Hmm, I think this heuristic actually doesn’t make sense for ideal (Bayesian) reasoners, since ideal reasoners can just multiply the EVs out for all actions and don’t need weird approximations/heuristics.
I broadly think this heuristic makes sense in a loose way in situations where the downside risks are not disproportionately high. I’m not sure what you mean by “sophisticated consequentialism” here, but I guess I’d sort of expect sophisticated consequentialism (at least in situations where explicit EV calculations are less practical) to include a variant of this heuristic somewhere.
Consequentialists are supposed to estimate all of the effects of their actions, and then add them up appropriately. This means that they cannot just look at the direct and immediate effects of their actions, but also have to look at indirect and less immediate effects. Failing to do so amounts to applying naive consequentialism. That is to be contrasted with sophisticated consequentialism, which appropriately takes indirect and less immediate effects into account (cf. the discussion on “simplistic” vs. “correct” replaceability on 80,000 Hours’ blog (Todd 2015)).
As for a concrete example, a naive conception of consequentialism may lead one to believe that it is right to break rules if it seems that that would have net positive effects on the world. Such rule-breaking normally has negative side-effects, however—e.g. it can lower the degree of trust in society, and for the rule-breaker’s group in particular—which means that sophisticated consequentialism tends to be more opposed to rule-breaking than naive consequentialism.
I think maybe what I have in mind is actually “consequentialism that accounts appropriately for biases, model uncertainty, optimizer’s curse, unilateralist’s curse, etc.” (This seems like a natural fit for the words sophisticated consequentialism, but it sounds like that’s not what the term is meant to mean.)
I’d be much more comfortable with someone having your heuristic if they were aware of those reasons why your EV estimates (whether implicit or explicit, qualitative or quantitative) should often be quite uncertain and may be systematically biased towards too much optimism for whatever choice you’re most excited about. (That’s not the same as saying EV estimates are useless, just that they should often be adjusted in light of such considerations.)
Hmm, I think this heuristic actually doesn’t make sense for ideal (Bayesian) reasoners, since ideal reasoners can just multiply the EVs out for all actions and don’t need weird approximations/heuristics.
I broadly think this heuristic makes sense in a loose way in situations where the downside risks are not disproportionately high. I’m not sure what you mean by “sophisticated consequentialism” here, but I guess I’d sort of expect sophisticated consequentialism (at least in situations where explicit EV calculations are less practical) to include a variant of this heuristic somewhere.
I now think sophisticated consequentialism may not be what I really had in mind. Here’s the text from the entry on naive consequentialism I linked to:
I think maybe what I have in mind is actually “consequentialism that accounts appropriately for biases, model uncertainty, optimizer’s curse, unilateralist’s curse, etc.” (This seems like a natural fit for the words sophisticated consequentialism, but it sounds like that’s not what the term is meant to mean.)
I’d be much more comfortable with someone having your heuristic if they were aware of those reasons why your EV estimates (whether implicit or explicit, qualitative or quantitative) should often be quite uncertain and may be systematically biased towards too much optimism for whatever choice you’re most excited about. (That’s not the same as saying EV estimates are useless, just that they should often be adjusted in light of such considerations.)