I’ve played with your moral parliament tool- really cool. I don’t think I’ve seen something like this in philosophy before, where a team of researchers are creating products that aren’t simply papers.
Since you are making products though- do you carry out user interviews/​ use other methods to figure out how to best fit the product to your audience?
Relatedly, how do you hope people will use the moral parliament tool?
Re: fitting products to our audience, that’s one reason we release them on the Forum! All our tools are in beta; the feedback we receive here is one of the important ways we identify necessary refinements. As time and funding permit, we hope to improve our tools so that they better serve individuals and organizations trying to do as much good as they can. That being said, we also did a lot of user testing in advance, soliciting feedback on many iterations of each tool to improve usability and accessibility.
Re: how we hope people will use the Moral Parliament Tool, we have two main goals. First, we hope that people will use it to have more transparent conversations about their disagreements. For instance, when people are debating the merits of a particular intervention, is the crux the probability that an intervention will backfire, how bad they think backfiring will be, their relative aversions to backfiring, or the way they think they should navigate uncertainty given all their other commitments? The tool forces people to make these kinds of differences explicit and think through their implications. Second, we hope that people will use the Moral Parliament Tool to explore the implications of even modest levels of uncertainty. The tool makes it obvious that changes to parameter values, credences in moral theories, and aggregation methods have big consequences for overall allocations!
I’ve played with your moral parliament tool- really cool. I don’t think I’ve seen something like this in philosophy before, where a team of researchers are creating products that aren’t simply papers.
Since you are making products though- do you carry out user interviews/​ use other methods to figure out how to best fit the product to your audience?
Relatedly, how do you hope people will use the moral parliament tool?
Thanks for these questions, Toby!
Re: fitting products to our audience, that’s one reason we release them on the Forum! All our tools are in beta; the feedback we receive here is one of the important ways we identify necessary refinements. As time and funding permit, we hope to improve our tools so that they better serve individuals and organizations trying to do as much good as they can. That being said, we also did a lot of user testing in advance, soliciting feedback on many iterations of each tool to improve usability and accessibility.
Re: how we hope people will use the Moral Parliament Tool, we have two main goals. First, we hope that people will use it to have more transparent conversations about their disagreements. For instance, when people are debating the merits of a particular intervention, is the crux the probability that an intervention will backfire, how bad they think backfiring will be, their relative aversions to backfiring, or the way they think they should navigate uncertainty given all their other commitments? The tool forces people to make these kinds of differences explicit and think through their implications. Second, we hope that people will use the Moral Parliament Tool to explore the implications of even modest levels of uncertainty. The tool makes it obvious that changes to parameter values, credences in moral theories, and aggregation methods have big consequences for overall allocations!