I don’t have or know of any data (which doesn’t mean much, to be fair), but my hunch would be that ra­tio­nal­ist peo­ple who haven’t heard of EA are, on av­er­age, prob­a­bly more open to EA ideas than the av­er­age al­tru­is­tic per­son who hasn’t heard of EA. While al­tru­is­tic peo­ple might gen­er­ally agree with the core ideas, they may be less likely to ac­tu­ally ap­ply them to their ac­tions.

It’s a vague claim though, and I make these as­sump­tion be­cause of the few dozens of EAs I know per­son­ally, I’d very roughly as­sume ²⁄₃ of them to come across as more ra­tio­nal­ist than al­tru­is­tic (if you had to choose which of the two they are), plus I’d fur­ther as­sume that from the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion more peo­ple will ap­pear to be al­tru­is­tic, than ra­tio­nal­ist. If ra­tio­nal­ists are more rare in the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion, yet more com­mon among EAs, that would seem like ev­i­dence for them be­ing a bet­ter match so to speak. Th­ese are all just guesses how­ever with­out much to back them up, so I too would be in­ter­est in what other peo­ple think (or know).

A few ran­dom thoughts from a re­searcher with a back­ground in psy­chol­ogy re­search:

• One driver for prefer­ences for LSTs or eu­daimo­nia frame­works for SWB is an in­tu­ition that solely fo­cus­ing our well-be­ing con­cerns on hap­piness or af­fect would lead us to con­clude that hap­piness wire­head­ing as a com­plete and fi­nal solu­tion, and that’s in­tu­itively wrong for most peo­ple.

• Be­cause psy­chol­o­gists are em­piri­cists, they don’t spend too much time wor­ry­ing about whether af­fect, life satis­fac­tion, or eu­da­mo­nia are more im­por­tant in a philo­soph­i­cal or eth­i­cal sense. They are more con­cerned about how they can mea­sure each of these fac­tors, and how en­vi­ron­men­tal (or be­hav­ioral or ge­netic) fac­tors might be linked to SWB mea­sures. To the ex­tent there is psy­cholog­i­cal liter­a­ture on the rel­a­tive value of SWB mea­sures, I think most of it is sim­ply just try­ing to jus­tify that it is worth mea­sur­ing and talk­ing about eu­da­mo­nia at all, as eu­da­mo­nia is prob­a­bly the least ac­cepted of the three SWB mea­sures.

• Work­ing out the rel­a­tive im­por­tance of SWB mea­sures seems to me to be solely a ques­tion of val­ues, for moral philos­o­phy and not psy­chol­ogy, so I am glad that you, as a moral philoso­pher, are con­sid­er­ing the ques­tion!

• Fi­nally, a bit of an aside, but an­other area where I would like to see more moral philoso­phers, psy­chol­o­gists, and neu­ro­scien­tists talk­ing is the rel­a­tive im­por­tance of pos­i­tive vs. nega­tive af­fect. From a neu­ropsy­cholog­i­cal point of view, pos­i­tive and nega­tive af­fect are qual­i­ta­tively differ­ent. Often, for con­ve­nience, re­searchers might mea­sure a net differ­ence be­tween them, but I think there are very good em­piri­cal rea­sons that they should be con­sid­ered in­com­men­su­rable. All pos­i­tive af­fect shares cer­tain phys­i­cal neu­ro­scien­tific char­ac­ter­is­tics (al­most always nu­cleus ac­cum­bens ac­tivity, for in­stance) but nega­tive af­fect ac­ti­vates differ­ent sys­tems. If these are re­ally in­com­men­su­rable, again we need to look to moral philoso­phers to be think about which is more im­por­tant. This could be im­por­tant for ques­tions in moral philos­o­phy (e.g., prior ex­is­tence vs. to­tal view) and in EA par­tic­u­larly: a strong em­pha­sis on the moral de­sir­a­bil­ity of pos­i­tive af­fect might lead us to­wards a to­tal view (be­cause more peo­ple means more to­tal pos­i­tive af­fect) whereas bal­anc­ing nega­tive and pos­i­tive af­fect could lead us to­wards a prior ex­is­tence view (fewer peo­ple means less nega­tive af­fect but also less pos­i­tive af­fect), and a strong fo­cus on avoidance of nega­tive af­fect could even lead to a prefer­ence for the ex­tinc­tion of sen­tient life.

