluded).
This simple example shows that we cannot quantify over future humans, quadrillions or otherwise, or make long term assumptions about their value.
You’re right about trends, and in this context the outcomes are tied up with ‘human kinds’, as humans can respond to predictions and thereby invalidate the prediction. Makes me think of Godfrey-Smith’s observation that natural selection has no inertia, change the selective environment and the observable ‘trend’ towards some adaptation (trend) vanishes.
Cluelessness seems to be some version of the Socratic Paradox (I know only that I know nothing).
RCTs don’t just falsify hypotheses, but also provide evidence for causal inference (in spite of hypotheses!)
If I think there’s a 10% chance I will quit my job upon further reflection, and I do the reflection, and then quit my job, this does not mean that before the reflection I cannot make any quantified statements about the expected earnings from my job.
Thanks for collating all of this here in one place. I should have read the later posts before I replied to the first one. Thank you too for your bold challenge. I feel like Kant waking from his ‘dogmatic slumber’. A few thoughts:
Humanity is an ‘interactive kind’ (to use Hacking’s term). Thinking about humanity can change humanity, and the human future.
Therefore, Ord’s ‘Long Reflection’ could lead to there being no future humans at all (if that was the course that the Long Reflection concluded).
This simple example shows that we cannot quantify over future humans, quadrillions or otherwise, or make long term assumptions about their value.
You’re right about trends, and in this context the outcomes are tied up with ‘human kinds’, as humans can respond to predictions and thereby invalidate the prediction. Makes me think of Godfrey-Smith’s observation that natural selection has no inertia, change the selective environment and the observable ‘trend’ towards some adaptation (trend) vanishes.
Cluelessness seems to be some version of the Socratic Paradox (I know only that I know nothing).
RCTs don’t just falsify hypotheses, but also provide evidence for causal inference (in spite of hypotheses!)
Hmm, I think 3 does not follow from 2.
If I think there’s a 10% chance I will quit my job upon further reflection, and I do the reflection, and then quit my job, this does not mean that before the reflection I cannot make any quantified statements about the expected earnings from my job.