Ask him about counterfactuals, ask him if his views have any implications for our ideas of counterfactual impact?
Ask him whether relative expectations can help us get out wagers like this one from Hayden Wilkinson’s paper:
Dyson’s Wager
You have $2,000 to use for charitable purposes. You can donate it to either of two charities.
The first charity distributes bednets in low-income countries in which malaria is endemic. With an additional $2,000 in their budget this year, they would prevent one additional death from malaria. You are certain of this.
The second charity does speculative research into how to do computations using ‘positronium’ - a form of matter which will be ubiquitous in the far future of our universe. If our universe has the right structure (which it probably does not), then in the distant future we may be able to use positronium to instantiate all of the operations of human minds living blissful lives, and thereby allow morally valuable life to survive indefinitely long into the future. From your perspective as a good epistemic agent, there is some tiny, non-zero probability that, with (and only with) your donation, this research would discover a method for stable positronium computation and would be used to bring infinitely many blissful lives into existence.
Ask him about counterfactuals, ask him if his views have any implications for our ideas of counterfactual impact?
Ask him whether relative expectations can help us get out wagers like this one from Hayden Wilkinson’s paper:
Dyson’s Wager
You have $2,000 to use for charitable purposes. You can donate it to either of two charities.
The first charity distributes bednets in low-income countries in which malaria is endemic. With an additional $2,000 in their budget this year, they would prevent one additional death from malaria. You are certain of this.
The second charity does speculative research into how to do computations using ‘positronium’ - a form of matter which will be ubiquitous in the far future of our universe. If our universe has the right structure (which it probably does not), then in the distant future we may be able to use positronium to instantiate all of the operations of human minds living blissful lives, and thereby allow morally valuable life to survive indefinitely long into the future. From your perspective as a good epistemic agent, there is some tiny, non-zero probability that, with (and only with) your donation, this research would discover a method for stable positronium computation and would be used to bring infinitely many blissful lives into existence.