By x-risks, do you mean primarily extinction risks? Suffering-focused and downside-focused views, which you cover after strong longtermism, still support work to reduce certain x-risks, specifically s-risks. Maybe it would say more about practical implications to do x-risks before suffering-focused or downside-focused? On the other hand, if you say you should focus on x-risks, but then find that there are deep tradeoffs between x-risks important to downside-focused views compared to upside-focused views, and you have deep/moral uncertainty or cluelessness about this, maybe it would end up better to not focus on x-risks at all.
In practice, though, I think current work on s-risks would probably look better than non x-risk work even for upside-focused views, whereas some extinction risk work looks bad for downside-focused views (by increasing s-risks). Some AI safety work could look very good to both downside- and upside-focused views, so you might find you have more credence in working on that specifically.
It also looks like you’re actually >50% downside-focused, conditional on strong longtermism, just before suffering-focused views. This is because you gave “not suffering-focused” 75% conditional on previous steps and “not downside-focused” 65% conditional on that, so 48.75% neither suffering-focused nor downside-focused, and therefore 51.25% suffering-focused or downside-focused, but (I think) suffering-focused implies downside-focused, so this is 51.25% downside-focused. (All conditional on previous steps.)
It also looks like you’re actually >50% downside-focused, conditional on strong longtermism, just before suffering-focused views.
I don’t think this is quite right.
The simplest reason is that I think suffering-focused does not necessarily imply downside-focused. Just as a (weakly) non-suffering-focused person could still be downside-focused for empirical reasons (basically the scale, tractability, and neglectedness of s-risks vs other x-risks), a (weakly) suffering-focused person could still focus on non-s-risk x-risks for empirical reasons. This is partly because one can have credence in a weakly suffering-focused view, and partly because one can have a lot of uncertainty between suffering-focused views and other views.
As I note in the spreadsheet, if I lost all credence in the claim that I shouldn’t be subscribe to suffering-focused ethics, I’d:
Probably work on s-risks or s-risk factors (rather than other x-risks or x-risk factors—though note that these categories can overlap).
But maybe still work on non-s-risk x-risks, such as extinction risks. (This depends on how much more important I’d now believe reducing suffering is; the importance, tractability, and neglectedness of specific intervention options; and my comparative advantage.) [emphasis added]
That said, it is true that I’m probably close to 50% downside-focused. (It’s even possible that it’s over 50% - I just think that the spreadsheet alone doesn’t clearly show that.)
And, relatedly, there’s a substantial chance that in future I’ll focus on actions somewhat tailored to reducing s-risks, most likely by researching authoritarianism & dystopias or broad risk factors that might be relevant both to s-risks and other x-risks. (Though, to be clear, there’s also a substantial chunk of why I see authoritarianism/dystopias as bad that isn’t about s-risks.)
This all speaks to a weakness of the spreadsheet, which is that it just shows one specific conjunctive set of claims that can lead me to my current bottom-line stance. This makes my current stance seems less justified-in-my-own-view than it really is, because I haven’t captured other possible paths that could lead me to it (such as being suffering-focused but thinking s-risks are far less likely or tractable than other x-risks).
And another weakness is simply that these claims are fuzzy and that I place fairly little faith in my credences even strongly reflecting my own views (let alone being “reasonable”). So one should be careful simply multiplying things together. That said, I do think that doing so can be somewhat fruitful and interesting.
It seems confusing for a view that’s suffering-focused not to commit you (or at least the part of your credence that’s suffering-focused, which may compromise with other parts) to preventing suffering as a priority. I guess people include weak NU/negative-leaning utilitarianism/prioritarianism in (weakly) suffering-focused views.
What would count as weakly suffering-focused to you? Giving 2x more weight to suffering than you would want to in your personal tradeoffs? 2x more weight to suffering than pleasure at the same “objective intensity”? Even less than 2x?
