Thanks for writing this! I find it really striking how academic critics of longtermism (both Thorstad and Schwitzgebel spring to mind here) don’t adequately consider model uncertainty. It’s something I also tried to flag in my old post on ‘X-risk agnosticism’.
Tarsney’s epistemic challenge paper is so much better, precisely because he gets into higher-order uncertainty (over possible values for the crucial parameter “r” which includes the persisting risk of extinction, in the far future, despite our best efforts).
Thanks, Richard! I’ve just had a look at your post and see you’ve anticipated a number of the points I made here. I’m interested in the problem of model uncertainty, but most of the treatments of it I’ve found have been technical, which isn’t much help to a maths illiterate like me. Some of the literature on moral uncertainty is relevant, and there’s an interesting treatment in Toby Ord’s, Rafaela Hillerbrand’s and Anders Sandberg’s paper here. But I’d be glad to learn of other philosophical treatments if you or others can recommend any.
Thanks for writing this! I find it really striking how academic critics of longtermism (both Thorstad and Schwitzgebel spring to mind here) don’t adequately consider model uncertainty. It’s something I also tried to flag in my old post on ‘X-risk agnosticism’.
Tarsney’s epistemic challenge paper is so much better, precisely because he gets into higher-order uncertainty (over possible values for the crucial parameter “r” which includes the persisting risk of extinction, in the far future, despite our best efforts).
Thanks, Richard! I’ve just had a look at your post and see you’ve anticipated a number of the points I made here. I’m interested in the problem of model uncertainty, but most of the treatments of it I’ve found have been technical, which isn’t much help to a maths illiterate like me. Some of the literature on moral uncertainty is relevant, and there’s an interesting treatment in Toby Ord’s, Rafaela Hillerbrand’s and Anders Sandberg’s paper here. But I’d be glad to learn of other philosophical treatments if you or others can recommend any.