Bob Jacobs

• Bob JacobsFeb 13, 2021, 7:35 PM

  1 point

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  on: Bob Ja­cobs’s Shortform

  Beauty vs Happiness Thought Experiment

  
  Say a genie were to give you the choice between:

  1) Creating a stunningly beautiful world that is uninhabited and won’t influence sentient beings in any way or 2) Not creating it.

  In addition, both the genie’s and your memories of this event are immediately erased once you make the choice, so no one knows about this world and you cannot derive happiness from the memory.

  Would you choose option one or two?
  

  I would choose option one, because I prefer a more beautiful universe to an uglier one (even if no one experiences it). This forms an argument against classic utilitarianism.

  Classic Utilitarianism says that I’m wrong. The choice doesn’t create any happiness, only beauty. This means that, according to classic utilitarianism, I should have no preferences between the two options.
  

  There are several moral theories that do allow you to prefer option one. One of which is preference utilitarianism which states that it’s okay to have preferences that don’t bottom out in happiness. For this reason, I find preference utilitarianism more persuasive than classic utilitarianism.

  
  A possible counterargument would be that the new world isn’t really beautiful since no one experiences it. Here we have a disagreement over whether beauty needs to be experienced to even exist.

  
  A third way of looking at this thought experiment would be through the lens of value uncertainty. Through this lens, it does make sense to pick option one. Even if you have a thousand times more credence in the theory that happiness is the arbiter of value, the fact that no happiness is created either way leaves the door open for your tiny credence that beauty might be the arbiter of value. Value uncertainty suggests that you take the first option, just in case.

Bob Ja­cobs’s Quick takes

• Bob JacobsFeb 3, 2021, 12:47 PM

  2 points

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  on: Creat­ing A Kick­starter for Co­or­di­nated Action

  Hey Lumpy, good post and I support the project.

  You might be interested to know that these things were already discussed on this platform. I made a post about Making a crowdaction website and gabcoh also wrote a post on this topic. On Less Wrong there is even a whole sequence about this idea.
  I don’t have much programming skills, but I might be able to help in other ways (graphic design, mechanism design). I can also bring you in contact with other people that are working on this project like: Ron (co-creator of collaction), DonyChristie (a programmer who already build a prototype website) and gabcoh.

• Bob JacobsJan 25, 2021, 3:31 PM

  3 points

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  on: 80,000 Hours: Where’s the best place to vol­un­teer?

  Hey Aaron, great post.
  Maybe this isn’t the best place to ask this, but should posts like these be tagged with the 80,000 Hours tag? We’ve discussed the tagging system in my recent post, but I’m still not sure when certain tags should be used. When I look at the 80,000 hours tag, almost all posts are from the 80,000 hours account. But the two bottom ones aren’t. So should this tag to be used exclusively by the 80,000 hours account, or should it be used when people talk about 80,000 hours in general? And is mentioning them/​their research in the post enough, or should the post be about 80,000 hours before you can tag it?

  Of course, I’m just using 80,000 hours as an example. What I’m really asking is if we should create a tag guideline. Something like the New Tag Guidelines from Less Wrong. (I would be willing to write it if you want)

  Also, for a totally unrelated comment. Congratulations on your satisfying karma-score milestone:

  

• Bob JacobsJan 24, 2021, 9:53 PM

  7 points

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  in reply to: Aaron Gertler 🔸’s comment on: Re­work­ing the Tag­ging System

  Oh wow, that’s fantastic! I now feel like the tone of this post seems way too harsh. Seeing that most of my points are already being addressed by the mod-team makes me think I should have reached out to you before posting this. I’ll make it up to you by winning that upcoming tagging event :)
  Thank you mod-team, for your continuing work on this amazing site!