FWIW, I think a factor of 2 is probably within the normal variance of judgements about classical utilitarian pleasure-suffering tradeoffs, and there probably isn’t any objective intensity or at least it isn’t discoverable, so such a weakly suffering-focused view wouldn’t really be distinguishable from classical utilitarianism (or a symmetric total view with the same goods and bads).
It sounds like part of what you’re saying is that it’s hard to say what counts as a “suffering-focused ethical view” if we include views that are pluralistic (rather than only caring about suffering), and that part of the reason for this is that it’s hard to know what “common unit” we could use for both suffering and other things.
I agree with those things. But I still think the concept of “suffering-focused ethics” is useful. See the posts cited in my other reply for some discussion of these points (I imagine you’ve already read them and just think that they don’t fully resolve the issue, and I think you’d be right about that).
What would count as weakly suffering-focused to you? Giving 2x more weight to suffering than you would want to in your personal tradeoffs? 2x more weight to suffering than pleasure at the same “objective intensity”? Even less than 2x?
I think this question isn’t quite framed right—it seems to assume that the only suffering-focused view we have in mind is some form of negative utilitarianism, and seems to ignore population ethics issues. (I’m not saying you actually think that SFE is just about NU or that population ethics isn’t relevant, just that that text seems to imply that.)
E.g., an SFE view might prioritise suffering-reduction not exactly because it gives more weight to suffering than pleasure in normal decision situations, but rather because it endorses “the asymmetry”.
But basically, I guess I’d count a view as weakly suffering-focused if, in a substantial number of decision situations I care a lot about (e.g., career choice), it places noticeably “more” importance on reducing suffering by some amount than on achieving other goals “to a similar amount”. (Maybe “to a similar amount” could be defined from the perspective of classical utilitarianism.) This is of course vague, and that definition is just one I’ve written now rather than this being something I’ve focused a lot of time on. But it still seems a useful concept to have.
(Minor point: “preventing suffering as a priority” seems quite different from “downside-focused”. Maybe you meant “as the priority”?)
I think my way of thinking about this is very consistent with what I believe are the “canonical” works on “suffering-focused ethics” and “downside-focused views”. (I think these may have even been the works that introduced those terms, though the basic ideas preceded the works.) Namely:
Suffering-focused ethics is an umbrella term for moral views that place primary or particular importance on the prevention of suffering. Most views that fall into this category arepluralistic in that they hold that other things besides reducing suffering also matter morally [emphasis added]
And the latter says:
Whether a normative view qualifies as downside-focused or upside-focused is not always easy to determine, as the answer can depend on difficult empirical questions such as how much disvalue we can expect to be able to reduce versus how much value we can expect to be able to create.[...] The following commitments may lead to a downside-focused prioritization:
(Non-welfarist) views that include considerations about suffering prevention or the prevention of rights violations as a prior or as (central) part of an objective list of what constitutes goodness [emphasis added]
Suffering-focused and downside-focused views, which you cover after strong longtermism, still support work to reduce certain x-risks, specifically s-risks. [...] Some AI safety work could look very good to both downside- and upside-focused views, so you might find you have more credence in working on that specifically.
FWIW, I agree with both of these points, and think they’re important. (Although it’s still the case that I’m not currently focused on s-risks or AI safety work, due to other considerations such as comparative advantage.)
I’m unsure of my stance on the other things you say in those first two paragraphs.
Other relevant notes from the spreadsheet itself, from the “In the coming century or so” cell:
Perhaps it’d make more sense to separate out the question of whether to focus on x-risks from the question of whether to focus on doing/supporting direct work done this century.
And perhaps it’d make sense to also add a separate question about whether to prioritise work that’s fairly directly relevant to x-risks from work on existential risk/security factors (e.g., perhaps, moral circle expansion or improving institutions). Currently this spreadsheet doesn’t address that question.
