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 “X has beliefs” 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 don’t see how we escape the question of what beliefs we’re justified in. E.g. betting on short AI timelines by opting out of your pension is only rational insofar as it’s rational to (read: you have good reasons to) believe in short timelines.
from my perspective the question of whether credences are ultimately indeterminate is … not so interesting? It’s 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 won’t be
I’m not sure what you’re 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 won’t be able to determinately say “X is net-good for the far future in expectation.” If you agree with that, that seems to have serious implications that the EA community isn’t pricing in yet. If you don’t agree with that, I’m not sure if it’s 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 I’m coauthoring), though I’d be happy to give some quick intuition pumps. Greaves here (the “Suppose that’s my personal uber-analysis...” 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 don’t see how we escape the question of what beliefs we’re justified in. E.g. betting on short AI timelines by opting out of your pension is only rational insofar as it’s rational to (read: you have good reasons to) believe in short timelines.
I’m not sure what you’re 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 won’t be able to determinately say “X is net-good for the far future in expectation.” If you agree with that, that seems to have serious implications that the EA community isn’t pricing in yet. If you don’t agree with that, I’m not sure if it’s 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 I’m coauthoring), though I’d be happy to give some quick intuition pumps. Greaves here (the “Suppose that’s my personal uber-analysis...” paragraph) is a pretty good starting point.