On the new definition—as far as I can tell it does pretty much the same job as the old definition, but is clearer and more precise, bar a small nitpick I have...
One deviation is from “a wide class of decision situations” to “the most important decision situations facing agents today”. As far as I can tell, Greaves and MacAskill don’t actually narrow the set of decision situations they argue ASL applies to in the new paper. Instead, I suspect the motivation for this change in wording was because “wide” is quite imprecise and subjective (Greaves concedes this in her 80,000 Hours interview). Therefore, instead of categorising the set of decision situations as wide, which was supposed to communicate the important decision-relevance of ASL, the authors instead describe these same decision situations as “the most important faced by agents today” on account of the fact that they have particularly great significance for the well-being of both present and future sentient beings. In doing so they still communicate the important decision-relevance of ASL, whilst being slightly more precise.
The authors also change from “fairly small subset of options whose ex ante effects on the very long-run future are best” to “options that are near-best for the far future”. It is interesting that they don’t specify “ex ante” best—as if it was simply obvious that is what they mean by “best”…(maybe you can tell I’m not super impressed by this change…unless I’m missing something?).
Otherwise, splitting the definition into two conditions seems to have just made it easier to understand.
On the new definition—as far as I can tell it does pretty much the same job as the old definition, but is clearer and more precise, bar a small nitpick I have...
One deviation is from “a wide class of decision situations” to “the most important decision situations facing agents today”. As far as I can tell, Greaves and MacAskill don’t actually narrow the set of decision situations they argue ASL applies to in the new paper. Instead, I suspect the motivation for this change in wording was because “wide” is quite imprecise and subjective (Greaves concedes this in her 80,000 Hours interview). Therefore, instead of categorising the set of decision situations as wide, which was supposed to communicate the important decision-relevance of ASL, the authors instead describe these same decision situations as “the most important faced by agents today” on account of the fact that they have particularly great significance for the well-being of both present and future sentient beings. In doing so they still communicate the important decision-relevance of ASL, whilst being slightly more precise.
The authors also change from “fairly small subset of options whose ex ante effects on the very long-run future are best” to “options that are near-best for the far future”. It is interesting that they don’t specify “ex ante” best—as if it was simply obvious that is what they mean by “best”…(maybe you can tell I’m not super impressed by this change…unless I’m missing something?).
Otherwise, splitting the definition into two conditions seems to have just made it easier to understand.