Tough enough? Robust satisficing as a decision norm for long-term policy analysis
Andreas Mogensen and David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
GPI Working Paper No. 15-2020, published in Synthese
This paper aims to open a dialogue between philosophers working in decision theory and operations researchers and engineers whose research addresses the topic of decision making under deep uncertainty. Specifically, we assess the recommendation to follow a norm of robust satisficing when making decisions under deep uncertainty in the context of decision analyses that rely on the tools of Robust Decision Making developed by Robert Lempert and colleagues at RAND. We discuss decision-theoretic and voting-theoretic motivations for robust satisficing, then use these motivations to select among candidate formulations of the robust satisficing norm. We also discuss two challenges for robust satisficing: whether the norm might in fact derive its plausibility from an implicit appeal to probabilistic representations of uncertainty of the kind that deep uncertainty is supposed to preclude; and whether there is adequate justification for adopting a satisficing norm, as opposed to an optimizing norm that is sensitive to considerations of robustness.
Other working papers
Can an evidentialist be risk-averse? – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Two key questions of normative decision theory are: 1) whether the probabilities relevant to decision theory are evidential or causal; and 2) whether agents should be risk-neutral, and so maximise the expected value of the outcome, or instead risk-averse (or otherwise sensitive to risk). These questions are typically thought to be independent – that our answer to one bears little on our answer to the other. …
It Only Takes One: The Psychology of Unilateral Decisions – Joshua Lewis (New York University) et al.
Sometimes, one decision can guarantee that a risky event will happen. For instance, it only took one team of researchers to synthesize and publish the horsepox genome, thus imposing its publication even though other researchers might have refrained for biosecurity reasons. We examine cases where everybody who can impose a given event has the same goal but different information about whether the event furthers that goal. …
Maximal cluelessness – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance…