Researcher at the Center on Long-Term Risk. All opinions my own.
Anthony DiGiovanni
Karma: 1,366
This is linked to my discussion with Jim about determinate credences (since I didn’t initially understand this concept well, ChatGPT gave me a useful explanation).
FYI, I don’t think ChatGPT’s answer here is accurate. I’d recommend this post if you’re interested in (in)determinate credences.
Should you go with your best guess?: Against precise Bayesianism and related views
To be clear, “preferential gap” in the linked article just means incomplete preferences. The property in question is insensitivity to mild sweetening.
If one was exactly indifferent between 2 outcomes, I believe any improvement/worsening of one of them must make one prefer one of the outcomes over the other
But that’s exactly the point — incompleteness is not equivalent to indifference, because when you have an incomplete preference between 2 outcomes it’s not the case that a mild improvement/worsening makes you have a strict preference. I don’t understand what you think doesn’t “make sense in principle” about insensitivity to mild sweetening.
I fully endorse expectational total hedonistic utilitarianism (ETHU) in principle
As in you’re 100% certain, and wouldn’t put weight on other considerations even as a tiebreaker? That seems extreme. (If, say, you became convinced all your options were incomparable from an ETHU perspective because of cluelessness, you would presumably still all-things-considered-prefer not to do something that injures yourself for no reason.)
Thanks! I’ll just respond re: completeness for now.
When we ask “why should we maximize EV,” we’re interested in the reasons for our choices. Recognizing that I’m forced by reality to either donate or not-donate doesn’t help me answer whether it’s rational to strictly prefer donating, strictly prefer not-donating, be precisely indifferent, or none of the above.
Incomplete preferences have at least one qualitatively different property from complete ones, described here, and reality doesn’t force you to violate this property.
Not that you’re claiming this directly, but just to flag, because in my experience people often conflate these things: Even if in some sense your all-things-considered preferences need to be complete, this doesn’t mean your preferences w.r.t. your first-order axiology need to be complete. For example, take the donation case. You might be very sympathetic to a total utilitarian axiology, but when deciding whether to donate, your evaluation of the total utilitarian betterness-under-uncertainty of one option vs. another doesn’t need to be complete. You might, say, just rule out options that are stochastically dominated w.r.t. total utility, and then decide among the remaining options based on non-consequentialist considerations. (More on this idea here.)
Why do you consider completeness self-evident? (Or continuity, although I’m more sympathetic to that one.)
Also, it’s important not to conflate “given these axioms, your preferences can be represented as maximizing expected utility w.r.t. some utility function” with “given these axioms [and a precise probability distribution representing your beliefs], you ought to make decisions by maximizing expected value, where ‘value’ is given by the axiology you actually endorse.” I’d recommend this paper on the topic (especially Sec. 4), and Sec. 2.2 here.
I mean, it seems to me like a striking “throw a ball in the air and have it land and balance perfectly on a needle” kind of coincidence to end at exactly — or indistinguishably close to — 50⁄50 (or at any other position of complete agnosticism, e.g. even if one rejects precise credences).
I don’t see how this critique applies to imprecise credences. Imprecise credences by definition don’t say “exactly 50⁄50.”
Up until the last paragraph, I very much found myself nodding along with this. It’s a nice summary of the kinds of reasons I’m puzzled by the theory of change of most digital sentience advocacy.
But in your conclusion, I worry there’s a bit of conflation between 1) pausing creation of artificial minds, full stop, and 2) pausing creation of more advanced AI systems. My understanding is that Pause AI is only realistically aiming for (2) — is that right? I’m happy to grant for the sake of argument that it’s feasible to get labs and governments to coordinate on not advancing the AI frontier. It seems much, much harder to get coordination on reducing the rate of production of artificial minds. For all we know, if weaker AIs suffer to a nontrivial degree, the pause could backfire because people would just use many more instances of these AIs to do the same tasks they would’ve otherwise done with a larger model. (An artificial sentience “small animal replacement problem”?)
I can accept the idea of X as an agent making decisions, and ask what those decisions are and what drives them, without implicitly accepting the idea that X has beliefs. Then “X has beliefs” is kind of a useful model for predicting their behaviour in the decision situations.
