This is very bad news for longtermism if correct, since it suggests that value in the far future gained by preventing extinction now is much lower than it would otherwise be.
David Mathersđ¸
Karma: 5,477
If you think there might well be forms of naturalism that are true but trivial, is your credence in anti-realism really well over >99%?
This forum probably isnât the place for really getting into the weeds of this, but Iâm also a bit worried about accounts of triviality that conflate a priority or even analyticity and triviality: Maths is not trivial in any sense of âtrivialâ on which âtrivialâ means ânot worth bothering withâ. Maybe you can get out of this by saying maths isnât analytic and itâs only being analytic that trivializes things, but I donât think it is particulary obvious that there is a sense making concept of analyticity that doesnât apply to maths. Apparently Neo-Fregeans think that lots of maths is analytic, and as far as I know that is a respected option in the philosophy of math: https://ââplato.stanford.edu/ââentries/ââlogicism/ââ#NeoFre
I also wonder about exactly what is being claimed to be trivial: individual identifications of moral properties with naturalistic properties, if they are explicitly claimed to be analytic? Or the claim that moral naturalism is true and there are some analytic truths of this sort? Or both?
Also, do you think semantic claims in general are trivial?
Finally, do you think the naturalists whose claims you consider âtrivialâ mostly agree with you that their views have the features that you think make for triviality but disagree that having those features means their views are of no interest. Or do most of them think their claims lack the features you think make for triviality? Or do you think most of them just havenât thought about it/âdonât have a good-faith substantive response?
So your claim is that naturalists are just stipulating a particular meaning of their own for moral terms? Can you say why you think this? Donât some naturalists just defend the idea that moral properties could be identical with complex sociological properties without even saying *which* properties? How could those naturalists be engaging in stipulative definition, even accidentally?
Iâd also say that this only bears on the truth/âfalsity of naturalism fairly indirectly. Thereâs no particular connection between whether naturalism is actually true and whether some group of naturalist thinkers happen to have stipulatively defined a moral term, although I guess if most defenses of naturalism did this, that would be evidence that naturalism couldnât be defended in other ways, which is evidence against itâs truth.
Is being trivial and of low interest evidence that naturalist forms of realism are *false*? âRed things are redâ is boring and trivial, but my credence in it is way above 0.99.
Yeah, I think I recall David Thorstad complaining that Ordâs estimate was far too high also.
Be careful not to conflate âexistential riskâ in the special Bostrom-dervied definition that I think Ord, and probably Will as well, are using with âextinction riskâ though. X-risk from climate *can* be far higher than extinction risk, because regressing to a pre-industrial state and then not succeeding in reindustrialising (perhaps because easily accessible coal has been used up), counts as an existential risk, even though it doesnât involve literal extinction. (Though from memory, I think Ord is quite dismissive of the possibility that there wonât be enough accessible coal to reindustrialise, but I think Will is a bit more concerned about this?)
Is there actually an official IPCC position on how likely degrowth from climate impacts is? I had a vague sense that they were projecting a higher world gdp in 2100 than now, but when I tried to find evidence of this for 15 minutes or so, I couldnât actually find any. (Iâm aware that even if that is the official IPCC best-guess position that does not necessarily mean that climate experts are less worried about X-risk from climate than AI experts are about X-risk from AI.)
What did the IPCC people say exactly?
The global warming thing is interesting to me because my sense is that Ord and MacAskill think of themselves as relying on expert consensus and published literature, rather than as having somehow outsmarted it. So why the difference between them and the author in what it shows?
Interesting, the paper is older than Thorstadâs blogposts, but it could still be that people are thinking of this as âthe answerâ.
ď[Question] Is There AcÂtuÂally a StanÂdard or ConÂvincÂing ReÂsponse to David Thorstadâs CritÂiÂcisms of the Value of X-Risk ReÂducÂtion and of LongterÂmism?
I do think one issue people may be underrating is that we might just not bother with space colonization, if the distances and costs mean that no one on Earth will ever see significant material gain from it.
