It seems to me that the naive way to handle the two envelopes problem (and I’ve never heard of a way better than the naive way) is to diversify your donations across two possible solutions to the two envelopes problem:
donate half your (neartermist) money on the assumption that you should use ratios to fixed human value
donate half your money on the assumption that you should fix the opposite way (eg fruit flies have fixed value)
Which would suggest donating half to animal welfare and probably half to global poverty. (If you let moral weights be linear with neuron count, I think that would still favor animal welfare, but you could get global poverty outweighing animal welfare if moral weight grows super-linearly with neuron count.)
Plausibly there are other neartermist worldviews you might include that don’t relate to the two envelopes problem, e.g. a “only give to the most robust interventions” worldview might favor GiveDirectly. So I could see an allocation of less than 50% to animal welfare.
There is no one opposite way; there are many other ways than to fix human value. You could fix the value in fruit flies, shrimps, chickens, elephants, C elegans, some plant, some bacterium, rocks, your laptop, GPT-4 or an alien, etc..
I think a more principled approach would be to consider precise theories of how welfare scales, not necessarily fixing the value in any one moral patient, and then use some other approach to moral uncertainty for uncertainty between the theories. However, there is another argument for fixing human value across many such theories: we directly value our own experiences, and theorize about consciousness in relation to our own experiences, so we can fix the value in our own experiences and evaluate relative to them.
It seems to me that the naive way to handle the two envelopes problem (and I’ve never heard of a way better than the naive way) is to diversify your donations across two possible solutions to the two envelopes problem:
donate half your (neartermist) money on the assumption that you should use ratios to fixed human value
donate half your money on the assumption that you should fix the opposite way (eg fruit flies have fixed value)
Which would suggest donating half to animal welfare and probably half to global poverty. (If you let moral weights be linear with neuron count, I think that would still favor animal welfare, but you could get global poverty outweighing animal welfare if moral weight grows super-linearly with neuron count.)
Plausibly there are other neartermist worldviews you might include that don’t relate to the two envelopes problem, e.g. a “only give to the most robust interventions” worldview might favor GiveDirectly. So I could see an allocation of less than 50% to animal welfare.
There is no one opposite way; there are many other ways than to fix human value. You could fix the value in fruit flies, shrimps, chickens, elephants, C elegans, some plant, some bacterium, rocks, your laptop, GPT-4 or an alien, etc..
I think a more principled approach would be to consider precise theories of how welfare scales, not necessarily fixing the value in any one moral patient, and then use some other approach to moral uncertainty for uncertainty between the theories. However, there is another argument for fixing human value across many such theories: we directly value our own experiences, and theorize about consciousness in relation to our own experiences, so we can fix the value in our own experiences and evaluate relative to them.