I mostly-disagree with this on pragmatic grounds. I agree that that’s the right approach to take on the first point if/when you have full information about what’s going on. But in practice you essentially never have proper information on what everyone else’s counterfactuals would look like according to different actions you could take.
If everyone thinks in terms of something like “approximate shares of moral credit”, then this can help in coordinating to avoid situations where a lot of people work on a project because it seems worth it on marginal impact, but it would have been better if they’d all done something different. Doing this properly might mean impact markets (where the “market” part works as a mechanism for distributing cognition, so that each market participant is responsible for thinking through their own alternative options, and feeding that information into the system via their willingness to do work for different amounts of pay), but I think that you can get some rough approximation to the benefits of impact markets without actual markets by having people do the things they would have done with markets—and in this context, that means paying attention to the share of credit different parties would get.
Is it at least fair to say that in situations where the other main actors aren’t explicitly coordinating with you and aren’t aware of your efforts (and, to an approximation, weren’t expecting your efforts and won’t react to them), you should be thinking more like I suggested?
I mostly-disagree with this on pragmatic grounds. I agree that that’s the right approach to take on the first point if/when you have full information about what’s going on. But in practice you essentially never have proper information on what everyone else’s counterfactuals would look like according to different actions you could take.
If everyone thinks in terms of something like “approximate shares of moral credit”, then this can help in coordinating to avoid situations where a lot of people work on a project because it seems worth it on marginal impact, but it would have been better if they’d all done something different. Doing this properly might mean impact markets (where the “market” part works as a mechanism for distributing cognition, so that each market participant is responsible for thinking through their own alternative options, and feeding that information into the system via their willingness to do work for different amounts of pay), but I think that you can get some rough approximation to the benefits of impact markets without actual markets by having people do the things they would have done with markets—and in this context, that means paying attention to the share of credit different parties would get.
Is it at least fair to say that in situations where the other main actors aren’t explicitly coordinating with you and aren’t aware of your efforts (and, to an approximation, weren’t expecting your efforts and won’t react to them), you should be thinking more like I suggested?
I think maybe yes? But I’m a bit worried that “won’t react to them” is actually doing a lot of work.
We could chat about more a concrete example that you think fits this description, if you like.