The evidentialist’s wager
William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University), Aron Vallinder (Forethought Foundation), Caspar Österheld (Duke University), Carl Shulman (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Johannes Treutlein (TU Berlin)
GPI Working Paper No. 12-2019
Suppose that an altruistic and morally motivated agent who is uncertain between evidential decision theory (EDT) and causal decision theory (CDT) finds herself in a situation in which the two theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act in accordance with EDT. First, we claim that that the appropriate response to normative uncertainty is to hedge one’s bets. That is, if the stakes are much higher on one theory than another, and the credences you assign to each of these theories aren’t very different, then it’s appropriate to choose the option which performs best on the high-stakes theory. Second, we show that, given the assumption of altruism, the existence of correlated decision-makers will increase the stakes for EDT but leave the stakes for CDT unaffected. Together these two claims imply that whenever there are sufficiently many correlated agents, the appropriate response is to act in accordance with EDT.
Other working papers
Crying wolf: Warning about societal risks can be reputationally risky – Lucius Caviola (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) et al.
Society relies on expert warnings about large-scale risks like pandemics and natural disasters. Across ten studies (N = 5,342), we demonstrate people’s reluctance to warn about unlikely but large-scale risks because they are concerned about being blamed for being wrong. In particular, warners anticipate that if the risk doesn’t occur, they will be perceived as overly alarmist and responsible for wasting societal resources. This phenomenon appears in the context of natural, technological, and financial risks…
Dynamic public good provision under time preference heterogeneity – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
I explore the implications of time preference heterogeneity for the private funding of public goods. The assumption that players use a common discount rate is knife-edge: relaxing it yields substantially different equilibria, for two reasons. First, time preference heterogeneity motivates intertemporal polarization, analogous to the polarization seen in a static public good game. In the simplest settings, more patient players spend nothing early in time and less patient players spending nothing later. Second…
Respect for others’ risk attitudes and the long-run future – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
When our choice affects some other person and the outcome is unknown, it has been argued that we should defer to their risk attitude, if known, or else default to use of a risk avoidant risk function. This, in turn, has been claimed to require the use of a risk avoidant risk function when making decisions that primarily affect future people, and to decrease the desirability of efforts to prevent human extinction, owing to the significant risks associated with continued human survival. …