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
Economic growth under transformative AI – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University) and Anton Korinek (University of Virginia)
Industrialized countries have long seen relatively stable growth in output per capita and a stable labor share. AI may be transformative, in the sense that it may break one or both of these stylized facts. This review outlines the ways this may happen by placing several strands of the literature on AI and growth within a common framework. We first evaluate models in which AI increases output production, for example via increases in capital’s substitutability for labor…
The unexpected value of the future – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Various philosophers accept moral views that are impartial, additive, and risk-neutral with respect to betterness. But, if that risk neutrality is spelt out according to expected value theory alone, such views face a dire reductio ad absurdum. If the expected sum of value in humanity’s future is undefined—if, e.g., the probability distribution over possible values of the future resembles the Pasadena game, or a Cauchy distribution—then those views say that no real-world option is ever better than any other. And, as I argue…
The freedom of future people – Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)
What happens to liberal political philosophy, if we consider not only the freedom of present but also future people? In this article, I explore the case for long-term liberalism: freedom should be a central goal, and we should often be particularly concerned with effects on long-term future distributions of freedom. I provide three arguments. First, liberals should be long-term liberals: liberal arguments to value freedom give us reason to be (particularly) concerned with future freedom…