And perhaps it’d make sense to add a separate question about extinction risk vs other x-risks. (At the moment, I mean x-risks to be inclusive of risks of unrecoverable collapse or unrecoverable dystopia.) [emphasis added]
And FWIW, here’s a relevant passage from a research agenda I recently drafted, which is intended to be useful both in relation to extinction risks and in relation to non-extinction existential risks:
Why should someone do research related to non-extinction existential risks?
My answer to this question mirrors the answer I gave above:
In my view, we’re currently very uncertain about how the likelihood and tractability of extinction and non-extinction existential risks compare, such that:
Both categories of risks should get substantial attention
Decisions to specialise for work on one category of risks or the other should probably focus more on how neglected each category is and what one’s comparative advantage is, rather than how likely and tractable each category of risks is
There appears to be a substantially larger amount of rigorous work done and planned on extinction risk than on non-extinction existential risk
Perhaps especially when it comes to the risk of an unrecoverable dystopia, rather than the risk of an unrecoverable collapse) [Footnote: Some of the relatively small amount of work that has been done on these topics to date can be found here, here, and here.]
Note that that section is basically about what someone who hasn’t yet specialised should now specialise to do, on the margin. I’m essentially quite happy for people who’ve already specialised for reducing extinction risk to keep on with that work.
Interesting!
By x-risks, do you mean primarily extinction risks? Suffering-focused and downside-focused views, which you cover after strong longtermism, still support work to reduce certain x-risks, specifically s-risks. Maybe it would say more about practical implications to do x-risks before suffering-focused or downside-focused? On the other hand, if you say you should focus on x-risks, but then find that there are deep tradeoffs between x-risks important to downside-focused views compared to upside-focused views, and you have deep/moral uncertainty or cluelessness about this, maybe it would end up better to not focus on x-risks at all.
In practice, though, I think current work on s-risks would probably look better than non x-risk work even for upside-focused views, whereas some extinction risk work looks bad for downside-focused views (by increasing s-risks). Some AI safety work could look very good to both downside- and upside-focused views, so you might find you have more credence in working on that specifically.
It also looks like you’re actually >50% downside-focused, conditional on strong longtermism, just before suffering-focused views. This is because you gave “not suffering-focused” 75% conditional on previous steps and “not downside-focused” 65% conditional on that, so 48.75% neither suffering-focused nor downside-focused, and therefore 51.25% suffering-focused or downside-focused, but (I think) suffering-focused implies downside-focused, so this is 51.25% downside-focused. (All conditional on previous steps.)
I don’t think this is quite right.
The simplest reason is that I think suffering-focused does not necessarily imply downside-focused. Just as a (weakly) non-suffering-focused person could still be downside-focused for empirical reasons (basically the scale, tractability, and neglectedness of s-risks vs other x-risks), a (weakly) suffering-focused person could still focus on non-s-risk x-risks for empirical reasons. This is partly because one can have credence in a weakly suffering-focused view, and partly because one can have a lot of uncertainty between suffering-focused views and other views.
As I note in the spreadsheet, if I lost all credence in the claim that I shouldn’t be subscribe to suffering-focused ethics, I’d:
That said, it is true that I’m probably close to 50% downside-focused. (It’s even possible that it’s over 50% - I just think that the spreadsheet alone doesn’t clearly show that.)
And, relatedly, there’s a substantial chance that in future I’ll focus on actions somewhat tailored to reducing s-risks, most likely by researching authoritarianism & dystopias or broad risk factors that might be relevant both to s-risks and other x-risks. (Though, to be clear, there’s also a substantial chunk of why I see authoritarianism/dystopias as bad that isn’t about s-risks.)
This all speaks to a weakness of the spreadsheet, which is that it just shows one specific conjunctive set of claims that can lead me to my current bottom-line stance. This makes my current stance seems less justified-in-my-own-view than it really is, because I haven’t captured other possible paths that could lead me to it (such as being suffering-focused but thinking s-risks are far less likely or tractable than other x-risks).