Re­work­ing the Tag­ging System

• Bob JacobsDec 25, 2020, 9:36 PM

  6 points

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  on: Health and hap­piness re­search top­ics—Part 2: The HALY+: Im­prov­ing prefer­ence-based health metrics

  Hey Derek, once again a great post!
  You might not know this, but the EA forum allows you to store a sequence of posts into an ordered sequence. If you go to https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​sequences you can see all the other sequences. When you click on the button on the right:

  

  you can create your own sequence. Once you click on it you will be asked to write a short introduction and add a banner and card image. I haven’t written any sequences, but as you can see I have designed most of them. I’m sure you can write a good introduction, but if you want a snazzy card image and banner, I’ve made some for you:

  

  

  Here’s how it will look among the other sequence cards:

  

  Hope you like them.

• Bob JacobsDec 16, 2020, 9:17 PM

  1 point

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  on: Ab­dul Latif Jameel Poverty Ac­tion Lab

  I don’t think we need a separate tag for this. Especially since there aren’t any posts about J-PAL.

• Bob JacobsOct 21, 2020, 9:51 AM

  3 points

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  in reply to: JP Addison🔸’s comment on: Mak­ing More Sequences

  Thank you! The cropping in photoshop only takes five minutes at most, so it isn’t a big deal. All of the images are made with creative commons images, except for “moral anti-realism” (which I took from Lukas’ own page, so I assume he has the rights) and “rwas library” which I found on a bunch of websites with no indication of it’s status (if it does get copyrightstriked I’ll photoshop a similar looking image).

  Btw, could you add an “EA Forum (meta)” tag to this post? I can’t add tags at the moment.

• Bob JacobsOct 20, 2020, 8:54 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: Mak­ing More Sequences

  I love that sequence, but it’s specifically about motivation and how to cultivate it. An “Introduction to EA” sequences would ideally focus on introducing some of the key concepts and organizations. Something like Doing Good Better, but with a little more focus on the movement.

Mak­ing More Sequences

• Bob JacobsOct 10, 2020, 1:59 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Timeline Utilitarianism

  I think so too, because you can’t really talk about ethics without a timeframe. I wasn’t trying to argue that people don’t use timeframes, but rather that people automatically use total timeline utilitarianism without realizing that other options are even possible. This was what I was trying to get at by saying:

  Usually when people talk about different types of utilitarianism they automatically presuppose “total timeline utilitarianism”. In fact, the current debate between total and average utilitarianism is actually a debate between “total total utilitarianism” and “total average utilitarianism”.

• Bob JacobsOct 10, 2020, 7:48 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Ramiro’s comment on: Timeline Utilitarianism

  Please, let me know about any source discussing this.

  If with “this” you mean timeline utilitarianism, then there isn’t one unfortunately (I haven’t published this idea anywhere else yet). Once I’ve finished university I hope some EA institution will hire me to do research into descriptive population ethics. So hopefully I can provide you with some data on our intuitions about timelines in a couple years.

  I suspect that people more concerned with the quality of life will tend to favor average timeline utilitarianism, and all the people in this community that are so focused on x-risk and life-extension might be a minority with their stronger preference for the quantity of life (anti-deathism is the natural consequence of being a strong total timeline utilitarian).
  If you want to read something similar to this then you could always check out the wider literature surrounding population ethics in general.

• Bob JacobsOct 9, 2020, 9:22 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Timeline Utilitarianism

  Yes, (total) total utilitarianism is both across time and space, but you can aggregate across time and space in many different ways. E.g median total utilitarianism is also both across time and space, but it aggregates very differently.

Timeline Utilitarianism

Sor­ti­tion Model of Mo­ral Uncertainty

• Bob JacobsSep 28, 2020, 2:01 PM

  30 points

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  on: Sugges­tions for On­line EA Dis­cus­sion Norms

  I made two visual guides that could be used to improve online discussions. These could be dropped into any conversation to (hopefully) make the discussion more productive.

  The first is an update on Grahams hierarchy of disagreement

  

  
  

  I improved the lay-out of the old image and added a top layer for steelmanning. You can find my reasoning here and a link to the pdf-file of the image here.

  The second is a hierarchy of evidence:

  

  I added a bottom layer for personal opinion. You can find the full image and pdf-file here.

  Lastly I wanted to share the Toulmin method of argumentation, which is an excellent guide for a general pragmatic approach to arguments

  

  What links here?