I think this is answering a different question, though. When talking about rationality and cause prioritization, what we want to know is what we ought to do, not how to describe our patterns of behavior after the fact. And when asking what we ought to do under uncertainty, I don’t see how we escape the question of what beliefs we’re justified in. E.g. betting on short AI timelines by opting out of your pension is only rational insofar as it’s rational to (read: you have good reasons to) believe in short timelines.
from my perspective the question of whether credences are ultimately indeterminate is … not so interesting? It’s enough that in practice a lot of credences will be indeterminate, and that in many cases it may be useful to invest time thinking to shrink our uncertainty, but in many other cases it won’t be
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. My substantive claim is that in some cases, our credences about features of the far future might be sufficiently indeterminate that overall we won’t be able to determinately say “X is net-good for the far future in expectation.” If you agree with that, that seems to have serious implications that the EA community isn’t pricing in yet. If you don’t agree with that, I’m not sure if it’s because of (1) thorny empirical disagreements over the details of what our credences should be, or (2) something more fundamental about epistemology (which is the level at which I thought we were having this discussion, so far). I think getting into (1) in this thread would be a bit of a rabbit hole (which is better left to some forthcoming posts I’m coauthoring), though I’d be happy to give some quick intuition pumps. Greaves here (the “Suppose that’s my personal uber-analysis...” paragraph) is a pretty good starting point.
I’ll just reply (for now) to a couple of parts
No worries! Relatedly, I’m hoping to get out a post explaining (part of) the case for indeterminacy in the not-too-distant future, so to some extent I’ll punt to that for more details.
without having such an account it’s sort of hard to assess how much of our caring for non-hedonist goods is grounded in themselves, vs in some sense being debunked by the explanation that they are instrumentally good to care about on hedonist grounds
Cool, that makes sense. I’m all for debunking explanations in principle. Extremely briefly, here’s why I think there’s something qualitative that determinate credences fail to capture: If evidence, trustworthy intuitions, and appealing norms like the principle of indifference or Occam’s razor don’t uniquely pin down an answer to “how likely should I consider outcome X?”, then I think I shouldn’t pin down an answer. Instead I should suspend judgment, and say that there aren’t enough constraints to give an answer that isn’t arbitrary. (This runs deeper than “wait to learn / think more”! Because I find suspending judgment appropriate even in cases where my uncertainty is resilient. Contra Greg Lewis here.)
Is it some analogue of betting odds? Or what?
No, I see credences as representing the degree to which I anticipate some (hypothetical) experiences, or the weight I put on a hypothesis / how reasonable I find it. IMO the betting odds framing gets things backwards. Bets are decisions, which are made rational by whether the beliefs they’re justified by are rational. I’m not sure what would justify the betting odds otherwise.
how you’d be inclined to think about indeterminate credences in an example like the digits of pi case
Ah, I should have made clear, I wouldn’t say indeterminate credences are necessary in the pi case, as written. Because I think it’s plausible I should apply the principle of indifference here: I know nothing about digits of pi beyond the first 10, except that pi is irrational and I know irrational numbers’ digits are wacky. I have no particular reason to think one digit is more or less likely than another, so, since there’s a unique way of splitting my credence impartially across the possibilities, I end up with 50:50.[1]
Instead, here’s a really contrived variant of the pi case I had too much fun writing, analogous to a situation of complex cluelessness, where I’d think indeterminate credences are appropriate:
Suppose that Sally historically has an uncanny ability to guess the parity of digits of (conjectured-to-be) normal numbers with an accuracy of 70%. Somehow, it’s verifiable that she’s not cheating. No one quite knows how her guesses are so good.
Her accuracy varies with how happy she is at the time, though. She has an accuracy of ~95% when really ecstatic, ~50% when neutral, and only ~10% when really sad. Also, she’s never guessed parities of Nth digits for any N < 1 million.
Now, Sally also hasn’t seen the digits of pi beyond the first 10, and she guesses the 20th is odd. I don’t know how happy she is at the time, though I know she’s both gotten a well-earned promotion at her job and had an important flight canceled.
