I think this is the standard reply to the repugnant conclusion, from Yudkowsky’s Ends Don’t Justify Means (Among Humans) (emphasis mine).
So here’s a reply to that philosopher’s scenario, which I have yet to hear any philosopher’s victim give:
“You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty. But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can’t occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine. Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree. However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings.
ie. the repugnant conclusion tells us a lot more about how human cognition works rather than how consequentionalism fundamentally works.
Hi Ghani, thanks for the question!
Broadly, we think that reaching HNWIs will depend heavily on establishing trust, legibility, and credibility to get our foot in the door. As highlighted in CEARCH’s report on EG in Asia, Asian philanthropists tend to be predominantly relationship-based, domestic/​inward-looking, and reactive to their peers. Our current thinking about the ToC on HNWI giving can be divided into three parts:
Rather than reaching HNWIs in a vacuum, we use our broad-based leg to provide us with the necessary credibility, surface area, and public standing to facilitate warm introductions
We’d like to translate EA ideas into framings that are more resonant to their current predispositions. For example, we can frame cost-effectiveness around high impact domestic and regional causes and work within their existing philanthropic focus (such as anti-stunting, maternal health, or religious giving), that over time we can expand towards more cause-neutral/​wider-moral-circle interventions.
We want to engage with HNWIs in a high-touch manner, to offer them research adapted to their giving preferences, that they may not find elsewhere.
We are still refining the precise pipeline and welcome any thoughts or connections in the space!