Hmm, the paper doesn’t seem to address the question I described in Is the potential astronomical waste in our universe too small to care about?
To me, this seems to be a central open problem in the moral parliament model, as well as in moral uncertainty in general (see this version of it which applies to MEC), and has strong practical implications, so it’s strange to see very little work from philosophers on it. It doesn’t seem to be addressed in Andrew Sepielli’s PhD thesis or Will MacAskill’s DPhil thesis, and Toby Ord told me there’s not “anything particularly relevant to that question” in his and Will’s upcoming book about moral uncertainty (although that’s because “the book doesn’t really include any post-2014 thinking at all”).
How about fixing the discount rate for all the parliament members? Or treating the discount rate question as orthogonal to the altruism/egoism question, and having 4 agents with each combination of altruism/egoism and high/low discount rates? I suppose analogous problems could appear in a non-discount-rate form somehow?
We are hoping to kind-of address the issue in that post in a paper I’m working on with Anders Sandberg—I’ll let you know when we’re ready to share it, if you’d like.
Hmm, the paper doesn’t seem to address the question I described in Is the potential astronomical waste in our universe too small to care about? To me, this seems to be a central open problem in the moral parliament model, as well as in moral uncertainty in general (see this version of it which applies to MEC), and has strong practical implications, so it’s strange to see very little work from philosophers on it. It doesn’t seem to be addressed in Andrew Sepielli’s PhD thesis or Will MacAskill’s DPhil thesis, and Toby Ord told me there’s not “anything particularly relevant to that question” in his and Will’s upcoming book about moral uncertainty (although that’s because “the book doesn’t really include any post-2014 thinking at all”).
Wow, this a great point.
The standard “academic knowledge generation usually isn’t tooled towards focusing on the most important stuff” probably applies here.
How about fixing the discount rate for all the parliament members? Or treating the discount rate question as orthogonal to the altruism/egoism question, and having 4 agents with each combination of altruism/egoism and high/low discount rates? I suppose analogous problems could appear in a non-discount-rate form somehow?
We are hoping to kind-of address the issue in that post in a paper I’m working on with Anders Sandberg—I’ll let you know when we’re ready to share it, if you’d like.