What should my credence in “the 20th digit is odd” be? Seems like there are various considerations floating around:
The principle of indifference seems like a fair baseline.
But there’s also Sally’s really impressive average track record on N ≥ 1 million.
But also I know nothing about what mechanism drives her intuition, so it’s pretty unclear if her intuition generalizes to such a small N.
And even setting that aside, since I don’t know how happy she is, should I just go with the base rate of 70%? Or should I apply the principle of indifference to the “happiness level” parameter, and assume she’s neutral (so 50%)?
But presumably the evidence about the promotion and canceled flight tell me something about her mood. I guess slightly less than neutral overall (but I have little clue how she personally would react to these two things)? How much less?
I really don’t know a privileged way to weigh all this up, especially since I’ve never thought about how much to defer to a digit-guessing magician before. It seems pretty defensible to have a range of credences between, say, 40% and 75%. These endpoints themselves are kinda arbitrary, but at least seem considerably less arbitrary than pinning down to one number.
I could try modeling all this and computing explicit priors and likelihood ratios, but it seems extremely doubtful there’s gonna be one privileged model and distribution over its parameters.
(I think forming beliefs about the long-term future is analogous in many ways to the above.)
Not sure how much that answers your question? Basically I ask myself what constraints the considerations ought to put on my degree of belief, and try not to needlessly get more precise than those constraints warrant.
- ^
I don’t think this is clearly the appropriate response. I think it’s kinda defensible to say, “This doesn’t seem like qualitatively the same kind of epistemic situation as guessing a coin flip. I have at least a rough mechanistic picture of how coin flips work physically, which seems symmetric in a way that warrants a determinate prediction of 50:50. But with digits of pi, there’s not so much a ‘symmetry’ as an absence of a determinate asymmetry.” But I don’t think you need to die on that hill to think indeterminacy is warranted in realistic cause prio situations.
Instead I’m saying that in many decision-situations people find themselves in, although they could (somewhat) narrow their credence range by investing more thought, in practice the returns from doing that thinking aren’t enough to justify it, so they shouldn’t do the thinking.
(I don’t think this is particularly important, you can feel free to prioritize my other comment.) Right, sorry, I understood that part. I was asking about an implication of this view. Suppose you have an intervention whose sign varies over the range of your indeterminate credences. Per the standard decision theory for indeterminate credences, then, you currently don’t have a reason to do the intervention — it’s not determinately better than inaction. (I’ll say more about this below, re: your digits of pi example.) So if by “the returns from doing that thinking aren’t enough to justify it” you mean you should just do the intervention in such a case, that doesn’t make sense to me.
Thanks for explaining!
I feel confusion about “where does the range come from? what’s it supposed to represent?”
Honestly this echoes some of my unease about precise credences in the first place!
Indeed. :) If “where do these numbers come from?” is your objection, this is a problem for determinate credences too. We could get into the positive motivations for having indeterminate credences, if you’d like, but I’m confused as to why your questions are an indictment of indeterminacy in particular.
Some less pithy answers to your question:
They might come from the same sort of process people go through when generating determinate credences — i.e. thinking through various considerations and trying to quantify them. But, at the step where you find yourself thinking, “Hm, it could be 0.2, but it could also be 0.3 I guess, idk…”, you don’t force yourself to pick just one number.
More formally, interval-valued credences fall out of Bradley’s (2017, sec 11.5.2) representation theorem. Even if your beliefs are just comparative judgments like “is A more/less/equally/[none-of-the-above] likely than B?” — which are realistic for bounded agents like us — if they satisfy all the usual axioms of probabilism except for completeness,[1] they have the structure of a set of probability distributions.
I don’t see probabilities as magic absolutes, rather than a tool
I’m confused about this “tool” framing, because it seems that in order to evaluate some numerical representation of your epistemic state as “helpful,” you still need to make reference to your beliefs per se. There’s no belief-independent stance from which you can evaluate beliefs as useful (see this post).[2]
The epistemic question here is whether your beliefs per se should have the structure of (in)determinacy, e.g., do you think you should always be able to say “intervention XYZ is net-good, net-bad, or net-neutral for the long-term future”. That’s what I’m talking about when talking about “rational obligation” to have (in)determinate credences in some situation. It’s independent of the kind of mere practical limitations on the precision of numbers in our heads you’re talking about.
