You can just widen the variance in your prior until it is appropriately imprecise, which that the variance on your prior reflects the amount of uncertainty you have.
For instance, perhaps a particular disagreement comes down to the increase in p(doom) deriving from an extra 0.1 C in global warming.
We might have no idea whether 0.1 C of warming causes an increase of 0.1% or 0.01% of P(Doom) but be confident it isn’t 10% or more.
You could model the distribution of your uncertainty with, say, a beta distribution of Beta(a=0.0001,b=100).
You might wonder, why b=100 and not b=200, or 101? It’s an arbitrary choice, right?
To which I have two responses:
You can go one level up and model the beta parameter on some distribution of all reasonable choices, say, a uniform distribution between 10 and 1000.
While it is arbitrary, I claim that avoiding expected effects because we can’t make a fully non-arbitrary choice is itself an arbitrary choice. This is because we are acting in a dynamic world where every second, opportunities can be lost, and no action is still an action, the action of foregoing the counterfactual option. So by avoiding assigning any outcome, and acting accordingly, you have implicitly, and arbitrarily, assigned an outcome value of 0. When there’s some morally outcome we can only model with some somewhat arbitrary statistical priors, doing so nevertheless seems less arbitrary than just assigning an outcome value of 0.
You can just widen the variance in your prior until it is appropriately imprecise, which that the variance on your prior reflects the amount of uncertainty you have.
For instance, perhaps a particular disagreement comes down to the increase in p(doom) deriving from an extra 0.1 C in global warming.
We might have no idea whether 0.1 C of warming causes an increase of 0.1% or 0.01% of P(Doom) but be confident it isn’t 10% or more.
You could model the distribution of your uncertainty with, say, a beta distribution of Beta(a=0.0001,b=100).
You might wonder, why b=100 and not b=200, or 101? It’s an arbitrary choice, right?
To which I have two responses:
You can go one level up and model the beta parameter on some distribution of all reasonable choices, say, a uniform distribution between 10 and 1000.
While it is arbitrary, I claim that avoiding expected effects because we can’t make a fully non-arbitrary choice is itself an arbitrary choice. This is because we are acting in a dynamic world where every second, opportunities can be lost, and no action is still an action, the action of foregoing the counterfactual option. So by avoiding assigning any outcome, and acting accordingly, you have implicitly, and arbitrarily, assigned an outcome value of 0. When there’s some morally outcome we can only model with some somewhat arbitrary statistical priors, doing so nevertheless seems less arbitrary than just assigning an outcome value of 0.