From your perspective now, given your uncertainty, you might have no reason to think that the drive changes things in a better or worse way, and so the expected value derived from taking the expected value of each possible consequence considered piecemeal and summed up might be neutral.
I think if you accept some degree of objective chance, this might completely resolve the problem. (I explore this idea, without direct connection to incomparability, here: https://philpapers.org/rec/SHICAT-11)
It is consistent with a purely subjective neutral expected value, however, that you might be quite sure that the results, if revealed in their full detail, would be incomparable.
This creates an intuitive tension. There is something called the “Principle of Reflection”—it is a bit controversial, but very intuitive—that says roughly that if you know you would believe something if you were put into a better epistemic position, you should believe it now. The challenge Bulldog raises relies on taking reflection seriously and thinking that we would almost surely see incomparability if we looked closely at all the details, so we should accept incomparability now.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Derek. I did not know about your paper.
One would ideally recognise the existing uncertainty, and become less uncertain with further research. However, I think it is very easy to underestimate uncertainty. So I can easily see further research making one more uncertain. Yet, this would only lead to incomparability if one is open to impresice probabilities (I am not)?
From your perspective now, given your uncertainty, you might have no reason to think that the drive changes things in a better or worse way, and so the expected value derived from taking the expected value of each possible consequence considered piecemeal and summed up might be neutral.
I think if you accept some degree of objective chance, this might completely resolve the problem. (I explore this idea, without direct connection to incomparability, here: https://philpapers.org/rec/SHICAT-11)
It is consistent with a purely subjective neutral expected value, however, that you might be quite sure that the results, if revealed in their full detail, would be incomparable.
This creates an intuitive tension. There is something called the “Principle of Reflection”—it is a bit controversial, but very intuitive—that says roughly that if you know you would believe something if you were put into a better epistemic position, you should believe it now. The challenge Bulldog raises relies on taking reflection seriously and thinking that we would almost surely see incomparability if we looked closely at all the details, so we should accept incomparability now.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Derek. I did not know about your paper.
One would ideally recognise the existing uncertainty, and become less uncertain with further research. However, I think it is very easy to underestimate uncertainty. So I can easily see further research making one more uncertain. Yet, this would only lead to incomparability if one is open to impresice probabilities (I am not)?