It seems that specifying the delegates’ informational situation creates a dilemma.
As you write above, we should take the delegates to think that Parliament’s decision is a stochastic variable such that the probability of the Parliament taking action A is proportional to the fraction of votes for A, to avoid giving the majority bloc absolute power.
However, your suggestion generates its own problems (as long as we take the parliament to go with the option with the most votes):
Suppose an issue The Parliament votes on involves options A1, A2, …, An and an additional option X. Suppose further that the great majority of theories in which the agent has credence agree that it is very important to perform one of A1, A2, …, An rather than X. Although all these theories have a different favourite option, which of A1, A2, …, An is performed makes little difference to them.
Now suppose that according to an additional hypothesis in which the agent has relatively little credence, it is best to perform X.
Because the delegates who favour A1, A2, …, An do not know that what matters is getting the majority, they see no value in coordinating themselves and concentrating their votes on one or a few options to make sure X will not end up getting the most votes. Accordingly, they will all vote for different options. X may then end up being the option with most votes if the agent has slightly more credence in the hypothesis which favours X than in any other individual theory, despite the fact that the agent is almost sure that this option is grossly suboptimal.
This is clearly the wrong result.
danieldewey
The Future of Humanity Institute could make use of your money
Polymath-style attack on the Parliamentary Model for moral uncertainty
To me it looks like the main issues are in configuring the “delegates” so that they don’t “negotiate” quite like real agents—for example, there’s no delegate that will threaten to adopt an extremely negative policy in order to gain negotiating leverage over other delegates.
The part where we talk about these negotiations seems to me like the main pressure point on the moral theory qua moral theory—can we point to a form of negotiation that is isomorphic to the “right answer”, rather than just being an awkward tool to get closer to the right answer?
This is worth thinking about in the future, thanks. I think right now, it’s good to take advantage of MIRI’s matched giving opportunities when they arise, and I’d expect either organization to announce if they were under a particular crunch or aiming to hit a particular target.
Yes, thank you!
I am considering adding oysters and mussels to my vegetarian diet as a result of these two blog posts. I don’t have Good Information about the nutritional problems that come from avoiding meat or the nutritional benefits of adding oysters and mussels, but it seems like a good way to hedge against deficiencies without spending too much research time, especially since I’m cutting down on eggs (Warning: unpleasant image of chicken having its beak clipped appears relatively high on that page).
That being said, I do consider this kind of thing to be “reconciling daily behaviours with abstract ethical beliefs” more than I consider it an effective form of altruism; it looks to me like poverty and the long-term future are much better places to invest Actual Altruistic Effort.
...Vincent has now updated the paper; thanks again!
Thanks, Alex; I think you’re right, and am checking into it.
This is an interesting consideration. One related thing I think about is that potential technical contributors will usually need to pass through the outermost layer of the onion before they get to the inner ones, and so not bouncing them off with something that seems too non-technical is important. This should be adjustable independently of the “alarm level” of the language, though.
Nice find! This will come in handy.
Thanks for linking that paper, I hand’t encountered it and it seems useful.
My personal favourite of his essays: Against Reflective Equilibrium (or, What is ethics for?)
Noted; thanks.
believe that “Garbage In, Garbage Out” only applies to arithmetic, not to morality
Catchy! Mind if I steal a derivative of this?
Great post! I found this quite enlightening and easy to follow.
This impression, whether true or false, was interesting to me:
While intellectual curiosity was the dominant trait among attendees, fear was the emotion the Institute leveraged in trying to solicit support.
Makes sense. Thanks.
Thank you for posting this! What led you to it, or how did you find it?
META THREAD: what do you think about this project? About Polymath on LW?