Formalism
Coherentist theory of epistemic justification
Correspondence theory of truth
Consequentialism
FCCC
Karma: 126
saying that it’s unfeasible will tend to make it more unfeasible
Thank you for saying this. It’s frustrating to have people who agree with you bat for the other team. I’d like to see how accurate people are for their infeasibility predictions: Take a list of policies that passed, a list that failed to pass, mix them together, and see how much better you can unscramble them than random chance. Your “I’m not going to talk about political feasibility in this post” idea is a good one that I’ll use in future.
Poor meta-arguments I’ve noticed on the Forum:
Using a general reference class when you have a better, more specific class available (e.g. taking an IQ test, having the results in your hand, and refusing to look at them because “I probably got 100 points, because that’s the average.”)
Bringing up common knowledge, i.e. things that are true, but everyone in the conversation already knows and applies that information. (E.g. “Logical arguments can be wrong in subtle ways, so just because your argument looks airtight, doesn’t mean it is”. A much better contribution is to actually point out the weaknesses in the specific argument that’s in front of you.)
And, as you say, predictions of infeasibility.
within some small number
In terms of cardinal utility? I think drawing any line in the sand has problems when things are continuous because it falls right into a slippery slope (if doesn’t make a real difference, what about drawing the line at , and then what about ?).
But I think of our actions as discrete. Even if we design a system with some continuous parameter, the actual implementation of that system is going to be in discrete human actions. So I don’t think we can get arbitrarily small differences in utility. Then maximalism (i.e. going for only ideal outcomes) makes sense when it comes to designing long-lasting institutions, since the small (but non-infinitesimal) differences add up across many people and over a long time.
I think he’s saying “optimal future = best possible future”, which necessarily has a non-zero probability.
Agreed, but at least in theory, a model that takes into account inmate’s welfare at the proper level will, all else being equal, do better under utilitarian lights than a model that does not take into account inmate welfare.
What if the laws forced prisons to treat inmates in a particular way, and the legal treatment of inmates coincided with putting each inmate’s wellbeing at the right level? Then the funding function could completely ignore the inmate’s wellbeing, and the prisons’ bids would drop to account for any extra cost to support the inmate’s wellbeing or loss to societal contribution. That’s what I was trying to do by saying the goal was to “maximize the total societal contribution of any given set of inmates within the limits of the law”. There definitely should be limits on how a prison can treat its inmates, even if it were to serve the rest of society’s interests.
But the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of having the inmate’s welfare as part of the funding function. It would avoid having to go through the process of developing the right laws to make the prison system function as intended, and it’s better at self-correcting when compared to laws (i.e. the prisons that are better at supporting inmate welfare will outcompete the prisons that are bad at it). And it would probably reduce the number of people who think that supporters of this policy change don’t care about what happens to inmates, which is nice.
That’s a good point. You could set up the system so that it’s “societal contribution” + funding—price (which is what it is at the moment) + “Convict’s QALYs in dollars” (maybe plus some other stuff too). The fact that you have to value a murder means that you should already have the numbers to do the dollar conversion of the QALYs.
I’m hesitant to make that change though. The change would allow prisons to trade off societal benefit for the inmate’s benefit, who, as some people say, “owes a debt to society”. Allowing this trade-off would also reduce the deterrence effect of prisons on would-be offenders, so denying the trade-off is not necessarily an anti-utilitarian stance.
And denying the trade-off doesn’t mean the inmate is not looked after either. There’s a kind of… “Laffer Curve” equivalent where decreasing inmate wellbeing beyond a certain point necessarily means a reduction in societal contribution (destroying an inmate’s mind is not good for their future societal contribution). So inmate wellbeing is not minimized by the system I’ve described (it’s not maximized either).
I’m not 100 percent set on the exact funding function. I might change my mind in the future.
You mean the first part? (I.e. Why pay for lobbying when you share the “benefits” with your competitors and still have to compete?) Yeah, when a company becomes large enough, the benefits of a rule change can outweigh the cost of lobbying.
