Related: Anti-realism about bargaining? (I don’t know if people still believed this in 2015, but early discussions on Lesswrong seemed to indicate that a prevalent belief was that there exists a proper solution to good bargaining that works best independently of the decision architecture of other agents in the environment.)
Arguably, some people were thinking along these lines before 2015. However, so many things fall under the heading of “acausal trade” that it’s hard to tell, and judging by conversations with people who think they understood the idea but actually mixed it up with something else, I assign 40% to this having been relevantly novel.
Some insights on metaethics might qualify. For instance, the claim “Being morally uncertain and confidently a moral realist are in tension” is arguably a macrostrategically relevant insight. It suggests that more discussion of the relevance of having underdetermined moral values (Stuart Armstrong wrote about this a lot) seems warranted, and that, depending on the conclusions from how to think about underdetermined values, peer disagreement might work somewhat differently for moral questions than for empirical ones. (It’s hard to categorise whether these are novel insights or not. I think it’s likely that there were people who would have confidently agreed with these points in 2015 for the right reasons, but maybe lacked awareness that not everyone will agree on addressing the underdetermination issue in the same way, and so “missed” a part of the insight.)
Thinking about insights that were particularly relevant for me / my values:
Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors as a potentially promising cause area
The importance of developing (the precursors for) peaceful bargaining strategies
Related: Anti-realism about bargaining? (I don’t know if people still believed this in 2015, but early discussions on Lesswrong seemed to indicate that a prevalent belief was that there exists a proper solution to good bargaining that works best independently of the decision architecture of other agents in the environment.)
Possible implications of correlated decision-making in large worlds
Arguably, some people were thinking along these lines before 2015. However, so many things fall under the heading of “acausal trade” that it’s hard to tell, and judging by conversations with people who think they understood the idea but actually mixed it up with something else, I assign 40% to this having been relevantly novel.
Some insights on metaethics might qualify. For instance, the claim “Being morally uncertain and confidently a moral realist are in tension” is arguably a macrostrategically relevant insight. It suggests that more discussion of the relevance of having underdetermined moral values (Stuart Armstrong wrote about this a lot) seems warranted, and that, depending on the conclusions from how to think about underdetermined values, peer disagreement might work somewhat differently for moral questions than for empirical ones. (It’s hard to categorise whether these are novel insights or not. I think it’s likely that there were people who would have confidently agreed with these points in 2015 for the right reasons, but maybe lacked awareness that not everyone will agree on addressing the underdetermination issue in the same way, and so “missed” a part of the insight.)