Thanks for sharing this! I’m very much in favour of looking for more robustly positive interventions and reducing sensitivity to arbitrary beliefs or modeling decisions.
I think it’s worth pointing out that minimizing regret is maximally ambiguity averse, which seems controversial philosophically, and may mean giving up enormous upside potential or ignoring far more likely bad cases. In a sense, it’s fanatically worst case-focused. I suppose you could cut out the most unlikely worst cases (hence minimizing “plausible future regret”), but doing so is also arbitrary, and I don’t know how you would want to assess “plausibility”.
And thank you for sharing your thoughts on this matter!
Indeed, focusing on hyper-unrealistic worst cases would be counter-productive in my view. Your arbitrary-objection is a justified one! However, there is some literature in this field engaging with the question of how to select or discover relevant scenarios. I think, there are some methods and judgment calls to handle this situation more gracefully than just waving one’s hand.
And I agree with your statement and linked post that the weaker claim is easier to accept. In practice, I would probably still go beyond and use decision-making under deep uncertainty to inform the policy-making process. This seems to be a still better approach than the default.
What you can also do is still handcrafting scenarios as it is done for climate change mitigation. You have various shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) created by a lot of experts. You could attempt to find policy solutions that would perform sufficiently well for SSP4 or SSP5. But in the end, it might be just very useful to involve the stakeholders and let them co-decide these aspects.
Thanks for sharing this! I’m very much in favour of looking for more robustly positive interventions and reducing sensitivity to arbitrary beliefs or modeling decisions.
I think it’s worth pointing out that minimizing regret is maximally ambiguity averse, which seems controversial philosophically, and may mean giving up enormous upside potential or ignoring far more likely bad cases. In a sense, it’s fanatically worst case-focused. I suppose you could cut out the most unlikely worst cases (hence minimizing “plausible future regret”), but doing so is also arbitrary, and I don’t know how you would want to assess “plausibility”.
I might instead make the weaker claim that we should rule out robustly dominated portfolios of interventions, but this might not rule out anything (even research and capacity building could end up being misused): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Mig4y9Duu6pzuw3H4/hedging-against-deep-and-moral-uncertainty
And thank you for sharing your thoughts on this matter!
Indeed, focusing on hyper-unrealistic worst cases would be counter-productive in my view. Your arbitrary-objection is a justified one! However, there is some literature in this field engaging with the question of how to select or discover relevant scenarios. I think, there are some methods and judgment calls to handle this situation more gracefully than just waving one’s hand.
And I agree with your statement and linked post that the weaker claim is easier to accept. In practice, I would probably still go beyond and use decision-making under deep uncertainty to inform the policy-making process. This seems to be a still better approach than the default.
What you can also do is still handcrafting scenarios as it is done for climate change mitigation. You have various shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) created by a lot of experts. You could attempt to find policy solutions that would perform sufficiently well for SSP4 or SSP5. But in the end, it might be just very useful to involve the stakeholders and let them co-decide these aspects.