But, for this particular system, if a prison is large enough to lobby, then they’re going to have a lot of liabilities from all of their former and current inmates. If they lobby for longer sentences or try to make more behaviours illegal, and one of their former inmates is caught doing one of these new crimes, the prison has to pay.
One way prisons could avoid this is by paying someone else to take on these liabilities. But, in the contract, this person could ensure the prison pays for compensation for any lobbying that damages them.
So a lobbying prison (1) benefits from more inmates in the future, (2) has to pay the cost of lobbying, and (3) has to pay more for the additional liabilities of their past and current inmates (not for their future inmates though, because the liabilities will be offset by a lower initial price for those inmate contracts). Points 1 and 2 are the same under the current prison system. Point 3 is new, and it should push in the direction of less lobbying, at least once the system has existed for a while.
There are mechanisms that aggregate distributed knowledge, such as free-market pricing.
I cannot really evaluate the value of a grant if I have not seen all the other grants.
Not with 100 percent accuracy, but that’s not the right question. We want to know whether it can be done better than chance. Someone can lack knowledge and be biased and still reliably do better than random (try playing chess against a computer that plays uniformly random moves).
In addition, if there would be an easy and obvious system people would probably already have implemented it.
Wouldn’t the “efficient-policy hypothesis” imply that lotteries are worse than the existing systems? I don’t think you really believe this. Are our systems better than most hypothetical systems? Usually, but this doesn’t mean there’s no low-hanging fruit. There’s plenty of good policy ideas that are well-known and haven’t been implemented, such as 100 percent land-value taxes.
Let’s take a subset of the research funding problem: How can we decide what to fund for research about prisoner rehabilitation? I’ve suggested a mechanism that would do this.
When designing a system, you give it certain goals to satisfy. A good example of this done well is voting theory. People come up with apparently desirable properties, such the Smith criterion, and then demonstrate mathematically that certain voting methods succeed or fail the criterion. Some desirable goals cannot be achieved simultaneously (an example of this is Arrow’s impossiblility theorem).
Lotteries give every ticket has an equal chance. And if each person has one ticket, this implies each person has an equal chance. But this goal is in conflict with more important goals. I would guess that lotteries are almost never the best mechanism. Where they improve situations is for already bad mechanisms. But in that case, I’d look further for even better systems.
If people fill in the free-text box in the survey, this is essentially the same as sending an email. If I disagree with the fund’s decisions, I can send them my reasons why. If my reasons aren’t any good, the fund can see that, and ignore me; if I have good reasons, the fund should (hopefully) be swayed.
Votes without the free-text box filled in can’t signal whether the voter’s justifications are valid or not. Opinions have differing levels of information backing them up. An “unpopular” decision might be supported by everyone who knows what they’re talking about; a “popular” decision might be considered to be bad by every informed person.
My idea of EA’s essential beliefs are:
Some possible timelines are much better than others
What “feels” like the best action often won’t result in anything close to the best possible timeline
In such situations, it’s better to disregard our feelings and go with the actions that get us closer to the best timeline.
This doesn’t commit you to a particular moral philosophy. You can rank timelines by whatever aspects you want: Your moral rule can tell you to only consider your own actions, and disregard their effects on the behaviour of other people’s actions. I could consider such a person to be an effective altruist, even though they’d be a non-consequentialist. While I think it’s fair to say that, after the above beliefs, consequentialism is fairly core to EA, I think the whole EA community could switch away from consequentialism without having to rebrand itself.
The critique targets effective altruists’ tendency to focus on single actions and their proximate consequences and, more specifically, to focus on simple interventions that reduce suffering in the short term.