Analogy: Your view here is like that of a hedonist saying, “Oh yeah, if I tried always directly maximizing my own pleasure, I’d feel worse. So pursuing non-pleasure things is sometimes helpful for bounded agents, by a hedonist axiology. But sometimes it actually is better to just maximize pleasure.” Whereas I’m the non-hedonist saying, “Okay but I’m endorsing the non-pleasure stuff as intrinsically valuable, and I’m not sure you’ve explained why intrinsically valuing non-pleasure stuff is confused.” (The hedonism thing is just illustrative, to be clear. I don’t think epistemology is totally analogous to axiology.)
for the normal vNM kind of reasons
The VNM theorem only tells you you’re representable as a precise EV maximizer if your preferences satisfy completeness. But completeness is exactly what defenders of indeterminate beliefs call into question. Rationality doesn’t seem to demand completeness — you can avoid money pumps / Dutch books with incomplete preferences.
For a toy example, suppose that I could take action X, which will lose me $1 if the 20th digit of Pi is odd, and gain me $2 if the 20th digit of Pi is even. Without doing any calculations or looking it up, my range of credences is [0,1] -- if I think about it long enough (at least with computational aids), I’ll resolve it to 0 or 1. But right now I can still make guesses about my expectation of where I’d end up
I think this fights the hypothetical. If you “make guesses about your expectation of where you’d end up,” you’re computing a determinate credence and plugging that into your EV calculation. If you truly have indeterminate credences, EV maximization is undefined.
I don’t think I’d agree with that.
I’d like to understand why, then. As I said, if indeterminate beliefs are on the table, it seems like the straightforward response to unknown unknowns is to say, “By nature, my access to these considerations is murky, so why should I think this particular determinate ‘simplicity prior’ is privileged as a good model?”
Makes sense, thanks. I think I just want to highlight that hypotheses that are “tightly tied to empirical evidence” still do sneak in some non-empirical premises, mostly about how to do induction, though of course some such premises can be more controversial than others. (Related post.)
If what you mean to say is something like the following, I’m sympathetic: Conscious Subsystems is more speculative in the sense that it violates Occam’s razor — we’re positing lots of extra minds we can never verify. Whereas, a principle like “if two animals’ pain-related brain regions have the same neuron-firing rate, we should expect the intensity of their suffering to be the same all else equal” seems privileged by Occam, even if we can’t empirically verify this either.
((ETA: Feel free to ignore if the above misses your point, I don’t mean to put words in your mouth!) I might quibble about how we cash out “all else equal.” In practice, I’d think we don’t have nearly fine-grained enough neurobiological evidence to apply that principle. So I’d worry that many of our inferences about comparisons of suffering intensity hinge on somewhat arbitrary judgment calls.)
I’ve also never been satisfied with any account I’ve seen of indeterminate/imprecise credences
I’d be keen to hear more why you’re unsatisfied with these accounts.
But this isn’t a fundamental indeterminacy — rather, it’s a view that it’s often not worth expending the cognition to make them more precise
Just to be clear, are you saying: “It’s a view that, for all/most indeterminate credences we might have, our prioritization decisions (e.g. whether intervention X is net-good or net-bad) aren’t sensitive to variation within the ranges specified by these credences”?
At any moment, we have credence (itself kind of imprecise absent further thought) about where our probabilities will end up with further thought
If your estimate of your ideal-precise-credence-in-the-limit is itself indeterminate, that seems like a big deal — you have no particular reason to adopt a determinate credence then, seems to me. (Maybe by “kind of” you mean to allow for a degree of imprecision that isn’t decision-relevant, per my question above?)
What’s the point of tracking all these imprecise credences rather than just single precise best-guesses?
Because if the sign of intervention X for the long-term varies across your range of credences, that means you don’t have a reason to do X on total-EV grounds. This seems hugely decision-relevant to me, if we have other decision procedures under cluelessness available to us other than committing to a precise best guess, as I think we do (see this comment).
