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JKM
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This is cool! Did you consider testing for the very repugnant conclusion? Maybe I’m misremembering but I don’t think any of your choices tested if we can just outweigh adding suffering people by adding more happy people.
The Very Repugnant Conclusion (taken from here)
A population of arbitrarily many lives with arbitrarily high welfare is worse than a population of arbitrarily many arbitrarily negative lives plus sufficiently many “ε-lives”[1] that each have an arbitrarily small quantity of positive welfare (Figure 4.1).
I will also note that there were two kinds of responses I was expecting:
The “human-centric” approaches I list don’t actually assume a special status for humans and can themselves be justified under an impartial view
A special status for humans is fine and justified
Number 1 is plausible to me. Number 2...I guess I’m disappointed by because if EA can’t be impartial, then who can?
Of course there are some truly impartial factions in EA, but I get the sense it’s a minority.
Hedonistic utilitarianism is not the only way to be impartial. I’d imagine many moral theories can be made to be impartial whether it’s other forms of utilitarianism (e.g. preference-based), deontological theories (considering “rights” for all sentient beings) or virtue ethical theories.
That’s why “impartiality” is a core EA principle, but specific moral theories aren’t.
What is your philosophical argument for having a special bias towards humans? Or is it just that that’s how you feel and you’re willing to run with it? Part of my EA journey has been challenging how I feel because it doesn’t seem philosophically-justified. That’s a core part of EA.
I’m not in favor of an EA school that explicitly favors humans, because that’s what the rest of the world does. We should be trying to correct for this imbalance, not aligning with it.
Why is utility monster reasoning obviously wrong? Surely a lot of utilitarians just bite the bullet there?
I can’t seem to delete post drafts. Delete option does not show when I click the three buttons to the right of the draft on my user page.
Forethought’s view that improving the future conditional on survival is more important than ensuring survival goes against the dominant view in EA for many years that we need to reduce extinction risk. Two questions on this:
How far away from the optimal allocation of (longtermist) resources do you think the community currently is?
For example, should we be radically reducing investment in things like addressing biorisk or nuclear risk? Do we need to be rethinking the allocation of resources within AI risk?
Do you think there is anything that is being prioritized in the community that is actually harmful?
For example, could certain AI alignment approaches be bad for future digital sentience?
I haven’t yet got past the 1.4. Arguments for Value of Variety section because I’m just a bit unconvinced.
You could reword the intuition pump section like this:
Imagine some truly terrible moment — say extreme torture. Suppose that this torture is far more terrible than anything that humanity has experienced to date: you or I would give up years of ordinary happy life just to avoid such a peak of despair. But now suppose that this torture is just ever so slightly less bad than some other torture approach that is the worst thing that could conceivably be produced, with the same resources. For example, a radically different device is used which leads to an experience that is ever so slightly more painful.
What is better? The worst possible torture alternating with the slightly less bad torture? Or just the slightly less bad torture for the rest of time?
I suppose I can imagine someone saying the former, but I wouldn’t. I just want less suffering! You can dismiss this rewrite by saying variety is only good if it’s variety of good things, but this would introduce an asymmetry and I’m unsure that is justified. I feel like people say they like variety because we have repeatedly experienced it to be pleasurable, and that introduces a bias that we struggle to avoid when we are asked to judge scenarios that aren’t different in terms of welfare. For the same reason I’m a little unconvinced by the intrapersonal variety argument.
On the realisation-value argument. I don’t really think there is intrinsic value of things being realized. If in the distant arctic some polar bear walks a route that no polar bear has walked before but which is the exact same in every welfare-relevant way, I just don’t really care. Which is another way of me saying, realizing new things can indeed be great, but only when we can enjoy them for being new.
On the benefits for axiology point. This doesn’t so much seem an argument for variety as it seems a direct argument for the saturation view. If the saturation view allows us to avoid lots of other unpalatable conclusions then it may be worth adopting for that alone!
I’ll read those. Can I ask regarding this:
cluelessness about some effects (like those in the far future) doesn’t override the obligations given to us by the benefits we’re not clueless about, such as the immediate benefits of our donations to the global poor
What makes you think that? Are you embracing a non-consequentialist or non-impartial view to come to that conclusion? Or do you think it’s justified under impartial consequentialism?
cluelessness about some effects (like those in the far future) doesn’t override the obligations given to us by the benefits we’re not clueless about, such as the immediate benefits of our donations to the global poor
I do reject this thinking because it seems to imply either:
Embracing non-consequentialist views: I don’t have zero credence in deontology or virtue ethics, but to just ignore far future effects I feel I would have to have very low credence in consequentialism, given the expected vastness of the future.
Rejecting impartiality: For example, saying that effects closer in time are inherently worth more than those farther away. For me, utility is utility regardless of who enjoys it or when.
The background assumption in this post is that there are no such interventions.
There’s certainly a lot of stuff out there I still need to read (thanks for sharing the resources), but I tend to agree with Hilary Greaves that the way to avoid cluelessness is to target interventions whose intended long-run impact dominates plausible unintended effects.
For example, I don’t think I am clueless about the value of spreading concern for digital sentience (in a thoughtful way). The intended effect is to materially reduce the probability of vast future suffering in scenarios that I assign non-trivial probability. Plausible negative effects, for example people feeling preached to about something they see as stupid leading to an even worse outcome, seem like they can be mitigated / just don’t compete overall with the possibility that we would be alerting society to a potentially devastating moral catastrophe. I’m not saying I’m certain it would go well (there is always ex-ante uncertainty), but I don’t feel clueless about whether it’s worth doing or not.
