I would simply say the expected mass is practically (not exactly) the same given the evidence available to me, and consider gathering additional evidence depending on how much I expected this to change future decisions. Likewise for altruistic interventions among which comparisons of the expected change in welfare feel very arbitrary.
I don’t know what you mean by “practically the same”, can you say more?
Regardless, the problem is that “gathering evidence” vs “doing something else” is itself a decision, whose consequences you’ll 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 − 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 that’s consistent with incomparability. Given the independent motivations we’ve discussed (/given in my post) for calling the two options incomparable, I’d say you should call them incomparable.
I would simply say the expected mass is practically (not exactly) the same given the evidence available to me, and consider gathering additional evidence depending on how much I expected this to change future decisions. Likewise for altruistic interventions among which comparisons of the expected change in welfare feel very arbitrary.
I don’t know what you mean by “practically the same”, can you say more?
Regardless, the problem is that “gathering evidence” vs “doing something else” is itself a decision, whose consequences you’ll 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 − 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 that’s consistent with incomparability. Given the independent motivations we’ve discussed (/given in my post) for calling the two options incomparable, I’d say you should call them incomparable.
I think I address your questions in the second paragraph in “Why we’re especially unaware of large-scale consequences” (this post) and “Meta-extrapolation” (post #4). See also my discussion with Richard here.