A few things come to mind. First, I’ve been really struck by how robust animal welfare work is across lots of kinds of uncertainties. It has some of the virtues of both GHD (a high probability of actually making a difference) and x-risk work (huge scales). Second, when working with the Moral Parliament tool, it is really striking how much of a difference different aggregation methods make. If we use approval voting to navigate moral uncertainty, we get really different recommendations than if we give every worldview control over a share of the pie or if we maximize expected choiceworthiness. For me, figuring out which method we should use turns on what kind of community we want to be and which (or whether!) democratic ideals should govern our decision-making. This seems like an issue we can make headway on, even if there are empirical or moral uncertainties that prove less tractable.
A few things come to mind. First, I’ve been really struck by how robust animal welfare work is across lots of kinds of uncertainties. It has some of the virtues of both GHD (a high probability of actually making a difference) and x-risk work (huge scales). Second, when working with the Moral Parliament tool, it is really striking how much of a difference different aggregation methods make. If we use approval voting to navigate moral uncertainty, we get really different recommendations than if we give every worldview control over a share of the pie or if we maximize expected choiceworthiness. For me, figuring out which method we should use turns on what kind of community we want to be and which (or whether!) democratic ideals should govern our decision-making. This seems like an issue we can make headway on, even if there are empirical or moral uncertainties that prove less tractable.