I donât 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 itâs conceptually confused to use the term âhigh epistemic standardsâ to favor imprecise credence or suspended judgment over using oneâs best judgment. I donât 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 âhigh standardsâ 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 donât see how this engages with the arguments I cited, or the cited post more generally. Why do you think itâs plausible to form a (non-arbitrary) determinate judgment about these matters? Why think these determinate judgments are our âbestâ judgment, when we could instead have imprecise credences that donât narrow things down beyond what we have reason to?
We disagree about âwhat we have reason toâ think about the value of humanityâs continued existenceâthatâs precisely the question in dispute. I might as well ask why you limit yourself to (widely) imprecise credences that donât 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 humanityâs continued existence) involve ineradicable judgment calls. The OP wants to call pro-humanity judgment calls âsuspiciousâ. Iâve pointed out that I think their reasons for suspicion are insufficient to overturn such a datum of good judgment as âit would be bad if everyone died.â (Iâm not saying itâs 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 âcrazy townâ conclusions on the basis of such flimsy arguments is a big part of why many outsiders think EAs are unhinged. Itâs a genuine failure mode thatâs 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 didnât engage with your posts. But I donât 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 Iâve given, here, about how sufficiently imprecise credences lead to crazy verdicts. Your response (in your linked post) dismisses this as âmotivated reasoning,â which I donât 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. Thatâs my view. Youâre free to disagree with it, of course.
I worry weâre going to continue to talk past each other. So I donât plan to engage further. But for other readersâ sake:
I definitely donât treat broad imprecision as âa privileged defaultâ. 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 havenât explained why your bottom-line intuition â about which decisions are good w.r.t. a moral standard as extremely far-reaching as impartial beneficence[1] â 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 donât 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 itâs conceptually confused to use the term âhigh epistemic standardsâ to favor imprecise credence or suspended judgment over using oneâs best judgment. I donât 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 âhigh standardsâ 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.
Iâve written about this more (with practical examples from pandemic policy disputes) in âAgency and Epistemic Cheems Mindsetâ
I donât see how this engages with the arguments I cited, or the cited post more generally. Why do you think itâs plausible to form a (non-arbitrary) determinate judgment about these matters? Why think these determinate judgments are our âbestâ judgment, when we could instead have imprecise credences that donât narrow things down beyond what we have reason to?
We disagree about âwhat we have reason toâ think about the value of humanityâs continued existenceâthatâs precisely the question in dispute. I might as well ask why you limit yourself to (widely) imprecise credences that donât 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 humanityâs continued existence) involve ineradicable judgment calls. The OP wants to call pro-humanity judgment calls âsuspiciousâ. Iâve pointed out that I think their reasons for suspicion are insufficient to overturn such a datum of good judgment as âit would be bad if everyone died.â (Iâm not saying itâs 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 âcrazy townâ conclusions on the basis of such flimsy arguments is a big part of why many outsiders think EAs are unhinged. Itâs a genuine failure mode thatâs 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 didnât engage with your posts. But I donât 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 Iâve given, here, about how sufficiently imprecise credences lead to crazy verdicts. Your response (in your linked post) dismisses this as âmotivated reasoning,â which I donât 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. Thatâs my view. Youâre free to disagree with it, of course.
I worry weâre going to continue to talk past each other. So I donât plan to engage further. But for other readersâ sake:
I definitely donât treat broad imprecision as âa privileged defaultâ. 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 havenât explained why your bottom-line intuition â about which decisions are good w.r.t. a moral standard as extremely far-reaching as impartial beneficence[1] â 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.