The Significance, Persistence, Contingency Framework
William MacAskill, Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Aron Vallinder (Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Institute)
GPI Technical Report No. T1-2022
The world, considered from beginning to end, combines many different features, or states of affairs, that contribute to its value. The value of each feature can be factored into its significance—its average value per unit time—and its persistence—how long it lasts. Sometimes, though, we want to ask a further question: how much of the feature’s value can be attributed to a particular agent’s decision at a particular point in time (or to some other originating event)? In other words, to what extent is the feature’s value contingent on the agent’s choice? For this, we must also look at the counterfactual: how would things have turned out otherwise?
Other working papers
The structure of critical sets – Walter Bossert (University of Montreal), Susumu Cato (University of Tokyo) and Kohei Kamaga (Sophia University)
The purpose of this paper is to address some ambiguities and misunderstandings that appear in previous studies of population ethics. In particular, we examine the structure of intervals that are employed in assessing the value of adding people to an existing population. Our focus is on critical-band utilitarianism and critical-range utilitarianism, which are commonly-used population theories that employ intervals, and we show that some previously assumed equivalences are not true in general. The possible discrepancies can be…
Welfare and felt duration – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
How should we understand the duration of a pleasant or unpleasant sensation, insofar as its duration modulates how good or bad the experience is overall? Given that we seem able to distinguish between subjective and objective duration and that how well or badly someone’s life goes is naturally thought of as something to be assessed from her own perspective, it seems intuitive that it is subjective duration that modulates how good or bad an experience is from the perspective of an individual’s welfare. …
Towards shutdownable agents via stochastic choice – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford), Alexander Roman (New College of Florida), Christos Ziakas (Independent), Leyton Ho (Brown University), and Louis Thomson (University of Oxford)
Some worry that advanced artificial agents may resist being shut down. The Incomplete Preferences Proposal (IPP) is an idea for ensuring that does not happen. A key part of the IPP is using a novel ‘Discounted Reward for Same-Length Trajectories (DReST)’ reward function to train agents to (1) pursue goals effectively conditional on each trajectory-length (be ‘USEFUL’), and (2) choose stochastically between different trajectory-lengths (be ‘NEUTRAL’ about trajectory-lengths). In this paper, we propose…