What about an ob­jec­tive list the­ory con­tain­ing only he­do­nis­tic value, prefer­ences, and global de­sire or life satis­fac­tion (whether men­tal state ver­sions or not)? In this way, it could be the case that non­hu­man an­i­mals do have welfare, but do not have ac­cess to cer­tain kinds of welfare. Non­hu­man an­i­mals may also not have ac­cess to non-men­tal state welfare be­yond what’s already cap­tured in their men­tal state welfare.

Of course, then we have to de­cide how to deal with con­flicts and weight­ing be­tween the differ­ent com­po­nents, as you men­tion, and this to me seems doomed to ar­bi­trari­ness.

Among ra­tio­nal­ist peo­ple and al­tru­is­tic peo­ple, on av­er­age, which of them are more likely to be at­tracted to effec­tive al­tru­ism?

This has uses. If one type of peo­ple are sig­nifi­cantly more likely to be at­tracted to EA, on av­er­age, then it makes sense to tar­get them for out­reach efforts. (e.g. at uni­ver­sity fairs)

I un­der­stand that this is a gen­eral ques­tion, and I’m only look­ing for a gen­eral an­swer :P (but speci­fics are wel­come if you can provide them!)

Har­ris is a mar­mite figure—in my ex­pe­rience peo­ple love him or hate him.

My guess is peo­ple who like Sam Har­ris are dis­pro­por­tionately likely to be po­ten­tially in­ter­ested in EA.

You men­tion that:

Nei­ther we nor they had any way of fore­cast­ing or quan­tify­ing the pos­si­ble im­pact of [Ex­tinc­tion Re­bel­lion]

and go on to talk about this is an ex­am­ple of the type of in­ter­ven­tion that EA is likely to miss due to lack of quan­tifi­a­bil­ity.

One think that would help us un­der­stand your point is to an­swer the fol­low­ing ques­tion:

If it’s re­ally not pos­si­ble to make any kind of fore­cast about the im­pact of grass­roots ac­tivism (or what­ever in­ter­ven­tion you would pre­fer), then on what ba­sis do you sup­port your claim that sup­port­ing grass­roots ac­tivism would im­prove its im­pact? And how would you have any idea which groups or which forms of ac­tivism to fund, if there’s no pos­si­ble way of fore­cast­ing which ones will work?

I think the in­fer­en­tial gap here is that (we think that) you are ad­vo­cat­ing for an al­ter­na­tive way of jus­tify­ing [the claim that a given in­ter­ven­tion is im­pact­ful] other than the tra­di­tional “sci­en­tific” and “ob­jec­tive” tools (e.g. cost-benefit anal­y­sis, RCTs) , but we’re not re­ally sure what you think that al­ter­na­tive jus­tifi­ca­tion would look like or why it would push you to­wards grass­roots ac­tivism.

I sus­pect that you might be us­ing words like “sci­en­tific”, “ob­jec­tive”, and “ra­tio­nal” in a nar­rower sense than EAs think of them. For in­stance, EAs don’t be­lieve that “ra­tio­nal­ity” means “don’t ac­cept any idea that is not backed by clear sci­en­tific ev­i­dence,” be­cause we’re aware that of­ten the ev­i­dence is in­com­plete, but we have to make a de­ci­sion any­way. What a “ra­tio­nal” per­son would say in that situ­a­tion is some­thing more like “think about what we would ex­pect to see in a world where the idea is true com­pared to what we would ex­pect to see if it were false, see which is closer to what we do see, and pos­si­bly also look at how similar things have turned out in the past.”

This seems like an in­cred­ibly in­ter­est­ing and im­por­tant dis­cus­sion! I don’t have much time now, but I’ll throw in some quick thoughts and hope­fully come back later.

I think that there is room for Romy and Paolo’s view­point in the EA move­ment. Lemme see if I can trans­late some of their points into EA-speak and fill in some of their im­plicit ar­gu­ments. I’ll in­evitably use a some­what per­sua­sive tone, but dis­agree­ment is of course wel­come.