I think that given a few generations of expansion to different stars in all directions, it is not implausible (i.e. at least 25% chance) that X-risk becomes extremely low (i.e. under 1 in 100,000 per century, once there are say, 60 colonies with expansion plans, and a lot less once there are 1000 colonies.) After all, weâve already survived a million years, and most X-risks not from AI seem mostly to apply to single planet civilizations, plus the lightspeed barrier makes it hard for a risk to reach everywhere at once. But I think I agree that thinking through this stuff is very, very hard, and Iâm sympathetic to David Thorstadâs claim that if we keep finding ways current estimates of the value of X-risk reduction could be wildly wrong, at some point we should just lose trust in current estimates (see here for Thorstad making the claim: https://ââreflectivealtruism.com/ââ2023/ââ11/ââ03/ââmistakes-in-the-moral-mathematics-of-existential-risk-part-5-implications/ââ), even though I am a lot less confident than Thorstad is that very low future per year risk is an âextremeâ assumption.
It is disturbing to me how much Thorstadâs work on this stuff seems to have been ignored by leading orgs; it is very serious work criticizing key assumptions that they base their decisions on, even if I personally think he tends to push points in his favour a bit far. I assume the same is true for the Rethink report you cite, although it is long and complicated enough, unlike Thorstadâs short blog posts, that I havenât read any of it.
What are the âextreme beliefsâ you have in mind?
âMore generally, I am very skeptical of arguments of the form âWe must ignore X, because otherwise Y would be badâ. Maybe Y is bad! What gives you the confidence that Y is good? If you have some strong argument that Y is good, why canât that argument outweigh X, rather than forcing us to simply close our eyes and pretend X doesnât exist?â
This is very difficult philosophical territory, but I guess my instinct is to draw a distinction between:
a) ignoring new evidence about what properties something has, because that would overturn your prior moral evaluation of that thing.
b) Deciding that well-known properties of a thing donât contribute towards it being bad enough to overturn the standard evaluation of it, because you are committed to the standard moral evaluation. (This doesnât involve inferring that something has particular non-moral properties from the claim that it is morally good/âbad, unlike a).)
A) feels always dodgy to me, but b) seems like the kind of thing that could be right, depending on how much you should trust judgments about individual cases versus judgements about abstract moral principles. And I think I was only doing b) here, not a).
Having said that, I remember a conversation I had in grad school with a faculty member who was probably much better at philosophy than me claimed that even a) is only automatically bad if you assume moral anti-realism.
âWho framed it in terms of individual rights?â
Nuno did. Iâm not criticizing you or suggesting this legislation is other than bad.
One reason to be suspicious of taking into account lost potential lives here is that if you always do so, it looks like you might get a general argument for âdevelopment is badâ. Rich countries have low fertility compared to poor countries. So anything that helps poor countries develop is likely to prevent some people from being born. But it seems pretty strange to think we should wait until we find out how much development reduces fertility before we can decide if it is good or bad.
A bit of a tangent in the current context, but I have slight issues with your framing here: mechanisms that prevent the federal government telling the state governments what to do are not necessarily mechanisms that protect individuals citizens, although they could be. But equally, if the federal government is more inclined to protect the rights of individual citizens than the state government is, then they are the opposite. And sometimes framing it in terms of individual rights is just the wrong way to think about it: i.e. if the federal government wants some economic regulation and the state government doesnât, and the regulation has complex costs and benefits that work out well for some citizens and badly for others, then âis it the feds or the state government protecting citizenâs rightsâ might not be a particularly helpful framing.
This isnât just abstract, historically in the South, it was often the feds who wanted to protect Black citizens and the state governments who wanted to avoid this under the banner of stateâs rights.
I am biased because Stuart is an old friend, but I found this critique of the idea that social media use causes poor mental health fairly convincing when I read it: https://ââwww.thestudiesshowpod.com/ââp/ââepisode-25-is-it-the-phones Though obviously you shouldnât just make your mind up about this based on a single source, and thereâs might be a degree of anti-woke and therefore anti-anti-tech bias creeping in.
In principle, or only in practice?
âBelow-replacement fertility is perhaps the simplest and most probable extinction risk aroundâ
For it to present a significant extinction risk, youâd need current demographic trends to persist way past the point where changes in population have completely transformed society to the point where thereâs no reason to think current demographic trends will hold.