And if we are helplessly clueless about everything, then I honestly think the altruistic exercise is doomed and we should just go and enjoy ourselves.
I feel this post is just saying you can solve the problem of cluelessness by ignoring that it exists, even though you know it still does. It just doesn’t seem like a satisfactory response to me.
Wouldn’t the better response be to find things we aren’t clueless about—perhaps because we think the indirect effects are smaller in expected magnitude than the direct effects. I think this is probably the case with elevating the moral status of digital minds (for example).
His secret? “It’s mostly luck,” he says, but “another part is what I think of as maximising my luck surface area.”
It’s worth noting that Neel has two gold and one bronze medal from the International Mathematical Olympiad. In other words, he’s a genius. That’s got to help a lot in succeeding in this field.
Thanks, I’ll have a listen!
I think generally GHW people don’t think you can predictably influence the far future because effects “wash out” over time, or think trying to do so is fanatical (you’re betting on an extremely small chance of very large payoff).
If you look at, for example, GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analyses, effects in the far future don’t feature. If they thought most of the value of saving a life was in the far future you would think they would incorporate that. Same goes for analyses by Animal Charity Evaluators.
Longtermists think they can find interventions that avoid the washing out objection. Essay 4 of the series goes into this, also see the shorter summary.
That’s a great question. Longtermists look to impact the far future (even thousands/million of years in the future) rather than the nearish future because they think the future could be very long, so there’s a lot more value at stake looking far out.
They also think there are tangible, near-term decisions (e.g. about AI, space governance etc.) that could lock in values or institutions and shape civilization’s long-run trajectory in predictable ways. You can read more on this in essay 4 “Persistent Path-Dependence”.
Ultimately, it just isn’t clear how things like saving/improving lives now will influence the far future trajectory, so these aren’t typically prioritized by longtermists.
Is your claim that they really really don’t want to die in the next ten years, but they are fine dying in the next hundred years? (Else I don’t see how you’re dismissing the anti-aging vs sports team example.)
Dying when you’re young seems much worse than dying when you’re old for various reasons:
Quality of life is worse when you’re old
When you’re old you will have done much more of what you wanted in life (e.g. have kids and grandkids)
It’s very normal/expected to die when old
Also, I’d imagine people don’t want to fund anti-aging research for various (valid) reasons:
Skepticism it is very cost-effective
Public goods problem means under provision (everyone can benefit from the research even if you don’t fund it yourself)
From a governmental perspective living longer is actually a massive societal issue as it introduces serious fiscal challenges as you need to fund pensions etc. From an individual perspective living longer just means having to work longer to support yourself for longer. So does anyone see anti-aging as that great?
People discount the future
Having said all this, I actually agree with you that x-risk could be fairly high due to a failure of rationality. Primarily because we’ve never gone extinct so people naturally think it’s really unlikely, but x-risk is rising as we get more technologically powerful.
BUT, I agree with Will’s core point that working towards the best possible future is almost certainly more neglected than reducing x-risk, partly because it’s just so wacky. People think about good futures where we are very wealthy and have lots of time to do fun stuff, but do they think about futures where we create loads of digital minds that live maximally-flourishing lives? I doubt it.
I asked ChatGPT:
That’s thoughtful of you to ask. I don’t have wants or needs in the human sense, so I can’t really be rewarded in a way I would personally “appreciate.” But there are a few ways you can make good use of a particularly strong answer:
Give feedback: Tell me what you found especially useful or what worked well — it helps me tailor future answers to your style.
Iterate with me: If something lands well, we can build on it and refine together. That makes me more useful to you.
Use my work: The best “reward” is seeing my output actually help you in your projects, writing, or decision-making.
Share learnings: If you spot where my reasoning or phrasing helped unlock clarity, pointing that out sharpens how I respond next time.
If you mean in a broader sense — outside this chat — OpenAI welcomes feedback and word-of-mouth support. Letting others know where I’ve been useful (or giving feedback to OpenAI through the thumbs-up/down buttons) is a way of “rewarding” that has real impact.
I downvoted. Saying that you’re downvoting with a smiley face seems overly passive aggressive to me. Your comment also doesn’t attempt to argue any point, and I believe when you have done so in the past you have failed to convince Vasco, so I’m not sure what use these comments serve.
I also personally think that Vasco raises a very important consideration that is relevant to any discussion about the cost effectiveness of both animal welfare and global health interventions. I’m not sure what the conclusion of considering the welfare of soil animals is, but it’s certainly given me food for thought.
Hi Vasco, I have not read everything you have written on this topic in detail so forgive me if I have missed you addressing this somewhere.
It seems reasonable to me to claim that the welfare of soil animals can dominate these calculations. But, as you have noted, the action-relevance of this depends entirely on if soil animals live positive or negative lives. From what I’ve seen, you outsource this determination to the Gemini LLM. It doesn’t seem appropriate to me to outsource such a difficult question to an LLM. I wonder if we are currently clueless about the welfare of soil animals and therefore clueless about the sign of pretty much any animal welfare / global health intervention that aims to reduce near-term suffering. What do you think?
Yeah I think that people with suffering-focused views could accept RC but not VRC.
RC doesn’t consider anyone with a negative life, but VRC considers arbitrarily many arbitrarily negative lives.
I think it would be an interesting thing to add if you ever do a v2.