But she also says EA has a “god’s eye moral epistemology”. This seems contradictory. Even if we suppose that most EAs focus on proximate consequences, that’s not a fundamental failing of the philosophy, it’s a failed application of it. If many fail to accurately implement the philosophy, it doesn’t imply the philosophy bad[1]: There’s a difference between a “criterion of right” and a “decision procedure”. Many EAs are longtermists who essentially use entire timelines as the unit of moral analysis. This is clearly is not focused on “proximate consequences”. That’s more the domain of non-consequentialists (e.g. “Are my actions directly harming anyone?”).
The article’s an incoherent mess, even ignoring the Communist nonsense at the end.
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This is in contrast with a policies being bad because no one can implement them with the desired consequences.
It happens in philosophy sometimes too: “Saving your wife over 10 strangers is morally required because...” Can’t we just say that we aren’t moral angels? It’s not hypocritical to say the best thing is to do is save the 10 strangers, and then not do it (unless you also claim to be morally perfect). Same thing here. You can treat yourself well even if it’s not the best moral thing to do. You can value non-moral things.
I think you’re conflating moral value with value in general. People value their pets, but this has nothing to do with the pet’s instrumental moral value.
So a relevant question is “Are you allowed to trade off moral value for non-moral value?” To me, morality ranks (probability distributions of) timelines by moral preference. Morally better is morally better, but nothing is required of you. There’s no “demandingness”. I don’t buy into the notions of “morally permissible” or “morally required”: These lines in the sand seem like sociological observations (e.g. whether people are morally repulsed by certain actions in the current time and place) rather than normative truths.
I do think having more focus on moral value is beneficial, not just because it’s moral, but because it endures. If you help a lot of people, that’s something you’ll value until you die. Whereas if I put a bunch of my time into playing chess, maybe I’ll consider that to be a waste of time at some point in the future. There’s other things, like enjoying relationships with your family, that also aren’t anywhere close to the most moral thing you could be doing, but you’ll probably continue to value.
You’re allowed to value things that aren’t about serving the world.
Hey Bob, good post. I’ve had the same thought (i.e. the unit of moral analysis is timelines, or probability distributions of timelines) with different formalism
The trolley problem gives you a choice between two timelines (). Each timeline can be represented as the set containing all statements that are true within that timeline. This representation can neatly state whether something is true within a given timeline or not: “You pull the lever” , and “You pull the lever” . Timelines contain statements that are combined as well as statements that are atomized. For example, since “You pull the lever”, “The five live”, and “The one dies” are all elements of , you can string these into a larger statement that is also in : “You pull the lever, and the five live, and the one dies”. Therefore, each timeline contains a very large statement that uniquely identifies it within any finite subset of . However, timelines won’t be our unit of analysis because the statements they contain have no subjective empirical uncertainty.
This uncertainty can be incorporated by using a probability distribution of timelines, which we’ll call a forecast (). Though there is no uncertainty in the trolley problem, we could still represent it as a choice between two forecasts: guarantees (the pull-the-lever timeline) and guarantees (the no-action timeline). Since each timeline contains a statement that uniquely identifies it, each forecast can, like timelines, be represented as a set of statements. Each statement within a forecast is an empirical prediction. For example, would contain “The five live with a credence of 1”. So, the trolley problem reveals that you either morally prefer (denoted as ), prefer (denoted as ), or you believe that both forecasts are morally equivalent (denoted as ).
Logical Foundations of Government Policy
I watched those videos you linked. I don’t judge you for feeling that way.
Did you convert anyone to veganism? If people did get converted, maybe there were even more effective ways to do so. Or maybe anger was the most effective way; I don’t know. But if not, your own subjective experience was worse (by feeling contempt), other people felt worse, and fewer animals were helped. Anger might be justified but, assuming there was some better way to convert people, you’d be unintentionally prioritizing emotions ahead of helping the animals.
Another thing to keep in mind: When we train particular physical actions, we get better at repeating that action. Athletes sometimes repeat complex, trained actions before they have any time to consciously decide to act. I assume the same thing happens with our emotions: If we feel a particular way repeatedly, we’re more likely to feel that way in future, maybe even when it’s not warranted.
