Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it)

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 26 Oct 2022 16:45 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: You Should Write a Fo­rum Bio

  Hi all, I’m new here and added a profile just now :-)

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 27 Oct 2022 22:37 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Jobst Heitzig (vo­dle.it)’s Shortform

  Fairness vs Efficiency?

  Assume for $100 charity A can increase one person’s subjective wellbeing from 0 to 1, while charity B can increase one person’s subjective wellbeing from 8 to 10.

  It seems that according to EA, we should donate to B since that increases total wellbeing more than A and is thus more efficient. But then we help happy people rather than miserly people, which seems unfair.

  Can one value (efficiency) really completely top another value (fairness) or should there be some compromise or tradeoff? Like giving something to A and more to B? Or the other way around?

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 28 Oct 2022 6:37 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Charlie_Guthmann’s comment on: Jobst Heitzig (vo­dle.it)’s Shortform

  Dear @Charlie_Guthmann, sorry for correcting you, but I’m not confusing EA with utilitarianism at all.

  Indeed, I consider myself a utilitarian and I would give to A rather than B. Because in my version of utilitarianism the relationship between subjective wellbeing and utility is nonlinear and I would consider an increase from 0 to 1 subjective wellbeing as a larger increase in utility than one from 8 to 10.

  My trouble is that a recent talk at the EAGxVirtual conference by someone from the Happier Lives Institute seemed to suggest that one should measure the amount of doing good by adding up increases in subjective wellbeing (rather than utility), and that that would lead us giving to B, which to me seems a little unfair.

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 28 Oct 2022 8:20 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Charlie_Guthmann’s comment on: Jobst Heitzig (vo­dle.it)’s Shortform

  Thanks for this clarification. I was sloppy originally when saying “it seems that according to EA, …” instead of saying “it seems that according to prominent members of the EA community, …”.

  So do you know of any statistics on what the values of people who identify with the EA community actually are, and what they would say to such questions as mine?

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 28 Oct 2022 8:57 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Jobst Heitzig (vo­dle.it)’s Shortform

  I’d be interested in an overview of everone’s opinion on a thought experiment related to measuring the amount of doing good. I have set up a vodle poll for this: go to poll

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 28 Oct 2022 12:19 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Charlie_Guthmann’s comment on: Jobst Heitzig (vo­dle.it)’s Shortform

  Thanks, Charlie. Unfortunally I boycott Faceb**k, but I will consider making a top-level post, on some thought experiments like this one.

[Question] EA com­mu­nity val­ues and at­ti­tudes sur­vey /​ polls?

An­nounc­ing vo­dle, a web app for con­sen­sus-aiming col­lec­tive decisions

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 31 Oct 2022 0:41 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: pete’s comment on: EA com­mu­nity val­ues and at­ti­tudes sur­vey /​ polls?

  Dear Pete, as I’m new here I don’t know of these polls you cite, so I can’t answer this. Do you have a link for that?

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 31 Oct 2022 23:49 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Emrik’s comment on: An­nounc­ing vo­dle, a web app for con­sen­sus-aiming col­lec­tive decisions

  Yes:

  • In a vodle poll, each participant gives each option a “wap” (willingness to approve) between 0 and 100.

  • Based on all waps, it is calculated who “approves” which options: if i gave x a wap of r, then i approves x iff less than r% of all participants do not approve x (this coupled system of inequalities has a unique largest solution, which vodle uses).

  • Based on who approves what, the “share” of each option is calculated: x’s share is the fraction of participants who approve x but approve no other option y that is approved by more participants than x. In other words: each participant “owns” an equal share, and a participant’s share goes to the most-approved option among those approved by that participant.

  • If the poll is about distributing a budget, each option gets their share of the budget.

  • If the poll is instead about picking a single winner, the winner is determined by a lottery in which each option’s winning probability equals its share.

  Rationale: By giving suitable waps, participants can make sure their share only goes to a good compromise option if others’ shares also go to that option. One can show that this possibility of “conditional commitment to approve” makes sure that if there is a good compromise, it will win with certainty in a strategic equilibrium between rational participants. Majoritarian methods like Plurality Voting, Approval Voting, STAR Voting, Instant Runoff Voting, Score Voting etc. cannot guarantee this whenever one faction has a majority (if only a slight one) and has thus no incentive whatsoever to seek a compromise with the other participants.

  See the theory paper for details.

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 31 Oct 2022 23:57 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: An­nounc­ing vo­dle, a web app for con­sen­sus-aiming col­lec­tive decisions

  • As far as I know pol.is is about forming your own opinion and seeing others’ opinions, but it does not contain any collective decision making. It is rather like a surveying or deliberation tool with very smart statistics.

  • vodle is about making an actual collective decision, like selecting a single option from some menu or distributing a budget among a number of projects. It is more like a formal voting tool.

  A similarity is that in vodle, the voting is interactive: you see the current results and can adjust your “vote” (your “waps”, see above) as often as you like until some deadline.

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 1 Nov 2022 0:02 UTC

  2 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben Stewart’s comment on: An­nounc­ing vo­dle, a web app for con­sen­sus-aiming col­lec­tive decisions

  Indeed! Well spotted issue with many systems.

  In vodle, adding further options is a central ingredient of converging to a full or broad partial consensus: when a participant sees a polarized situation, they have an incentive to add a compromise option that both sides would then have an incentive to approve to resolve the split.

  So every participant can add as many options as they like until the poll ends. (But no-one can alter or delete options) All options are treated the same.

