It seems like youâre overselling Shapley values here, then, unless Iâve misunderstood. They wonât help to decide which interventions to fund, except for indirect reasons (e.g. assigning credit and funding ex post, judging track record).
You wrote âThen we walk away saying (hyperopically,) we saved a life for $5,000, ignoring every other part of the complex system enabling our donation to be effective. And that is not to say itâs not an effective use of money! In fact, itâs incredibly effective, even in Shapley-value terms. But weâre over-allocating credit to ourselves.â
But if $5000 per life saved is the wrong number to use to compare interventions, Shapley values wonât help (for the right reasons, anyway). The solution here is to just model counterfactuals better. If youâre maximizing the sum of Shapley values, youâre acknowledging we have to model counterfactuals better anyway, and the sum is just expected utility, so you donât need the Shapley values in the first place. Either Shapley value cost-effectiveness is the same as the usual cost-effectiveness (my interpretation 1) and redundant, or itâs a predictably suboptimal theoretical target (e.g. maximizing your own Shapley value only, as in Nunoâs proposal, or as another option, my interpretation 2, which requires unrealistic counterfactual assumptions).
The solution to the non-EA money problem is also to just model counterfactuals better. For example, Charity Entrepreneurship has used estimates of the counterfactual cost-effectiveness of non-EA money raised by their incubated charities if the incubated charity doesnât raise it.
Youâre right that Shapley values are the wrong toolâthank you for engaging with me on that, and I have gone back and edited the post to reflect that!
Iâm realizing as I research this that the problem is that act-utilitarianism fundamentally fails for cooperation, and thereâs a large literature on that fact[1] - I need to do much more research.
But âjust model counterfactuals betterâ isnât a useful response. Itâs just saying âget the correct answer,â which completely avoids the problem of how to cooperate and how to avoid the errors I was pointing at.
Kuflik, A. (1982). Utilitarianism and large-scale cooperation. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 60(3), 224â237.
Regan, Donald H., âCo-operative Utilitarianism Introducedâ, Utilitarianism and Co-operation (Oxford, 1980)
Williams, Evan G. âIntroducing Recursive Consequentialism: A Modified Version of Cooperative Utilitarianism.â The Philosophical Quarterly 67.269 (2017): 794-812.
It seems like youâre overselling Shapley values here, then, unless Iâve misunderstood. They wonât help to decide which interventions to fund, except for indirect reasons (e.g. assigning credit and funding ex post, judging track record).
You wrote âThen we walk away saying (hyperopically,) we saved a life for $5,000, ignoring every other part of the complex system enabling our donation to be effective. And that is not to say itâs not an effective use of money! In fact, itâs incredibly effective, even in Shapley-value terms. But weâre over-allocating credit to ourselves.â
But if $5000 per life saved is the wrong number to use to compare interventions, Shapley values wonât help (for the right reasons, anyway). The solution here is to just model counterfactuals better. If youâre maximizing the sum of Shapley values, youâre acknowledging we have to model counterfactuals better anyway, and the sum is just expected utility, so you donât need the Shapley values in the first place. Either Shapley value cost-effectiveness is the same as the usual cost-effectiveness (my interpretation 1) and redundant, or itâs a predictably suboptimal theoretical target (e.g. maximizing your own Shapley value only, as in Nunoâs proposal, or as another option, my interpretation 2, which requires unrealistic counterfactual assumptions).
The solution to the non-EA money problem is also to just model counterfactuals better. For example, Charity Entrepreneurship has used estimates of the counterfactual cost-effectiveness of non-EA money raised by their incubated charities if the incubated charity doesnât raise it.
Youâre right that Shapley values are the wrong toolâthank you for engaging with me on that, and I have gone back and edited the post to reflect that!
Iâm realizing as I research this that the problem is that act-utilitarianism fundamentally fails for cooperation, and thereâs a large literature on that fact[1] - I need to do much more research.
But âjust model counterfactuals betterâ isnât a useful response. Itâs just saying âget the correct answer,â which completely avoids the problem of how to cooperate and how to avoid the errors I was pointing at.
Kuflik, A. (1982). Utilitarianism and large-scale cooperation. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 60(3), 224â237.
Regan, Donald H., âCo-operative Utilitarianism Introducedâ, Utilitarianism and Co-operation (Oxford, 1980)
Williams, Evan G. âIntroducing Recursive Consequentialism: A Modified Version of Cooperative Utilitarianism.â The Philosophical Quarterly 67.269 (2017): 794-812.