I don’t think this response engages with the argument that judgment calls about our impact on net welfare over the whole cosmos are extraordinary claims, so they should be held to a high epistemic standard. What do you think of my points on this here and in this thread?
I think it’s conceptually confused to use the term “high epistemic standards” to favor imprecise credence or suspended judgment over using one’s best judgment. I don’t think the former two are automatically more epistemically responsible.
Suspended judgment may be better than forming a bad precise judgment, but worse than forming a good precise judgment. Nothing in the concept of “high standards” should necessarily lead us to prioritize avoiding the risk of bad judgment over the risk of failing to form a good judgment when we could and should have.
I don’t see how this engages with the arguments I cited, or the cited post more generally. Why do you think it’s plausible to form a (non-arbitrary) determinate judgment about these matters? Why think these determinate judgments are our “best” judgment, when we could instead have imprecise credences that don’t narrow things down beyond what we have reason to?
We disagree about “what we have reason to” think about the value of humanity’s continued existence—that’s precisely the question in dispute. I might as well ask why you limit yourself to (widely) imprecise credences that don’t narrow things down nearly enough (or as much as we have reason to).
The topics under dispute here (e.g. whether we should think that human extinction is worse in expectation than humanity’s continued existence) involve ineradicable judgment calls. The OP wants to call pro-humanity judgment calls “suspicious”. I’ve pointed out that I think their reasons for suspicion are insufficient to overturn such a datum of good judgment as “it would be bad if everyone died.” (I’m not saying it’s impossible to overturn this verdict, but it should take a lot more than mere debunking arguments.)
Incidentally, I think the tendency of some in the community to be swayed to “crazy town” conclusions on the basis of such flimsy arguments is a big part of why many outsiders think EAs are unhinged. It’s a genuine failure mode that’s worth being aware of; the only way to avoid it, I suspect, is to have robustly sensible priors that are not so easily swayed without a much stronger basis.
Anyway, that was my response to the OP. You then complained that my response to the OP didn’t engage with your posts. But I don’t see why it would need to. Your post treats broad imprecision as a privileged default; my previous reply explained why I disagree with that starting point. Your own post links to further explanations I’ve given, here, about how sufficiently imprecise credences lead to crazy verdicts. Your response (in your linked post) dismisses this as “motivated reasoning,” which I don’t find convincing.
To mandate broadly imprecise credences on the topic at hand would be to defer overly much to a formal apparatus which, in virtue of forcing (with insufficient reason) a kind of practical neutrality about whether it would be bad for everyone to die, is manifestly unfit to guide high-stakes decision-making. That’s my view. You’re free to disagree with it, of course.
I worry we’re going to continue to talk past each other. So I don’t plan to engage further. But for other readers’ sake:
I definitely don’t treat broad imprecision as “a privileged default”. In the post I explain the motivation for having more or less severely imprecise credences in different hypotheses. The heart of it is that adding more precision, beyond what the evidence and plausible foundational principles merit, seems arbitrary. And you haven’t explained why your bottom-line intuition — about which decisions are good w.r.t. a moral standard as extremely far-reaching as impartial beneficence[1] — would constitute evidence or a plausible foundational principle. (To me this seems pretty clearly different from the kind of intuition that would justify rejecting radical skepticism.)
I don’t think this response engages with the argument that judgment calls about our impact on net welfare over the whole cosmos are extraordinary claims, so they should be held to a high epistemic standard. What do you think of my points on this here and in this thread?
I think it’s conceptually confused to use the term “high epistemic standards” to favor imprecise credence or suspended judgment over using one’s best judgment. I don’t think the former two are automatically more epistemically responsible.
Suspended judgment may be better than forming a bad precise judgment, but worse than forming a good precise judgment. Nothing in the concept of “high standards” should necessarily lead us to prioritize avoiding the risk of bad judgment over the risk of failing to form a good judgment when we could and should have.
I’ve written about this more (with practical examples from pandemic policy disputes) in ‘Agency and Epistemic Cheems Mindset’
I don’t see how this engages with the arguments I cited, or the cited post more generally. Why do you think it’s plausible to form a (non-arbitrary) determinate judgment about these matters? Why think these determinate judgments are our “best” judgment, when we could instead have imprecise credences that don’t narrow things down beyond what we have reason to?
We disagree about “what we have reason to” think about the value of humanity’s continued existence—that’s precisely the question in dispute. I might as well ask why you limit yourself to (widely) imprecise credences that don’t narrow things down nearly enough (or as much as we have reason to).
The topics under dispute here (e.g. whether we should think that human extinction is worse in expectation than humanity’s continued existence) involve ineradicable judgment calls. The OP wants to call pro-humanity judgment calls “suspicious”. I’ve pointed out that I think their reasons for suspicion are insufficient to overturn such a datum of good judgment as “it would be bad if everyone died.” (I’m not saying it’s impossible to overturn this verdict, but it should take a lot more than mere debunking arguments.)
Incidentally, I think the tendency of some in the community to be swayed to “crazy town” conclusions on the basis of such flimsy arguments is a big part of why many outsiders think EAs are unhinged. It’s a genuine failure mode that’s worth being aware of; the only way to avoid it, I suspect, is to have robustly sensible priors that are not so easily swayed without a much stronger basis.
Anyway, that was my response to the OP. You then complained that my response to the OP didn’t engage with your posts. But I don’t see why it would need to. Your post treats broad imprecision as a privileged default; my previous reply explained why I disagree with that starting point. Your own post links to further explanations I’ve given, here, about how sufficiently imprecise credences lead to crazy verdicts. Your response (in your linked post) dismisses this as “motivated reasoning,” which I don’t find convincing.
To mandate broadly imprecise credences on the topic at hand would be to defer overly much to a formal apparatus which, in virtue of forcing (with insufficient reason) a kind of practical neutrality about whether it would be bad for everyone to die, is manifestly unfit to guide high-stakes decision-making. That’s my view. You’re free to disagree with it, of course.
I worry we’re going to continue to talk past each other. So I don’t plan to engage further. But for other readers’ sake:
I definitely don’t treat broad imprecision as “a privileged default”. In the post I explain the motivation for having more or less severely imprecise credences in different hypotheses. The heart of it is that adding more precision, beyond what the evidence and plausible foundational principles merit, seems arbitrary. And you haven’t explained why your bottom-line intuition — about which decisions are good w.r.t. a moral standard as extremely far-reaching as impartial beneficence[1] — would constitute evidence or a plausible foundational principle. (To me this seems pretty clearly different from the kind of intuition that would justify rejecting radical skepticism.)
As I mention in the part of the post I linked, here.