Thank you for the response, and in particular for the references for further reading!
I’m curious to hear more about your reasoning for those examples, or why they seem especially likely under some plausible distribution. (For what it’s worth, I’ll clarify the hypothetical donation goes to GiveDirectly, not GiveWell. Also, I eat meat, and my meat consumption is sensitive to my income.)
I agree that it is possible for them to occur, but there is no probability distribution I would include in my representor under which they are sufficiently likely to occur that the comparison between actions is indeterminate.
I’m not sure how helpful it is to dwell on specific examples, but this is the disagreement I have with many arguments for cluelessness about neartermist causes.
The story given in Mogensen 2021 of the priest saving Hitler from drowning as a child is illustrative. This was the right thing to do. There have been billions and billions of children; a handful have had both the opportunity and desire to commit horrific genocides. I don’t believe there is a plausible probability distribution that make it so likely an anonymous child will commit genocide that it is better to let them drown.
Oops sorry for the GW-GD confusion, but yeah, this changes nothing to my point I think.
I agree that it is possible for them to occur, but there is no probability distribution I would include in my representor under which they are sufficiently likely to occur that the comparison between actions is indeterminate.
This seems hardly defensible. - The average human being (including in poor countries) contributes to the farming of so many animals throughout their lifetime (at least in expectation). You would have to be astonishingly confident that the welfare of the animals we eat do not significantly matter for your above conclusion to follow. - The number of far-future lives we indirectly influence might be astronomical such that long-term effects (almost) always dominate. I don’t see on what basis you can exclude this possibility from your probability distributions, given the arguments given here and refs therein.
(I don’t recall this specific example from Mogensen and don’t have time to dive back into it, so I won’t comment on that, sorry.)
Thank you for the response, and in particular for the references for further reading!
I’m curious to hear more about your reasoning for those examples, or why they seem especially likely under some plausible distribution. (For what it’s worth, I’ll clarify the hypothetical donation goes to GiveDirectly, not GiveWell. Also, I eat meat, and my meat consumption is sensitive to my income.)
I agree that it is possible for them to occur, but there is no probability distribution I would include in my representor under which they are sufficiently likely to occur that the comparison between actions is indeterminate.
I’m not sure how helpful it is to dwell on specific examples, but this is the disagreement I have with many arguments for cluelessness about neartermist causes.
The story given in Mogensen 2021 of the priest saving Hitler from drowning as a child is illustrative. This was the right thing to do. There have been billions and billions of children; a handful have had both the opportunity and desire to commit horrific genocides. I don’t believe there is a plausible probability distribution that make it so likely an anonymous child will commit genocide that it is better to let them drown.
Oops sorry for the GW-GD confusion, but yeah, this changes nothing to my point I think.
This seems hardly defensible.
- The average human being (including in poor countries) contributes to the farming of so many animals throughout their lifetime (at least in expectation). You would have to be astonishingly confident that the welfare of the animals we eat do not significantly matter for your above conclusion to follow.
- The number of far-future lives we indirectly influence might be astronomical such that long-term effects (almost) always dominate. I don’t see on what basis you can exclude this possibility from your probability distributions, given the arguments given here and refs therein.
(I don’t recall this specific example from Mogensen and don’t have time to dive back into it, so I won’t comment on that, sorry.)