I think the money-pump argument is wrong. You are practically assuming the conclusion. A scope insensitive person would negatively value the total number of bird deaths, or maybe positively value the number of birds alive. So that each death is less bad if other birds also die. In this case it doesn’t make sense to talk about $1 per 100 avoided deaths in isolation.
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Karma: 43
I know that might be a problem, but I asked for other ideas that have at least a 5% chance of saving a lot of people, even if they are bad in expectation. The hope is that they can somehow be modified into good ones, and I still don’t know whether that’s the case for gene drives. When I get enough free time, I’ll try to ask the researchers.
Then what does scope sensitivity follow from?
Other than releasing anti-malaria (or similar diseases) gene drives, is there any other “physical” action that can be taken for less than a million dollars and has a chance greater than 5% of saving an enormous number of people?
Why is scope insensitivity considered a bias instead of just the way human values work?
Do you have a link to the talk? That goes against what I have read elsewhere.
I think you should have different entries for each one of the top nootropics, instead of a single one. I expect the effect on productivity to vary a lot between them.
You say you want us to estimate the cost-effectiveness of our proposals. Does this mean that suggestions like scientific research or lobbying where it’s very hard to estimate costs and probability of success are invalid? How would you respond if someone submitted a proposal for, say, funding anti-aging research? (this is not what I plan to submit btw) Would it have the potential of winning a prize?
And what about providing funding for for-profit companies that could have a positive impact?
From their FAQs:
Can I submit multiple entries?
Yes. You can submit up to 3 entries as an author or co-author.
That explanation is a bit vague, I don’t understand what you mean. By “quantitative thinking” do you mean something like having a textual length simplicity prior over moralities? By triumph of moral imagination do you mean somehow changing the mental representation of the world you are evaluating so that it represents better the state of the world? Why do you call it a triumph (implying it’s good) over small-scope concerns? Why do you say this is an empirical question? What do you plan on testing?