(For con­text, I’ve been in­volved in EA for about six years now, but I’ve never come across any EAs in the wild. In­stead, I’m im­mersed in three com­mu­ni­ties: Bud­dhist, Chris­tian, and so­cial-jus­tice-ori­ented aca­demic. I’m deeply com­mit­ted to con­se­quen­tial­ism, but I be­lieve that virtues are great tools for bring­ing about good con­se­quences.)

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I think the main differ­ence be­tween Guer­rilla’s per­spec­tive and the dom­i­nant EA per­spec­tive is that Guer­rilla be­lieves that small ac­tions, virtues, in­tu­itions, etc. re­ally mat­ter. I’m in­clined to agree.

So­cial jus­tice in­tu­ition says that the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem be­hind all this suffer­ing is that pow­er­ful/​priv­ileged peo­ple are jerks in var­i­ous ways. For ex­am­ple, colo­nial­ism screwed up Africa’s thriv­ing (by the stan­dards of that time) econ­omy. (I’m no ex­pert, but as far as I know, it seems highly likely that Afri­can com­mu­ni­ties would have mod­ern­ized into flour­ish­ing places if they weren’t ex­ploited.) As an­other ex­am­ple, priv­ileged peo­ple act like jerks when they spend money on lux­u­ries in­stead of donat­ing.

Spiritual in­tu­ition, from Bud­dhism, Chris­ti­an­ity, and prob­a­bly many other tra­di­tions, says that the rea­son pow­er­ful/​priv­ileged peo­ple are jerks is that they’re held cap­tive by greed, anger, delu­sion, and other af­flic­tive emo­tions. For ex­am­ple, it’s delu­sional and greedy to think that you need a sports car more than other peo­ple need ba­sic ne­ces­si­ties.

If af­flic­tive emo­tions are the root cause of all the world’s ills, then I think it’s plau­si­ble to look to virtues as a solu­tion. (I in­ter­pret “gen­er­at­ing the poli­ti­cal will” to mean “gen­er­at­ing the de­sire for spe­cific ac­tions and the ded­i­ca­tion to fol­low through”, which sound like virtues to me.) In par­tic­u­lar, re­li­gions and so­cial jus­tice philoso­phers seem to agree that it’s im­por­tant to cul­ti­vate a gen­uine yearn­ing for the flour­ish­ing of all sen­tient be­ings. Other virtues—equa­nim­ity, gen­eros­ity, dili­gence—ob­vi­ously help with al­tru­is­tic en­deav­ors. Virtues can sup­port the goal of hap­piness for all in at least three ways. First, a vir­tu­ous per­son can help oth­ers more effec­tively. Com­pas­sion and gen­eros­ity help them to gladly share their re­sources, pa­tience helps them to avoid blow­ing up with anger and dam­ag­ing re­la­tion­ships, and per­se­ver­ance helps them to keep work­ing through challenges. Se­cond, peo­ple who have trained their minds are them­selves hap­pier with their cir­cum­stances (cita­tion needed). Great, now there’s less work for oth­ers to do! Third, ac­cord­ing to the Bud­dhist tra­di­tion, a vir­tu­ous per­son knows bet­ter what to do at any given mo­ment. By de­vel­op­ing com­pas­sion, one de­vel­ops wis­dom, and vice versa. The “Effec­tive” and the “Altru­ism” are tied to­gether. This makes sense be­cause spiritual train­ing should make one more open, less re­ac­tive, and less sus­cep­ti­ble to sub­con­scious habits; once these ob­scu­ra­tions are re­moved, one has a clearer view of what needs to be done in any given mo­ment. You don’t want to act on re­pressed fear, anger, or bi­gotry by ac­ci­dent! To riff off Romy and Paolo’s ex­am­ple of “wealthy EA donors” failing to work on them­selves, their ig­no­rance of their own minds may have real-world con­se­quences when they don’t even no­tice that they could sup­port sys­temic change at their own or­ga­ni­za­tions. The ar­gu­ment here is that our men­tal states have sig­nifi­cant effects on our ac­tions, so we’d bet­ter help oth­ers by clean­ing up our harm­ful men­tal ten­den­cies.

