The only scenario in which a single vote can determine the outcome is one where exactly one vote separates two governing coalitions. Since that has never happened, and in fact has never come remotely close to happening, it is almost always pointless to vote.
This is not true, see https://people.howstuffworks.com/can-single-vote-change-election-outcome.htm and https://www.npr.org/2017/12/19/572082933/a-single-vote-has-flipped-control-of-virginias-house-of-delegates
I’m not a fan of non-counterfactual donation matching, but your proposal is making things worse, not better. You are basically holding hostage your donation to try to get other people to do what you want.
On the other hand, I like the idea of a long whitelist of charities, because then it is giving other people power. But I don’t see any connection between that and your proposal; just say that if not all matching funds get distributed initially then they get distributed according to some distribution determined beforehand by the matching funder.
Trying to make donation matching counterfactual is manipulative behavior, in my opinion. People should be free to make donations to the charities that they think are best, rather than the ones that are the most donation-matched. If you want to convince people to donate to your favorite charity, just give an unconditional donation and tell other people that that’s what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
Why should we expect AI systems to develop bizarre and alien preferences when virtually all biological organisms have extremely normal preferences? (For instance, humans like to eat ice cream, but they don’t like to eat, as you mention, jet engine fuel.)
Isn’t this backwards? We call eating ice cream normal because humans like to do it, not the other way around. That isn’t evidence that AIs will have normal (i.e. similar to human) preferences.
I’m probably not competent to look at the details, but their paper sets off my BS detector by its reference to Godel’s incompleteness theorem and its notion of “non-algorithmic understanding”. These are both reminiscent of the Lucas-Penrose idea that consciousness requires uncomputability and that humans have some sort of magical ability to determine the truth-values of Godel sentences. I think the conventional view, sometimes known as the Church-Turing thesis, is that the universe is in fact computable.
Re God deciding to establish a system of morality: Presumably this amounts to God making a bunch of moral claims, and then us defining “morality” as “the system of moral claims made by God”. But I don’t see why this system should have any definitive relationship with what we ordinarily talk about when we talk about “morality”. After all, our usual talk of morality is intricately connected with how we plan what we are going to do—we hopefully plan to do moral things. Now maybe we also plan to follow God’s system of morality, either because we’ve decided to submit to his omnipotence or because we think his system of morality is a rather good one. But these are not necessary relations but rather practical or moral considerations. In other words, we follow God’s will because God is moral (or we don’t follow his will because he isn’t moral), rather than morality being defined by God’s will. This distinction is important to make in case we want to make sense of moral criticism of God for Old Testament atrocities or other possible moral failings of his, even if we believe in God.
So no, I don’t think that God’s existence would bear any relation on whether morality is objective.
Preventing abortion is more tractable than malaria prevention(which I would guess is likely true)
Huh, my guess would have been the opposite. To prevent an abortion, you have to actually convince someone to do something they didn’t want to do (or advocate for political change to force them to do it), whereas people already don’t want to die from malaria, they just need resources to help them do that. That said I really have no idea, you may be right.
Ah, the problem was I was viewing the post on GreaterWrong, and for some reason the button didn’t make the transition :/ Anyway, thanks for the link,
I don’t see a link to the survey?
2\uparrow^n 2 =4, for any n, though.
Maybe edit your post? I don’t know, it’s really up to you.
Cons: The store might not actually gather one less lobster than usual
This… seems like a pretty big deal, actually. The store still needs the same number of lobsters to serve to customers who order lobster to eat it, so… how exactly would they gather one less lobster than usual? What’s the actual plan, here?
It seems to me like this proposal is trying to optimize for “public relations” in the sense of Anna Salamon’s old post, even though it uses the term “reputation”. In Anna’s words:
If I am safeguarding my “honor” (or my “reputation”, “brand”, or “good name”), there are some fixed standards that I try to be known as adhering to. For example, in Game of Thrones, the Lannisters are safeguarding their “honor” by adhering to the principle “A Lannister always pays his debts.” They take pains to adhere to a certain standard, and to be known to adhere to that standard. Many examples are more complicated than this; a gentleman of 1800 who took up a duel to defend his “honor” was usually not defending his known adherence to a single simple principle a la the Lannisters. But it was still about his visible adherence to a fixed (though not explicit) societal standard.
I guess I just don’t see what societal standard we are supposed to be conforming ourselves to with this 2%/8% split. I don’t think there is any generally recognized obligation to give 2% to local charities, and certainly not to “warm fuzzy” charities (merely the fact that you’re phrasing it that way indicates that you are not referring to a concept that has broad agreement). Your description of how you are modelling your friends’ reactions to your charitable giving sounds more like the “weird and loopy” process that Anna talks about.
It’s always possible for a decent moral view to be self-effacing, because having true beliefs isn’t the most important thing in the world. If an evil demon said “Agree to moral brainwashing or I’ll torture everyone for eternity,” then you’d obviously better agree to the brainwashing.
What about the deontologist who says “I can’t agree to moral brainwashing because that would involve being complicit in an objective wrong”? I don’t see how this position reduces to or implies the belief that “having true beliefs [is] the most important thing in the world”.
Or by “decent moral view” did you mean “decent consequentialist moral view”?
A failure mode I see here is where philosophy education comes to be regarded as something like math education is now: something that everyone believes has no practical application, but we are forced to learn it anyway. Why does a farmer or engineer need to know the difference “between consequentialism and deontology”? If philosophy comes to be seen as rigor for the sake of pointless rigor, it will be trusted less.
-”In each case, I think EA emphasizes estimating the impact in terms of human outcomes like lives saved. Successful Supreme Court cases could be a useful intermediate outcome, but ultimately I’d want to know something like the impact of the average case on well-being, as well as the likelihood of cases going the other way in the absence of funding the Institute for Justice.”
But a Supreme Court case could have potentially infinite effects in the future, since it will be used as precedent for further cases etc. Is it really possible to model this? If it is not possible, then is it possible that IJ is the most effective charity, even though it cannot be analyzed under an EA framework?
From what I understand they cut off the extra digit(s) at birth, so you wouldn’t know unless you asked them.