I tried to account for the difficulty to pin down all relevant effects in our CBA by adding the somewhat intangible feeling about the gun to backfire (standing for your point that there may be more general/typical but less easy to quantify benefits of not censoring etc.). Sorry, if that was not clear.
More importantly:
I think your last paragraph gets to the essence: You’re afraid the cost-benefit analysis is done naively, potentially ignoring the good reasons for which we most often may not want to try to prevent the advancement of science/tech.
This does, however, not imply that for pausing we’d require Pause Benefit >> Pause Cost. Instead, it means, simply you’re wary of certain values for E[Pause Benefit] (or of E[Pause Cost]) to be potentially biased in a particular direction, so that you don’t trust in conclusions based on them. Of course, if we expect a particular bias of our benefit or our cost estimate, we cannot just use the wrong estimates.
When I’m advocating to be even-handed, I refer to a cost-benefit comparison that is non-naive. That is, if we have priors that there may exist positive effects that we’ve just not yet managed to pin down well, or to quantify, we have (i) used reasonable placeholders for these, avoiding bias as good as we can, and (ii) duly widened our uncertainty intervals. It is therefore, that in the end, we can remain even-handed, i.e. pause roughly iif E[Pause Benefit] > E[Pause Cost]. Or, if you like, iif E[Pause Benefit*] > E[Pause Cost*], with * = Accounting with all duty of care for the fact that you’d usually not want to stop your professor or so/usually not want to stop tech advancements because of yadayada..
I tried to account for the difficulty to pin down all relevant effects in our CBA by adding the somewhat intangible feeling about the gun to backfire (standing for your point that there may be more general/typical but less easy to quantify benefits of not censoring etc.). Sorry, if that was not clear.
More importantly:
I think your last paragraph gets to the essence: You’re afraid the cost-benefit analysis is done naively, potentially ignoring the good reasons for which we most often may not want to try to prevent the advancement of science/tech.
This does, however, not imply that for pausing we’d require Pause Benefit >> Pause Cost. Instead, it means, simply you’re wary of certain values for E[Pause Benefit] (or of E[Pause Cost]) to be potentially biased in a particular direction, so that you don’t trust in conclusions based on them. Of course, if we expect a particular bias of our benefit or our cost estimate, we cannot just use the wrong estimates.
When I’m advocating to be even-handed, I refer to a cost-benefit comparison that is non-naive. That is, if we have priors that there may exist positive effects that we’ve just not yet managed to pin down well, or to quantify, we have (i) used reasonable placeholders for these, avoiding bias as good as we can, and (ii) duly widened our uncertainty intervals. It is therefore, that in the end, we can remain even-handed, i.e. pause roughly iif E[Pause Benefit] > E[Pause Cost]. Or, if you like, iif E[Pause Benefit*] > E[Pause Cost*], with * = Accounting with all duty of care for the fact that you’d usually not want to stop your professor or so/usually not want to stop tech advancements because of yadayada..