Maybe this in­ter­nal work won’t bear su­per-effec­tive fruit im­me­di­ately, but I think it’s clear that mind-train­ing and wellbe­ing cre­ate a pos­i­tive feed­back loop. In­vest­ing now will pay off later: build­ing com­pas­sion­ate and wise com­mu­ni­ties would be in­cred­ibly benefi­cial long-term.

---

Mis­cel­la­neous points in no par­tic­u­lar or­der:

“EA seems to un­ques­tion­ingly repli­cate the val­ues of the old sys­tem: effi­ciency and cost-effec­tive­ness, growth/​scale, lin­ear­ity, sci­ence and ob­jec­tivity, in­di­vi­d­u­al­ism, and de­ci­sion-mak­ing by ex­perts/​elites”.

Here’s how I in­ter­pret the ar­gu­ment: his­tor­i­cally, peo­ple who value these things have gone on to gain a bunch of power and use it to op­press oth­ers. This is ev­i­dence that valu­ing these things leads to bad con­se­quences. There­fore, we should try to find val­ues that have bet­ter track records. I’d be fas­ci­nated to see a full ar­gu­ment for or against this chain of rea­son­ing.

More fac­tors that may or may not mat­ter: Greed might be the root cause of some­one’s as­pira­tion to­ward effi­ciency+growth. A lack of trust+em­pa­thy might lead some­one to em­brace in­di­vi­d­u­al­ism. Giv­ing power to ex­perts/​elites sug­gests a lack of re­spect for non-elites.

“In short, we be­lieve that EA could do more to en­courage wealth own­ers to dig deep to trans­form them­selves to build mean­ingful re­la­tion­ships and poli­ti­cal al­ly­ship that are needed for change at the sys­tems level.”

If you as­sume that spread­ing virtues is cru­cial, as I’ve ar­gued above, and if virtues can spread through­out net­works of al­lies, then you should build those net­works.

We would sus­pect that donors and grant man­agers with a deep emo­tional con­nec­tion to their work and an ac­tual in­ter­est to have their per­sonal lives, val­ues and re­la­tion­ships be touched by it will stick with it and go the ex­tra mile to make a pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tion, gen­er­at­ing even more pos­i­tive out­comes and im­pact.

We need mind train­ing so that we can help im­par­tially. Im­par­tial­ity is com­pat­i­ble with cul­ti­vat­ing “warm” qual­ities like trust and re­la­tion­ships. Ju­lia Wise ex­plains why no one is a statis­tic: http://​​www.giv­ing­gladly.com/​​2018/​​10/​​no-one-is-statis­tic.html

More philan­thropic fund­ing, about half of it we would ar­gue, should go to ini­ti­a­tives that are still small, un­proven and/​or aca­dem­i­cally ‘un­prov­able’, that tackle the sys­tem rather than the symp­toms, and adopt a grass­roots, par­ti­ci­pa­tory bot­tom-up ap­proach to find­ing al­ter­na­tive solu­tions, which might bear more plen­tiful fruit in the long run.”

Sounds like a good con­se­quen­tial­ist the­sis that fits right in in EA!

The con­clu­sion I draw from this is that many EAs are prob­a­bly wor­ried about CC but are afraid to talk about it pub­li­cly be­cause in CC you can get can­celed for talk­ing about CC, ex­cept of course to claim that it doesn’t ex­ist. (Maybe they won’t be can­celed right away, but it will make them tar­gets when can­cel cul­ture gets stronger in the fu­ture.) I be­lieve that the so­cial dy­nam­ics lead­ing to de­vel­op­ment of CC do not de­pend on the bal­ance of opinions fa­vor­ing CC, and only re­quire that those who are against it are afraid to speak up hon­estly and pub­li­cly (c.f. “prefer­ence falsifi­ca­tion”). That seems to already be the situ­a­tion to­day.