  • How to use the Forum by Julia_Wise🔸 (Sep 5, 2018, 5:22 PM; 99 points)
  • Guide to norms on the Forum by Lizka (Apr 28, 2022, 1:28 PM; 59 points)
  • EA Images by Bob Jacobs (Nov 11, 2022, 3:56 PM; 59 points)
  • EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for Septem­ber 2020 by Aaron Gertler 🔸 (Nov 5, 2020, 6:23 AM; 17 points)

• Bob JacobsSep 10, 2020, 10:55 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Marcel D’s comment on: A Toy Model of Hingeyness

  The reason I find the definition not very useful is because it can be interpreted in so many different ways. The aim of this post was to show the four main ways you could interpreted it. When I read the definition my first interpretation was “hinge broadness”, while I suspect your interpretation was “hinge reduction”. I’m not saying that hinge broadness is the ‘correct’ definition of hingeyness, because there is no ‘correct’ definition of hingeyness until a community of language users has made it a convention. There is no convention yet so I’m purposefully splitting the concept into more quantifiable chunks in the hope that we can avoid the confusion that comes from multiple people using the same terms for different concepts.
  Since I failed to convey this I will slightly edit this post to clear it up for the next confused reader. I added one sentence, and tweaked another sentence and a subtitle. The old version of the post can be found on LessWrong.

• Bob JacobsSep 9, 2020, 10:42 AM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Megan Kinniment’s comment on: A Toy Model of Hingeyness

  That’s a very useful link, thank you.

  Also mod-team, this comment isn’t visible underneath my post in any of my browsers. Is there any way to fix that?

  EDIT: Thank you mod-team!

  EDIT 2: It just occurred to me that some people may find the shift in range also important for hingeyness. I’ll illustrate what I mean with a new image:

  (I can’t post images in comments so here is a link to the image I will use to illustrate this point)

  Here the “range of possible utility in endings” tick 1 has (the first 10) is [0-10] and the “range of possible utility in endings” the first 0 has (tick 2) is [0-10] which is the same. Of course the probability has changed (getting an ending of 1 utility is not even an option anymore), but the minimum and maximum stay the same.

  But we don’t care about just the endings, we care about the rest of the journey too. The width of the “range of the total amount of utility you could potentially experience over all branches (not just the endings)” can shrink or stay the same. But the range itself can shift. For example the lowest possible utility tick 1 can experience is 10->0->0 = 10 utility and the highest possible utility that it can experience is 10->0->10 = 20 utility. The difference between the lowest and highest is 10 utility. The lowest total utility that the 0 on tick 2 can experience is 0->0 = 0 utility and the highest is 0->10 = 10 utility, which is once again a difference of 10 utility.

  The probability has changed: Ending with a weird number like 19 is impossible for the ‘0 on tick 2’. The probability for a good ending has also become much more favorable (50% chance to end with a 10 instead of 25% it was before). Probability is important for the precipiceness.

  But while the width of the range stayed the same, the range itself has shifted downwards from [10-20] to [0-10]. Maybe this also an important factor in what some people call hingeyness? Maybe call that ‘hinge shift’?

  This will effect the probability that you end up in certain futures and not others. I used the word precipiceness in my post to refer to high-risk high-reward probability distributions. Maybe it’s also important to have a word for a time in which the probability that we will generate low amounts of utility in the future is increasing. We call this “increase in x-risk” now because going extinct is most of the time a good way to ensure you will generate low amounts of utility. But as I showed in my post, you can have an awesome extinction and a horrible long existence. Maybe I shouldn’t be trying to attach words to all the different variants of probability distributions and just draw them instead.

  To recap “the range of total amount of utility you can potentially generate” aka “hinge broadness” can:

  1) Shrink by a certain amount (aka hinge reduction) this can be because the most amount of utility you can potentially generate is decreasing (I’ll call this “top-reduction”) or because the least amount of utility you can potentially generate is increasing (I’ll call this “bottom-reduction”). Top-reduction is bad, bottom-reduction is good.

  2) Shift upward or downward in utility by a certain amount (aka hinge shift) Upward shift is good, downward shift is bad.

A Toy Model of Hingeyness