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 1 Nov 2022 12:55 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Emrik’s comment on: An­nounc­ing vo­dle, a web app for con­sen­sus-aiming col­lec­tive decisions

  The method is named “Maximum Partial Consensus (MaxParC)” in the paper.

  The exact meaning of giving a wap of r to option x is really just the following binding conditional commitment: “I commit to approve x if and only if less than r% of the participants do not approve x”.

  All the waps for x together form an interdependent system of conditions, which has a “largest” solution in the sense that there is a unique largest set of participants such that if all of them approve, then everyone’s condition for approval is met.

  One can find this solution easily with pen and paper as follows: sort all waps for x in ascending order, draw a diagonal like in the screenshot below, and find its leftmost intersection with the wap distribution. Then all participants with waps to the left do not approve and those with waps to the right do approve.

  

  In the GUI, one can see whether one approves by checking whether one’s wap slider intersects with the light approval bar, as in this screenshot from the EA-related demo poll posted earlier:

  

[Question] De­ci­sion mak­ing un­der model am­bi­guity, moral un­cer­tainty, and other agents with free will?

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 2 Nov 2022 16:00 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An In­tro­duc­tion to the Mo­ral Weight Project

  Just to clarify: In this text, are “welfare” and “utility” referring to same concept, or are they just proportional to each other because of the unitarianist assumption?

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 3 Nov 2022 13:04 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Longter­mist ter­minol­ogy has bi­as­ing assumptions

  Thank you so much, this is especially helpful for a newbie like me who was a little confused about these things and now thinks that is mainly to do with terminology.

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 3 Nov 2022 13:08 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 1

  on: A pro­posed hi­er­ar­chy of longter­mist concepts

  You write

  expected utility, and its main factors, expected number of people, and expected value per person

  but that is only true if number of people and value per person are stochastically independent, which they probably aren’t, right?

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 3 Nov 2022 13:31 UTC

  13 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it)’s comment on: A pro­posed hi­er­ar­chy of longter­mist concepts

  Related to that:

  Your figure says

  Longtermist regress IS EITHER Contraction OR Average wellbeing decrease,

  but consider a certain baseline trajectory A on which

  • longterm population = 3 gazillion person life years for sure

  • average wellbeing = 3 utils per person per life year for sure,

  so that their expected product equals 9 gazillion utils, and an uncertain alternative trajectory B on which

  • if nature’s coin lands heads, longterm population = 7 gazillion person life years but average wellbeing = 1 util per person per life year

  • if nature’s coin lands tails, longterm population = 1 gazillion person life years but average wellbeing = 7 utils per person per life year,

  so that their expected product equals (7 x 1 + 1 x 7) /​ 2 = 7 gazillion utils.

  Then an event that changes the trajectory from A to B is a longtermist regress since it reduces the expected utility.

  But it is NEITHER a contraction NOR an average wellbeing decrease. In fact, it is BOTH an Expansion, since the expected longterm population increases from 3 to 4 gazillion person life years, AND an average wellbeing increase, since that increases from 3 to 4 utils per person per life year.

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 3 Nov 2022 14:09 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Model­ling civil­i­sa­tion af­ter a catastrophe

  I like this type of models very much! As it happens, a few years ago I had a paper in Sustainability that used an even simpler model in a similar spirit, which I used to discuss and compare the implications of various normative systems.

  Abstract: We introduce and analyze a simple formal thought experiment designed to reflect a qualitative decision dilemma humanity might currently face in view of anthropogenic climate change. In this exercise, each generation can choose between two options, either setting humanity on a pathway to certain high wellbeing after one generation of suffering, or leaving the next generation in the same state as the current one with the same options, but facing a continuous risk of permanent collapse. We analyze this abstract setup regarding the question of what the right choice would be both in a rationality-based framework including optimal control, welfare economics, and game theory, and by means of other approaches based on the notions of responsibility, safe operating spaces, and sustainability paradigms. Across these different approaches, we confirm the intuition that a focus on the long-term future makes the first option more attractive while a focus on equality across generations favors the second. Despite this, we generally find a large diversity and disagreement of assessments both between and within these different approaches, suggesting a strong dependence on the choice of the normative framework used. This implies that policy measures selected to achieve targets such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals can depend strongly on the normative framework applied and specific care needs to be taken with regard to the choice of such frameworks.

  The model is this:

  

  Here L is the current “lake” state, from which action A (“taking action”) certainly leads to the absorbing “shelter” state S via the passing “valley of tears” state P, while action B (“business as usual”) likely keeps us in L but might also lead to the absorbing “trench” state.

  The names “lake”, “shelter”, “trench” I had introduced earlier in another paper on sustainable management that contained this figure to explain that terminology:

  

  (Humanity sits in a boat and can row against slow currents but not up waterfalls. The dark half is ethically undesirable, the light half desirable. We are likely in a “lake” or “glade” state now, roughly comparable to your “age of perils”. Your “interstellar” state would be a “shelter”.)

• Jobst Heitzig (vodle.it) 3 Nov 2022 18:18 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Mildly Against Donor Lotteries

  I think you point to relevant tradeoffs here. I myself am currently testing a different scheme to determine my donation: let the public (or anyone interested in participating) decide collectively where to donate. I believe this might...

  • improve the decision quality due to crowd-sourcing information and reducing any bias (moral or otherwise) that I might have

  • encourage others to think about various causes and potentially make them donate more as well

  The downside is probably that the total effort spent in this decision is larger than would I take it on my own...

  My polls look like this, sometimes with a fixed total amount, sometimes with a total that increases with participation (to give an incentive). Typically around 100 people participate in it:

  

  What do you think of this?