I donât know what you mean by âpractically the sameâ, can you say more?
Regardless, the problem is that âgathering evidenceâ vs âdoing something elseâ is itself a decision, whose consequences youâll be clueless about. I discuss this more here.
I meant my future decisions would be the same in reality if I could not gather additional evidence regardless of whether the mass of the 2 identical objects was exactly the same or differed by 10^-6 kg.
Do you think annual human welfare per human-year has increased since 1900? Child mortality decreased 37.3 pp (= 0.41 â 0.037) since then until 2023. If you agree annual human welfare per human-year has increased since 1900, are you confident that similar progress cannot be extented to non-humans? Would you have argued 200 years ago that we are all clueless about how to increase human welfare? I agree research can backfire. However, at least historically, doing research on the sentience of animals, and on how to increase their welfare has mostly been beneficial for the target animals?
I meant my future decisions would be the same in reality if I could not gather additional evidence
Perhaps, but thatâs consistent with incomparability. Given the independent motivations weâve discussed (/âgiven in my post) for calling the two options incomparable, Iâd say you should call them incomparable.
I donât know what you mean by âpractically the sameâ, can you say more?
Regardless, the problem is that âgathering evidenceâ vs âdoing something elseâ is itself a decision, whose consequences youâll be clueless about. I discuss this more here.
I meant my future decisions would be the same in reality if I could not gather additional evidence regardless of whether the mass of the 2 identical objects was exactly the same or differed by 10^-6 kg.
Do you think annual human welfare per human-year has increased since 1900? Child mortality decreased 37.3 pp (= 0.41 â 0.037) since then until 2023. If you agree annual human welfare per human-year has increased since 1900, are you confident that similar progress cannot be extented to non-humans? Would you have argued 200 years ago that we are all clueless about how to increase human welfare? I agree research can backfire. However, at least historically, doing research on the sentience of animals, and on how to increase their welfare has mostly been beneficial for the target animals?
Perhaps, but thatâs consistent with incomparability. Given the independent motivations weâve discussed (/âgiven in my post) for calling the two options incomparable, Iâd say you should call them incomparable.
I think I address your questions in the second paragraph in âWhy weâre especially unaware of large-scale consequencesâ (this post) and âMeta-extrapolationâ (post #4). See also my discussion with Richard here.