MichaelStJules comments on Evidence, cluelessness, and the long term—Hilary Greaves

MichaelStJules 15 Nov 2020 3:20 UTC
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Longtermism wouldn’t say you should die, just that, unless you know more, it wouldn’t say that you shouldn’t die either.
You can’t work on longtermist interventions if you die, though, and doing so might be robustly better than dying.
- Michael_Wiebe 18 Nov 2020 2:46 UTC
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  Is this longtermism?
  1. List all possible actions { $A_{1}$ ,.., $A_{K}$ }.
  2. For each action $A_{j}$ , calculate expected value $V_{t} (A_{j})$ over t=1: $\infty$ , using the social welfare function.
  3. If we can’t calculate $V_{t}$ for some t, due to cluelessness, then skip over that action.
  4. Out of the remaining actions, choose the action with the highest expected value.
  - Michael_Wiebe 18 Nov 2020 2:52 UTC
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    Or, (3′): if we can’t calculate $V_{t}$ for $A_{i}$ and $A_{j}$ , then assume that they’re equal, and rank them by using their expected value over periods before $t$ .
- Michael_Wiebe 18 Nov 2020 2:36 UTC
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  So longtermism is not a general decision theory, and is only meant to be applied narrowly?
  - MichaelStJules 19 Nov 2020 2:07 UTC
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    Longtermism is the claim (or thesis) that we can do the most good by focusing on effects going into the longterm future:
    Let strong longtermism be the thesis that in a wide class of decision situations, the option that is ex ante best is contained in a fairly small subset of options whose ex ante effects on the very long-run future are best.
    https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/hilary-greaves-william-macaskill-the-case-for-strong-longtermism/