And another weakness is simply that these claims are fuzzy and that I place fairly little faith in my credences even strongly reflecting my own views (let alone being “reasonable”). So one should be careful simply multiplying things together. That said, I do think that doing so can be somewhat fruitful and interesting.
It seems confusing for a view that’s suffering-focused not to commit you (or at least the part of your credence that’s suffering-focused, which may compromise with other parts) to preventing suffering as a priority. I guess people include weak NU/negative-leaning utilitarianism/prioritarianism in (weakly) suffering-focused views.
What would count as weakly suffering-focused to you? Giving 2x more weight to suffering than you would want to in your personal tradeoffs? 2x more weight to suffering than pleasure at the same “objective intensity”? Even less than 2x?
FWIW, I think a factor of 2 is probably within the normal variance of judgements about classical utilitarian pleasure-suffering tradeoffs, and there probably isn’t any objective intensity or at least it isn’t discoverable, so such a weakly suffering-focused view wouldn’t really be distinguishable from classical utilitarianism (or a symmetric total view with the same goods and bads).
It sounds like part of what you’re saying is that it’s hard to say what counts as a “suffering-focused ethical view” if we include views that are pluralistic (rather than only caring about suffering), and that part of the reason for this is that it’s hard to know what “common unit” we could use for both suffering and other things.
I agree with those things. But I still think the concept of “suffering-focused ethics” is useful. See the posts cited in my other reply for some discussion of these points (I imagine you’ve already read them and just think that they don’t fully resolve the issue, and I think you’d be right about that).
I think this question isn’t quite framed right—it seems to assume that the only suffering-focused view we have in mind is some form of negative utilitarianism, and seems to ignore population ethics issues. (I’m not saying you actually think that SFE is just about NU or that population ethics isn’t relevant, just that that text seems to imply that.)
E.g., an SFE view might prioritise suffering-reduction not exactly because it gives more weight to suffering than pleasure in normal decision situations, but rather because it endorses “the asymmetry”.
But basically, I guess I’d count a view as weakly suffering-focused if, in a substantial number of decision situations I care a lot about (e.g., career choice), it places noticeably “more” importance on reducing suffering by some amount than on achieving other goals “to a similar amount”. (Maybe “to a similar amount” could be defined from the perspective of classical utilitarianism.) This is of course vague, and that definition is just one I’ve written now rather than this being something I’ve focused a lot of time on. But it still seems a useful concept to have.
(Minor point: “preventing suffering as a priority” seems quite different from “downside-focused”. Maybe you meant “as the priority”?)
I think my way of thinking about this is very consistent with what I believe are the “canonical” works on “suffering-focused ethics” and “downside-focused views”. (I think these may have even been the works that introduced those terms, though the basic ideas preceded the works.) Namely:
https://longtermrisk.org/the-case-for-suffering-focused-ethics/
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/225Aq4P4jFPoWBrb5/cause-prioritization-for-downside-focused-value-systems
The former opens with:
And the latter says:
I think another good post on this is Descriptive Population Ethics and Its Relevance for Cause Prioritization, and that that again supports the way I’m thinking about this. (But to save time / be lazy, I won’t mine it for useful excepts to share here.)
FWIW, I agree with both of these points, and think they’re important. (Although it’s still the case that I’m not currently focused on s-risks or AI safety work, due to other considerations such as comparative advantage.)
I’m unsure of my stance on the other things you say in those first two paragraphs.
No, though I did worry people would misinterpret the post as meaning extinction risks specifically. As I say in the post:
Other relevant notes from the spreadsheet itself, from the “In the coming century or so” cell:
And FWIW, here’s a relevant passage from a research agenda I recently drafted, which is intended to be useful both in relation to extinction risks and in relation to non-extinction existential risks:
Note that that section is basically about what someone who hasn’t yet specialised should now specialise to do, on the margin. I’m essentially quite happy for people who’ve already specialised for reducing extinction risk to keep on with that work.