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
In Defence of Moderation – Jacob Barrett (Vanderbilt University)
A decision theory is fanatical if it says that, for any sure thing of getting some finite amount of value, it would always be better to almost certainly get nothing while having some tiny probability (no matter how small) of getting sufficiently more finite value. Fanaticism is extremely counterintuitive; common sense requires a more moderate view. However, a recent slew of arguments purport to vindicate it, claiming that moderate alternatives to fanaticism are sometimes similarly counterintuitive, face a powerful continuum argument…
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. …
Prediction: The long and the short of it – Antony Millner (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Daniel Heyen (ETH Zurich)
Commentators often lament forecasters’ inability to provide precise predictions of the long-run behaviour of complex economic and physical systems. Yet their concerns often conflate the presence of substantial long-run uncertainty with the need for long-run predictability; short-run predictions can partially substitute for long-run predictions if decision-makers can adjust their activities over time. …