I can accept the idea of X as an agent making decisions, and ask what those decisions are and what drives them, without implicitly accepting the idea that X has beliefs. Then āX has beliefsā is kind of a useful model for predicting their behaviour in the decision situations.
I think this is answering a different question, though. When talking about rationality and cause prioritization, what we want to know is what we ought to do, not how to describe our patterns of behavior after the fact. And when asking what we ought to do under uncertainty, I donāt see how we escape the question of what beliefs weāre justified in. E.g. betting on short AI timelines by opting out of your pension is only rational insofar as itās rational to (read: you have good reasons to) believe in short timelines.
from my perspective the question of whether credences are ultimately indeterminate is ā¦ not so interesting? Itās enough that in practice a lot of credences will be indeterminate, and that in many cases it may be useful to invest time thinking to shrink our uncertainty, but in many other cases it wonāt be
Iām not sure what youāre getting at here. My substantive claim is that in some cases, our credences about features of the far future might be sufficiently indeterminate that overall we wonāt be able to determinately say āX is net-good for the far future in expectation.ā If you agree with that, that seems to have serious implications that the EA community isnāt pricing in yet. If you donāt agree with that, Iām not sure if itās because of (1) thorny empirical disagreements over the details of what our credences should be, or (2) something more fundamental about epistemology (which is the level at which I thought we were having this discussion, so far). I think getting into (1) in this thread would be a bit of a rabbit hole (which is better left to some forthcoming posts Iām coauthoring), though Iād be happy to give some quick intuition pumps. Greaves here (the āSuppose thatās my personal uber-analysis...ā paragraph) is a pretty good starting point.
I think this is answering a different question, though. When talking about rationality and cause prioritization, what we want to know is what we ought to do, not how to describe our patterns of behavior after the fact. And when asking what we ought to do under uncertainty, I donāt see how we escape the question of what beliefs weāre justified in. E.g. betting on short AI timelines by opting out of your pension is only rational insofar as itās rational to (read: you have good reasons to) believe in short timelines.
Iām not sure what youāre getting at here. My substantive claim is that in some cases, our credences about features of the far future might be sufficiently indeterminate that overall we wonāt be able to determinately say āX is net-good for the far future in expectation.ā If you agree with that, that seems to have serious implications that the EA community isnāt pricing in yet. If you donāt agree with that, Iām not sure if itās because of (1) thorny empirical disagreements over the details of what our credences should be, or (2) something more fundamental about epistemology (which is the level at which I thought we were having this discussion, so far). I think getting into (1) in this thread would be a bit of a rabbit hole (which is better left to some forthcoming posts Iām coauthoring), though Iād be happy to give some quick intuition pumps. Greaves here (the āSuppose thatās my personal uber-analysis...ā paragraph) is a pretty good starting point.