Welfare and felt duration
Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 14-2023
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. However, I argue that we know of no way to make sense of what subjective duration consists in on which this claim turns out to be plausible. Moreover, some plausible theories of what subjective duration consists in strongly suggest that subjective duration is irrelevant in itself.
Other working papers
The epistemic challenge to longtermism – Christian Tarsney (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict— perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism…
Dispelling the Anthropic Shadow – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
There are some possible events that we could not possibly discover in our past. We could not discover an omnicidal catastrophe, an event so destructive that it permanently wiped out life on Earth. Had such a catastrophe occurred, we wouldn’t be here to find out. This space of unobservable histories has been called the anthropic shadow. Several authors claim that the anthropic shadow leads to an ‘observation selection bias’, analogous to survivorship bias, when we use the historical record to estimate catastrophic risks. …
Estimating long-term treatment effects without long-term outcome data – David Rhys Bernard (Rethink Priorities), Jojo Lee and Victor Yaneng Wang (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The surrogate index method allows policymakers to estimate long-run treatment effects before long-run outcomes are observable. We meta-analyse this approach over nine long-run RCTs in development economics, comparing surrogate estimates to estimates from actual long-run RCT outcomes. We introduce the M-lasso algorithm for constructing the surrogate approach’s first-stage predictive model and compare its performance with other surrogate estimation methods. …