Thanks, Tom! I agree with with you that all else being equal
solutions that destroy less option value are preferable
though I still think that in some cases the benefits of hard-to-reverse decisions can outweigh the costs.
It seems strange to override what your future self wants to do, if you expect your future self to be in an equally good epistemic position. If anything, future you is better informed and wiser...
This seems to assume that our future selves will actually make important decisions purely (or mostly) based on their epistemic status.
However, as CalebWithers points out in a comment:
I believe most people who appear to have value “drifted” will merely have drifted into situations where fulfilling a core drive (e.g. belonging, status) is less consistent with effective altruism than it was previously; as per The Elephant in the Brain, I believe these non-altruistic motives are more important than most people think.
If this is valid (as it seems to me) than many of the important decisions of our future selves are a result of some more or less conscious psychological drives rather than an all-things-considered, reflective and value-based judgment. It is very hard for me to imagine that my future self could ever decide to stop being altruistic or caring about effectiveness on the basis of being better informed and more rational. However, I find it much more plausible that other psychological drives could bring my future self to abandon these core values (and find a rationalization for it). To be frank, though I generally appreciate the idea of ‘being loyal to and cooperating with my future self’, it seems to me that I place a considerably lower trust in the driving motivations of my future self than many others. From my perspective now, it is my future self that might act disloyally with regards to my current values and that is what I want to find ways to prevent.
It is worth pointing out that in the whole article and this comment I mostly speak about high-level, abstract values such as a fundamental commitment to altruism and to effectiveness. This is what I don’t want to lose and what I’d like to lock in for my future self. As illustrated by RandomEAs comment, I would be much more careful about attempting to tie-myself-to-the-mast with respect to very specific values such as discount rates between humans and non-human animals, specific cause area or intervention preferences etc.
It’s not enough to place a low level of trust in your future self for commitment devices to be a good idea. You also have to put a high level of trust in your current self :)
That is, if you believe in moral uncertainty, and believe you currently haven’t done a good job of figuring out the “correct” way of thinking about ethics, you may think you’re likely to make mistakes by committing and acting now, and so be willing to wait, even in the face of a strong chance your future self won’t even be interested in those questions anymore.
Thanks, Tom! I agree with with you that all else being equal
though I still think that in some cases the benefits of hard-to-reverse decisions can outweigh the costs.
This seems to assume that our future selves will actually make important decisions purely (or mostly) based on their epistemic status. However, as CalebWithers points out in a comment:
If this is valid (as it seems to me) than many of the important decisions of our future selves are a result of some more or less conscious psychological drives rather than an all-things-considered, reflective and value-based judgment. It is very hard for me to imagine that my future self could ever decide to stop being altruistic or caring about effectiveness on the basis of being better informed and more rational. However, I find it much more plausible that other psychological drives could bring my future self to abandon these core values (and find a rationalization for it). To be frank, though I generally appreciate the idea of ‘being loyal to and cooperating with my future self’, it seems to me that I place a considerably lower trust in the driving motivations of my future self than many others. From my perspective now, it is my future self that might act disloyally with regards to my current values and that is what I want to find ways to prevent.
It is worth pointing out that in the whole article and this comment I mostly speak about high-level, abstract values such as a fundamental commitment to altruism and to effectiveness. This is what I don’t want to lose and what I’d like to lock in for my future self. As illustrated by RandomEAs comment, I would be much more careful about attempting to tie-myself-to-the-mast with respect to very specific values such as discount rates between humans and non-human animals, specific cause area or intervention preferences etc.
It’s not enough to place a low level of trust in your future self for commitment devices to be a good idea. You also have to put a high level of trust in your current self :)
That is, if you believe in moral uncertainty, and believe you currently haven’t done a good job of figuring out the “correct” way of thinking about ethics, you may think you’re likely to make mistakes by committing and acting now, and so be willing to wait, even in the face of a strong chance your future self won’t even be interested in those questions anymore.