Ratcourse comments on A critique of effective altruism - Less Wrong

64 Post author: benkuhn 02 December 2013 04:53PM

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Comment author: Ratcourse 02 December 2013 07:33:16PM 0 points [-]

"Hmm. I didn't interpret a hypothetical apostasy as the fiercest critique, but rather the best critique--i.e. weight the arguments not by "badness if true" but by something like badness times plausibility."

See http://www.amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/risk.pdf. Plausibility depends on your current model/arguments/evidence. If the badness times probability of these being wrong dwarfs the former, you must account for it.