We can be motivated to do something good for the world in lots of different ways. Helping people by solving problems gives my life meaning and I enjoy doing it. No negative emotions needed.
“writing down stylized models of the world and solving for the optimal thing for EAs to do in them”
I think this is one of the most important things we can be doing. Maybe even the most important since it covers such a wide area and so much government policy is so far from optimal.
you just solve for the policy … that maximizes your objective function, whatever that may be.
I don’t think that’s right. I’ve written about what it means for a system to do “the optimal thing” and the answer cannot be that a single policy maximizes your objective function:
Societies need many distinct systems: a transport system, a school system, etc. These systems cannot be justified if they are amoral, so they must serve morality. Each system cannot, however, achieve the best moral outcome on its own: If your transport system doesn’t cure cancer, it probably isn’t doing everything you want; if it does cure cancer, it isn’t just a “transport” system...
Unless by policy, you mean “the entirety of what government does”, then yes. But given that you’re going to consider one area at a time, and you’re “only including all the levers between which you’re considering”, you could reach a local optimum rather than a truly ideal end state. The way I like to think about it is “How would a system for prisons (for example) be in the best possible future?” This is not necessarily going to be the system that does the greatest good at the margin when constrained to the domain you’re considering (though they often are). Rather than think about a system maximizing your objective function, it’s better to think of systems as satisfying goals that are aligned with your objective function.
And bits describe proportional changes in the number of possibilities, not absolute changes...
And similarly, the 3.3 bits that take you from 100 possibilities to 10 are the same amount of information as the 3.3 bits that take you from 10 possibilities to 1. In each case you’re reducing the number of possibilities by a factor of 10.
Ahhh. Thanks for clearing that up for me. Looking at the entropy formula, that makes sense and I get the same answer as you for each digit (3.3). If I understand, I incorrectly conflated “information” with “value of information”.
I think this is better parsed as diminishing marginal returns to information.
How does this account for the leftmost digit giving the most information, rather than the rightmost digit (or indeed any digit between them)?
per-thousandths does not have double the information of per-cents, but 50% more
Let’s say I give you $1 + $ where is either 0, $0.1, $0.2 … or $0.9. (Note $1 is analogous to 1%, and is equivalent adding a decimal place. I.e. per-thousandths vs per-cents.) The average value of , given a uniform distribution, is $0.45. Thus, against $1, adds almost half the original value, i.e. $0.45/$1 (45%). But what if I instead gave you $99 + $? $0.45 is less than 1% of the value of $99.
The leftmost digit is more valuable because it corresponds to a greater place value (so the magnitude of the value difference between places is going to be dependent on the numeric base you use). I don’t know information theory, so I’m not sure how to calculate the value of the first two digits compared to the third, but I don’t think per-thousandths has 50% more information than per-cents.
From a bayesian perspective there is no particular reason why you have to provide more evidence if you provide credences
This statement is just incorrect.
It’s not that any criticism is bad, it’s that people who agree with an idea (when political considerations are ignored) are snuffing it out based on questionable predictions of political feasibility. I just don’t think people are good at predicting political feasibility. How many people said Trump would never be president (despite FiveThirtyEight warning there was a 30 percent chance)?
Rather than the only disagreement being political feasibility, I would actually prefer someone to be against a policy and criticise it based on something more substantive (like pointing out an error in my reasoning). Criticism needs to come in the right order for any policy discussion to be productive. Maybe this:
Given the assumptions of the argument, does the policy satisfy its specified goals?
Are the goals of the policy good? Is there a better goalset we could satisfy?
Is the policy technically feasible to implement? (Are the assumptions of the initial argument reasonable? Can we steelman the argument to make a similar conclusion from better assumptions?)
Is the policy politically feasible to implement?
I think talking about political feasibility should never ever be the first thing we bring up when debating new ideas. And if someone does give a prediction on political feasibility, they should either show that they do produce good predictions on such things, or significantly lower their confidence in their political feasibility claims.