It seems pos­si­ble to me that many in­sti­tu­tions (e.g. EA orgs, aca­demic fields, big em­ploy­ers, all man­ner of ran­dom FB groups...) will be­come in­creas­ingly hos­tile to speech or (less likely) that they will col­lapse al­to­gether.

That does seem im­por­tant. I mostly don’t think about this is­sue be­cause it’s not my wheelhouse (and lots of peo­ple talk about it already). Over­all my at­ti­tude to­wards it is pretty similar to other hy­pothe­ses about in­sti­tu­tional de­cline. I think peo­ple at EA orgs have way more rea­sons to think about this is­sue than I do, but it may be difficult for them to do so pro­duc­tively.

If some­one con­vinced me to get more pes­simistic about “can­cel cul­ture” then I’d definitely think about it more. I’d be in­ter­ested in con­crete fore­casts if you have any. For ex­am­ple, what’s the prob­a­bil­ity that mak­ing pro-speech com­ments would it­self be a sig­nifi­cant poli­ti­cal li­a­bil­ity at some point in the fu­ture? Will there be a time when a com­ment like this one would be a prob­lem?

Look­ing be­yond the health of ex­ist­ing in­sti­tu­tions, it seems like most peo­ple I in­ter­act with are still quite liberal about speech, in­clud­ing a ma­jor­ity of peo­ple who I’d want to work with, so­cial­ize with, or take fund­ing from. So hope­fully the endgame boils down to free­dom of as­so­ci­a­tion. Some peo­ple will run a strat­egy like “Cen­sure those who don’t cen­sure oth­ers for not cen­sur­ing oth­ers for prob­le­matic speech” and take that to its ex­treme, but the rest of the world will get along fine with­out them and it’s not clear to me that the anti-speech minor­ity has any­thing to do other than ex­clude peo­ple they dis­like (e.g. it doesn’t look like they will win elec­tions).

in CC you can get can­celed for talk­ing about CC, ex­cept of course to claim that it doesn’t ex­ist. (Maybe they won’t be can­celed right away, but it will make them tar­gets when can­cel cul­ture gets stronger in the fu­ture.)

I don’t feel that way. I think that “ex­clude peo­ple who talk openly about the con­di­tions un­der which we ex­clude peo­ple” is a deeply per­ni­cious norm and I’m happy to keep blithely vi­o­lat­ing it. If a group ex­cludes me for do­ing so, then I think it’s a good sign that the time had come to jump ship any­way. (Similarly if there was pres­sure for me to en­force a norm I dis­agreed with strongly.)

I’m gen­er­ally sup­port­ive of pro-speech ar­gu­ments and efforts and I was glad to see the Harper’s let­ter. If this is even­tu­ally con­sid­ered cause for ex­clu­sion from some com­mu­ni­ties and in­sti­tu­tions then I think enough peo­ple will be on the pro-speech side that it will be fine for all of us.

I gen­er­ally try to state my mind if I be­lieve it’s im­por­tant, don’t talk about toxic top­ics that are unim­por­tant, and am open about the fact that there are plenty of top­ics I avoid. If even­tu­ally there are im­por­tant top­ics that I feel I can’t dis­cuss in pub­lic then my in­ten­tion is to dis­cuss them.

I would only in­tend to join an in­ter­net dis­cus­sion about “can­cel­la­tion” in par­tic­u­larly ex­treme cases (whether in terms of who is be­ing can­celed, se­vere ob­ject-level con­se­quences of the can­cel­la­tion, or the co­er­cive rather than plau­si­bly-free­dom-of-as­so­ci­a­tion na­ture of the can­cel­la­tion).

The ad­dress (in the link) is hum­bling and shows some­one mak­ing a pos­i­tive change for good rea­sons. He is clear and co­her­ent.

Good on him.

I’m ex­cited to hear that! Look­ing for­ward to see­ing the ar­ti­cle. I par­tic­u­larly had trou­ble dis­t­in­guish­ing be­tween three po­ten­tial crit­i­cisms you could be mak­ing:

1. It’s cor­rect to try do the most good, but peo­ple who call them­selves “EA’s” define “good” in­cor­rectly. For ex­am­ple, EA’s might eval­u­ate repa­ra­tions on the ba­sis of whether they elimi­nate poverty as op­posed to whether they are just.

