Executive summary: This deeply philosophical, argument-rich post defends fanaticism—the view that any guaranteed good outcome is less valuable than a sufficiently small chance of a vastly better one—arguing that rejecting it requires giving up on core principles of rational choice, and that objections based on intuition or infinite cases are less compelling than the overwhelming structural and practical reasons in its favor.
Key points:
Fanaticism arises unavoidably from basic decision-theoretic principles. The author argues that accepting transitivity and plausible dominance principles (like Partial Dominance and 99% Independence) forces one to accept fanaticism, unless one is willing to accept strange or irrational alternatives such as intransitivity or timidity.
Objections relying on infinite cases (e.g. St. Petersburg paradox) don’t undermine fanaticism. The post claims that counterintuitive results involving infinite values or divergent series reflect mathematical weirdness, not flaws in fanaticism itself—and that such problems afflict many views equally.
Non-fanatical alternatives are worse. Bounded utility and risk discounting lead to implausible consequences, such as being indifferent to massive gains or valuing trivial improvements over tiny chances of enormous value, and often break core principles like separability or transitivity.
Fanaticism has practical implications for cause prioritization. If one accepts fanaticism, they should focus on actions with even tiny chances of extremely large benefits—like existential risk reduction—over high-certainty, smaller-scale interventions.
Our intuitions about low probabilities are unreliable. The author discusses psychological biases (e.g. scope neglect, risk insensitivity) that distort our reasoning about very small risks, suggesting that we should not trust intuitive resistance to fanaticism.
Rejecting fanaticism requires rejecting many plausible principles. To avoid fanaticism, one must deny transitivity, dominance, or background independence—implying that what happens in causally isolated regions (like ancient Egypt) affects the value of actions today, which seems highly implausible.
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Executive summary: This deeply philosophical, argument-rich post defends fanaticism—the view that any guaranteed good outcome is less valuable than a sufficiently small chance of a vastly better one—arguing that rejecting it requires giving up on core principles of rational choice, and that objections based on intuition or infinite cases are less compelling than the overwhelming structural and practical reasons in its favor.
Key points:
Fanaticism arises unavoidably from basic decision-theoretic principles. The author argues that accepting transitivity and plausible dominance principles (like Partial Dominance and 99% Independence) forces one to accept fanaticism, unless one is willing to accept strange or irrational alternatives such as intransitivity or timidity.
Objections relying on infinite cases (e.g. St. Petersburg paradox) don’t undermine fanaticism. The post claims that counterintuitive results involving infinite values or divergent series reflect mathematical weirdness, not flaws in fanaticism itself—and that such problems afflict many views equally.
Non-fanatical alternatives are worse. Bounded utility and risk discounting lead to implausible consequences, such as being indifferent to massive gains or valuing trivial improvements over tiny chances of enormous value, and often break core principles like separability or transitivity.
Fanaticism has practical implications for cause prioritization. If one accepts fanaticism, they should focus on actions with even tiny chances of extremely large benefits—like existential risk reduction—over high-certainty, smaller-scale interventions.
Our intuitions about low probabilities are unreliable. The author discusses psychological biases (e.g. scope neglect, risk insensitivity) that distort our reasoning about very small risks, suggesting that we should not trust intuitive resistance to fanaticism.
Rejecting fanaticism requires rejecting many plausible principles. To avoid fanaticism, one must deny transitivity, dominance, or background independence—implying that what happens in causally isolated regions (like ancient Egypt) affects the value of actions today, which seems highly implausible.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.