Ah, good point. In which case I don’t think there’s any clean way to dissolve expected utility into simple factors without making strong assumptions. Does that sound right?
Thinking about changes to expected population holding average wellbeing constant and and expected average wellbeing holding population constant still seem like they’re useful approaches (the former being what I’m doing in the rest of the series), but that would make them heuristics as well—albeit higher fidelity ones than ‘existential risk’ vs ‘not existential risk’.
I think you are right, and the distinction still makes sense, but only as a theoretical device to disentangle things in thought experiments, maybe less in practice, unless one can argue that the correlations are weak.
Ah, good point. In which case I don’t think there’s any clean way to dissolve expected utility into simple factors without making strong assumptions. Does that sound right?
Thinking about changes to expected population holding average wellbeing constant and and expected average wellbeing holding population constant still seem like they’re useful approaches (the former being what I’m doing in the rest of the series), but that would make them heuristics as well—albeit higher fidelity ones than ‘existential risk’ vs ‘not existential risk’.
I think you are right, and the distinction still makes sense, but only as a theoretical device to disentangle things in thought experiments, maybe less in practice, unless one can argue that the correlations are weak.