I agree with you two. I don’t have any delusions about avoiding all risk of causing harm or that harm avoidance is straightforwardly more important than providing benefits. I guess what I am saying is that risk of causing harm is distinct from risk this is ineffective, and it would be nice to see these broken out (as someone who works in data analytics and engineering, I realize the real world is not so simple). It seems to me that actively causing harm is a bit of a different thing than just being ineffective, and you would ideally reason about it specifically, rather than bundling it all together into one big effectiveness metric.
Especially since, while I don’t think we should try to avoid all harm, people may have different moral weights about causing harm. For some people, they may be much more indifferent about causing harm relative to providing some benefit, whereas others may have a stronger bias towards “first, do no harm.” Given that the tradeoff between these is something each individual must determine, it is better to separate it out in your model and allow people to discount the effectiveness according to their own priorities.
I agree with you two. I don’t have any delusions about avoiding all risk of causing harm or that harm avoidance is straightforwardly more important than providing benefits. I guess what I am saying is that risk of causing harm is distinct from risk this is ineffective, and it would be nice to see these broken out (as someone who works in data analytics and engineering, I realize the real world is not so simple). It seems to me that actively causing harm is a bit of a different thing than just being ineffective, and you would ideally reason about it specifically, rather than bundling it all together into one big effectiveness metric.
Especially since, while I don’t think we should try to avoid all harm, people may have different moral weights about causing harm. For some people, they may be much more indifferent about causing harm relative to providing some benefit, whereas others may have a stronger bias towards “first, do no harm.” Given that the tradeoff between these is something each individual must determine, it is better to separate it out in your model and allow people to discount the effectiveness according to their own priorities.