2. It’s cor­rect to try to do the most good, but peo­ple who call them­selves “EA’s” are just em­piri­cally wrong about how to do this. For ex­am­ple, EA’s fo­cus too much on short-term benefits and dis­count long-term value.

3. It’s in­cor­rect to try to do the most good. (I’m not sure what the al­ter­na­tive you are propos­ing in your es­say is here.)

If you are able to elu­ci­date which of these crit­i­cisms, if any, you are mak­ing, I would find it helpful. (Michael Dick­ens writes some­thing similar above.)

Har­ris is a mar­mite figure—in my ex­pe­rience peo­ple love him or hate him.

It is good that he has done this.

News­wise, it seems to me it is more likely to im­pact the be­hav­ior of his listen­ers, who are likely to be well-dis­posed to him. This is a sig­nifi­cant but cur­rently low-pro­file an­nounce­ment. As will the courses be on his app.

I don’t think I’d go spread­ing this around more gen­er­ally, many don’t like Har­ris and for those who don’t like him, it could be easy to see EA as more of the same (cal­lous su­pe­rior pro­ges­sivism).

In the low prob­a­bil­ity (5%?) event that EA gains trac­tion in that space of the web (gen­er­ally called the In­tel­lec­tual Dark Web—don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules) I would urge cau­tion for EA speak­ers who might pul­led into po­laris­ing dis­cus­sion which would leave some groups feel­ing EA ideas are “not for them”.

Sam Har­ris takes Giv­ing What We Can pledge for him­self and for his med­i­ta­tion com­pany “Wak­ing Up”

Har­ris refer­ences MacAk­sill and Ord as hav­ing been cen­tral to his think­ing and talks about Effec­tive Altru­ism and exs­ten­tial risk. He pub­li­cly pledges 10% of his own in­come and 10% of the profit from Wak­ing Up. He also will cre­ate a se­ries of les­sons on his med­i­ta­tion and ed­u­ca­tion app around al­tru­ism and effec­tive­ness.

Har­ris has 1.4M twit­ter fol­low­ers and is a famed Hu­man­ist and New Athiest. The Wak­ing Up app has over 500k down­loads on an­droid, so I guess over 1 mil­lion over­all.

https://​​dy­namic.wak­ingup.com/​​course/​​D8D148

I like let­ting per­sonal thoughts be up or down­voted, so I’ve put them in the com­ments.

I agree. Just as the EA move­ment has been push­ing against the bias to­wards philan­thropy in rich coun­tries, so we should also try to re­sist the urge to pay at­ten­tion only to poli­ti­cal crises in rich coun­tries like the United States.

Good ques­tion. I did a quick google and came across Lisa Bero who seems to have done a huge amount of work on re­search in­tegrity. From this pop­u­lar ar­ti­cle, it sounds like cor­po­rate fund­ing is of­ten prob­le­matic for the re­search pro­cess.

The ar­ti­cle links to sev­eral sys­tem­atic re­views her group has done, and the ar­ti­cle ‘In­dus­try spon­sor­ship and re­search out­come’ does con­clude that cor­po­rate fund­ing leads to a bias in the pub­lished re­sults:

Authors’ con­clu­sions: Spon­sor­ship of drug and de­vice stud­ies by the man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pany leads to more fa­vor­able effi­cacy re­sults and con­clu­sions than spon­sor­ship by other sources. Our analy­ses sug­gest the ex­is­tence of an in­dus­try bias that can­not be ex­plained by stan­dard ‘Risk of bias’ as­sess­ments.

I just read the ab­stract this so I’m not sure if they tried to iden­tify if this was solely due to pub­li­ca­tion bias or if cor­po­rate-funded re­search also tended to have other is­sues (e.g. less rigor­ous ex­per­i­men­tal de­signs or other ques­tion­able re­search prac­tices).

