lessdazed comments on Why We Can't Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They're Unbiased) - Less Wrong

75 Post author: HoldenKarnofsky 18 August 2011 11:34PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 August 2011 10:38:57PM 15 points [-]

Leaving aside Aumann questions: If people like that think that the Future of Humanity Institute, work on human rationality, or Giving What We Can has a large probability of catalyzing the creation of an effective institution, they should quite plausibly be looking there instead. "I should be doing something I think is at least medium-probably remedying the sheerly stupid situation humanity has gotten itself into with respect to the intelligence explosion" seems like a valuable summary heuristic.

If you can't think of anything medium-probable, using that as an excuse to do nothing is unacceptable. Figure out which of the people trying to address the problem seem most competent and gamble on something interesting happening if you give them more money. Money is the unit of caring and I can't begin to tell you how much things change when you add more money to them. Imagine what the global financial sector would look like if it was funded to the tune of $600,000/year. You would probably think it wasn't worth scaling up Earth's financial sector.

Comment author: lessdazed 20 August 2011 11:18:45AM 2 points [-]

Imagine what the global financial sector would look like if it was funded to the tune of $600,000/year. You would probably think it wasn't worth scaling up Earth's financial sector.

And one might even be right about that.

A better analogy might be if regulation of the global financial sector were funded at 600k/yr.