Given any moral uncertainty, mixed motivations, etc (with an aggregation rule that doesn’t automatically hand the decision to the internal component that names the biggest number) the claim doesn’t go through.
This isn’t clear to me, especially given that Will only said roughly infinite.
An aggregation rule that says “follow the prescription of any moral hypothesis to which you assign at least 80% probability” might well make Will’s claim go through, and yet does not “automatically hand the decision to the internal component that names the biggest number” as I understand that phrase; after all, the hypothesis won out by being 80% probable and not by naming the biggest number. Some other hypothesis could have won out by naming a smaller number (than the numbers that turn up in discussions of astronomical waste), if it had seemed true.
I don’t actually endorse that particular aggregation rule, but for me to be convinced that all plausible candidates avoid Will’s conclusion that the relevant value here is “roughly infinite” (or the much weaker conclusion that LW is irrationally scope-insensitive here) would require some further argument.
This isn’t clear to me, especially given that Will only said roughly infinite.
An aggregation rule that says “follow the prescription of any moral hypothesis to which you assign at least 80% probability” might well make Will’s claim go through, and yet does not “automatically hand the decision to the internal component that names the biggest number” as I understand that phrase; after all, the hypothesis won out by being 80% probable and not by naming the biggest number. Some other hypothesis could have won out by naming a smaller number (than the numbers that turn up in discussions of astronomical waste), if it had seemed true.
I don’t actually endorse that particular aggregation rule, but for me to be convinced that all plausible candidates avoid Will’s conclusion that the relevant value here is “roughly infinite” (or the much weaker conclusion that LW is irrationally scope-insensitive here) would require some further argument.