Ah, from the pa­per:

Ad­dic­tion: I shall in­ject you with an ad­dic­tive drug. From now on, you will wake each morn­ing with an ex­tremely strong de­sire to have an­other in­jec­tion of this drug. Hav­ing this de­sire will be in it­self nei­ther pleas­ant nor painful, but if the de­sire is not fulfilled within an hour it will then be­come very painful. This is no cause for con­cern, since I shall give you am­ple sup­plies of this drug. Every morn­ing, you will be able at once to fulfil this de­sire. The in­jec­tion, and its af­ter‐effects, would also be nei­ther pleas­ant nor painful. You will spend the rest of your days as you do now.

A lo­cal de­sire the­ory, where only lo­cal de­sire counts is, in fact, ob­jec­tivist—it will claim that I am bet­ter off in Ad­dic­tion even if I stren­u­ously protest that it’s my life and I don’t think that I’m bet­ter off.

(Per­son­ally, though, I don’t think cre­at­ing a de­sire and satis­fy­ing it makes an in­di­vi­d­ual bet­ter off on the ba­sis of that de­sire, as­sum­ing a de­sire the­ory. I think an­tifrus­tra­tionism and prefer­ence-af­fect­ing views or mix­tures of them are far more plau­si­ble. More on this here.)

Is it plau­si­ble that he­do­nic ex­pe­rience or de­sires are a judge­ment about how well things are go­ing right now? If cer­tain welfare sub­jects are psy­cholog­i­cally dis­con­nected from their pasts and fu­tures or oth­er­wise un­able to judge them all to­gether, then we might think of each mo­ment of their life as a sep­a­rate welfare sub­ject, each with their own life satis­fac­tion, which is ex­actly how they feel at that mo­ment. This way, life satis­fac­tion re­duces to he­do­nism or prefer­ence satis­fac­tion for non­hu­man an­i­mals.

Is au­tomax­i­miza­tion not an ob­jec­tion to de­sire the­o­ries as well? Or should we ac­cept that we don’t get to de­cide all of our de­sires or how easy it is to satisfy them?

In the case of a Pas­cal’s mug­ging, when some­one is threat­en­ing you, you should con­sider that giv­ing in may en­courage this be­havi­our fur­ther, al­low­ing more threats and more threats fol­lowed through on, and the kind of per­son threat­en­ing you this way may use these re­sources for harm, any­way.

In the case of Pas­cal’s wa­ger, there are mul­ti­ple pos­si­ble deities, each of which might pun­ish or re­ward you or oth­ers (in­finitely) based on your be­havi­our. It may turn out to be the case that you should take your chances with one or mul­ti­ple of them, and that you should spend a lot of time and re­sources find­ing out which. This could end up be­ing a case of un­re­solv­able moral clue­less­ness, and that choos­ing any of the deities isn’t ro­bustly good, nor is choos­ing none of them isn’t ro­bustly bad, and you’ll never be able to get past this un­cer­tainty. Then, you may have mul­ti­ple per­mis­si­ble op­tions (ac­cord­ing to the max­i­mal­ity rule, say), but given a par­tic­u­lar choice (or non-choice), there could still be things that ap­pear to you to be ro­bustly bet­ter than other things, e.g. donat­ing to char­ity X in­stead of char­ity Y, or not tor­tur­ing kit­tens for fun in­stead of tor­tur­ing kit­tens for fun. This doesn’t mean any­thing goes.

the ma­trix of the Neef model is pretty cool.

I think $V=\infty$ is log­i­cally pos­si­ble when you ag­gre­gate over space and time, and I think we shouldn’t gen­er­ally as­sign prob­a­bil­ity 0 to any­thing that’s log­i­cally pos­si­ble (ex­cept where a mea­sure is con­tin­u­ous; I think this re­quire­ment had a name, but I for­get). Pas­cal’s wa­ger and Dyson’s wa­ger illus­trate this.

We have rea­son to be­lieve the uni­verse is in­finite in ex­tent, and there’s a chance that it’s in­finite tem­po­rally. You might claim that our light­cone is finite/​bounded and we can’t af­fect any­thing out­side of it (set­ting aside mul­ti­verses), but this is an em­piri­cal claim, so we should give it some chance of be­ing false. That we could af­fect an in­finite re­gion of space­time is also not a log­i­cal im­pos­si­bil­ity, so we shouldn’t ab­solutely rule it out.