I agree that behaviours like my actual behaviours can be the right choice even if I don’t have high credence in all of these claims, and perhaps even if I had very low or 0 credence in some of them or in the conjunction, for the reasons you mention.
I think it’s useful to separate “my credence that X is true” from “my credence that, all things considered, I should act roughly as if X is true”. I think that that’s also key in “explaining the discrepancy” you point to.
But disagree that “the real question is, selfishly speaking, how much more do you gain from playing video games than from working on longtermism”. That would only be true if it was guaranteed that what I should do is what’s best for me selfishly, which would be suspicious convergence and/or overconfidence.
I’ll split that into three comments.
But I should note that these comments focus on what I think is true, not necessarily what I think it’s useful for everyone to think about. There are some people for whom thinking about this stuff just won’t be worth the time, or might be overly bad for their motivation or happiness.
1. Where I agree with your comment
I do worry how much it might bias you, especially in the absence of equally rigorously evaluated alternatives.
Am I correct in thinking that you mean you worry how much conducting this sort of exercise might affect anyone who does so, in the sense that it’ll tend to overly strongly make them think they should reduce their confidence in their bottom-line conclusions and actions? (Because they’re forced to look at and multiply one, single, conjunctive set of claims, without considering the things you mention?)[1]
If so, I think I sort-of agree, and that was the main reason I consider never posting this. I also agree that each of the things you point to as potentially “explaining the discrepancy” can matter. As I note in a reply to Max Daniel above:
(Maybe here it’s worth noting that one worry I had about posting this was that it might be demotivating, since there are so many uncertainties relevant to any given action, even though in reality it can still often be best to just go ahead with our current best guess because any alternative—including further analysis—seems less promising.)
And as I note in various other replies here and in the spreadsheet itself, it’s often not obvious that a particular “crux” actually is required to support my current behaviours. E.g., here’s what I say in the spreadsheet I’d do if I lost all my credence in the 2nd claim:
Maybe get back into video games, stand-up comedy, and music? But it feels hard to say, partly because currently I think spending lots of time on EA-aligned things and little time on video games etc. is best for my own happiness, since otherwise I’d have nagging sense that I should be contributing to things that matter. But maybe that sense would go away if I lost my belief that there are substantial moral reasons? Or maybe I’d want to push that updated belief aside and keep role-playing as if morality mattered a lot.
This is why the post now says:
Perhaps most significantly, as noted in the spreadsheet, it seems plausible that my behaviours would stay pretty similar if I lost all credence in the first four claims
And this is also why I didn’t include in this post itself my “Very naive calculation of what my credence “should be” in this particular line of argument”—I just left that in the spreadsheet, so people will only see that if they actually go to where the details can be found. And in my note there, I say:
I’m not sure that these calculations are useful at all. They might be misleading, because of various complexities noted in this spreadsheet and the accompanying post. Maybe I should just delete this bit.
[1] Or you might’ve meant other things by the “it”, “you”, and “bias” here. E.g., you might’ve meant “I worry how much seeing this post might bias people who see it”, or “I worry how much seeing this post or conducting this exercise might cause a bias towards anchoring on one’s initial probabilities.”
tl;dr
I agree that behaviours like my actual behaviours can be the right choice even if I don’t have high credence in all of these claims, and perhaps even if I had very low or 0 credence in some of them or in the conjunction, for the reasons you mention.
I think it’s useful to separate “my credence that X is true” from “my credence that, all things considered, I should act roughly as if X is true”. I think that that’s also key in “explaining the discrepancy” you point to.
But disagree that “the real question is, selfishly speaking, how much more do you gain from playing video games than from working on longtermism”. That would only be true if it was guaranteed that what I should do is what’s best for me selfishly, which would be suspicious convergence and/or overconfidence.
I’ll split that into three comments.
But I should note that these comments focus on what I think is true, not necessarily what I think it’s useful for everyone to think about. There are some people for whom thinking about this stuff just won’t be worth the time, or might be overly bad for their motivation or happiness.
1. Where I agree with your comment
Am I correct in thinking that you mean you worry how much conducting this sort of exercise might affect anyone who does so, in the sense that it’ll tend to overly strongly make them think they should reduce their confidence in their bottom-line conclusions and actions? (Because they’re forced to look at and multiply one, single, conjunctive set of claims, without considering the things you mention?)[1]
If so, I think I sort-of agree, and that was the main reason I consider never posting this. I also agree that each of the things you point to as potentially “explaining the discrepancy” can matter. As I note in a reply to Max Daniel above:
And as I note in various other replies here and in the spreadsheet itself, it’s often not obvious that a particular “crux” actually is required to support my current behaviours. E.g., here’s what I say in the spreadsheet I’d do if I lost all my credence in the 2nd claim:
This is why the post now says:
And this is also why I didn’t include in this post itself my “Very naive calculation of what my credence “should be” in this particular line of argument”—I just left that in the spreadsheet, so people will only see that if they actually go to where the details can be found. And in my note there, I say:
[1] Or you might’ve meant other things by the “it”, “you”, and “bias” here. E.g., you might’ve meant “I worry how much seeing this post might bias people who see it”, or “I worry how much seeing this post or conducting this exercise might cause a bias towards anchoring on one’s initial probabilities.”