Dear all,
For example: There are things we currently do not know about human psychology, some of which bear on how inclined we are toward peace and cooperation. Perhaps Steven Pinker is right, and violence will continue its steady decline, until one evening sees the world’s last bar fight and humanity is at peace forever after.
My belief is that peace and cooperation occurs when the marginally benefit of doing so outweighs the benefit of not doing so. The incremental benefit of an individual to decide to join cooperate in a group would essential be based on the decision of whether the marginal utility of doing so outweighs the decision to not do so. A fundamental aspect of the human condition is that it generates marginal utility to even sense a physical forms of what bears similarities to you (as we are going to the basest of human conditions) and hence, at heart of the human condition is a underlying base for peace and cooperation. And hence of course, the next important question to ask is then, to what extent of our physical conditions of the world and ourselves bearing upon these base conditions would trigger a non-cooperation decision.
Once we start thinking along these lines, we open various cans of worms. If our x-risk reduction effort starts far “upstream”, e.g. with an effort to make people more cooperative and peace-loving in general, to what extent should we take the success of the intermediate steps (which must succeed for the x-risk reduction effort to succeed) as evidence that the saved world would go on to a great future? Should we incorporate the fact of our own choice to pursue x-risk reduction itself into our estimate of the expected value of the future, as recommended by evidential decision theory, or should we exclude it, as recommended by causal? How should we generate all these conditional expected values, anyway?
My beliefs is that teachings and information dissemination can only go so far to make people more cooperative and peace loving. The final limitations we face are the fundamental human conditions that we are born with, and of course, if if we set out to improve and enhance the base fundamentals attributable to our biological conditions based on a concept of positive value creation benchmarked to the fundamental human conditions since the Big Bang, i believe that these should tend to magnitudes of infinity and a near zero concept of our physical vessel will be ideal for humanity.
The way i would think of the dilemma between EDT and Casual theory would be that, we have as humans, thrive since the origin as a result of cooperation and more importantly, a love for ourselves and those around us, and that i think people generally don’t die, even from having too much of a good thing.. but too much of a bad thing, on a balance of probability kills more than the former.
Thank you, i will be happy to hear all of your comments on this
Kind regards,
Wei Lun
Dear drbrake,
I can see where your key feedbacks are coming from, i think what you are proposing is definitely valid and should definitely layered on top of saving lives. But i think it’s not easy, even such a thought movement such as Effective Altruism has only been recently gaining traction. It’s a luxury and privilege to think of helping others on the scale that EA or other multi-laterals can do and often it’s a decision to weigh the immediately value accretive decisions such as saving lives over more specific treatments. But i as definitely agree with the validity of your points as a forward looking initiative
Kind regards,
Wei Lun