ETA: I’m also curious whether, if you agreed that we aren’t rationally obligated to assign determinate credences in many cases, you’d agree that your arguments about unknown unknowns here wouldn’t work. (Because there’s no particular reason to commit to one “simplicity prior,” say. And the net direction of our biases on our knowledge-sampling processes could be indeterminate.)
Thanks for explaining!
we don’t think anyone really believes it for empirical reasons
Arguably every view on consciousness hinges on (controversial) non-empirical premises, right? You can tell me every third-person fact there is to know about the neurobiology, behavior, etc. of various species, and it’s still an open question how to compare the subjective severity of animal A’s experience X to animal B’s experience Y. So it’s not clear to me what makes the non-empirical premises (other than hedonism and unitarianism) behind the welfare ranges significantly less speculative than Conscious Subsystems. (To be clear, I don’t see much reason yet to be confident in Conscious Subsystems myself. My worry is that I don’t have much reason to be confident in the other possible non-empirical premises either.)
Sorry if this is addressed elsewhere in the post/sequence!
So, given our methodological commitment to letting the empirical evidence drive the results, we decided not to include this hypothesis in our calculations
I’m not sure I understand this reasoning. If our interpretation of the empirical evidence depends on whether we accept different philosophical hypotheses, it seems like the results should reflect our uncertainty over those hypotheses. What would it mean for claims about weights on potential conscious experiences to be driven purely by empirical evidence, if questions about consciousness are inherently philosophical?
Not all negative utilitarians deny that there exists such a thing as pleasure, they generally deny that it matters as much as pain. The view that there are no good states is crazy
Denying that pleasure is a “good state” is not the same as denying that pleasure exists.
If I understand correctly, you’re arguing that we either need to:
Put precise estimates on the consequences of what we do for net welfare across the cosmos, and maximize EV w.r.t. these estimates, or
Go with our gut … which is just implicitly putting precise estimates on the consequences of what we do for net welfare across the cosmos, and maximizing EV w.r.t. these estimates.
I think this is a false dichotomy,[1] even for those who are very confident in impartial consequentialism and risk-neutrality (as I am!). If (as suggested by titotal’s comment) you worry that precise estimates of net welfare conditional on different actions are themselves vibes-based, you have option 3: Suspend judgment on the consequences of what we do for net welfare across the cosmos, and instead make decisions for reasons other than “my [explicit or implicit] estimate of the effects of my action on net welfare says to do X.” (Coherence theorems don’t rule this out.)
What might those other reasons be? A big one is moral uncertainty: If you truly think impartial consequentialism doesn’t give you compelling reasons either way, because our estimates of net welfare are hopelessly arbitrary, it seems better to follow the verdicts of other moral views you put some weight on. Another alternative is to reflect more on what your reasons for action are exactly, if not “maximize EV w.r.t. vibes-based estimates.” You can ask yourself, what does it mean to make the world a better place impartially, under deep uncertainty? If you’ve only looked at altruistic prioritization from the perspective of options 1 or 2, and didn’t realize 3 was on the table, I find it pretty plausible that (as a kind of bedrock meta-normative principle) you ought to clarify the implications of option 3. Maybe you can find non-vibes-based decision procedures for impartial consequentialists. ETA: Ch. 5 of Bradley (2012) is an example of this kind of research, not to say I necessarily endorse his conclusions.
(Just to be clear, I totally agree with your claim that we shouldn’t dismiss shrimp welfare — I don’t think we’re clueless about that, though the tradeoffs with other animal causes might well be difficult.)
[Question] Neartermist crucial considerations?
(This post was coauthored by Jesse Clifton — crossposting from LW doesn’t seem to show this, unfortunately.)
I agree that the particular guesses we make about aliens will be very speculative/arbitrary. But “we shouldn’t take the action recommended by our precise ‘best guess’ about XYZ” does not imply “we can set the expected contribution of XYZ to the value of our interventions to 0″. I think if you buy cluelessness — in particular, the indeterminate beliefs framing on cluelessness — the lesson you should take from Maxime’s post is that we simply aren’t justified in saying any intervention with effects on x-risk is net-positive or net-negative (w.r.t. total welfare of sentient beings).