I don't think there's much need for heuristics like "rate of effectiveness change times donation must be much smaller - say, a few percent of - effectiveness itself."

If you're really using a Landsburg-style calculation to decide where to donate to, you've already estimated the effectiveness of the second-most effective charity, so you can just say that effectiveness drop must be no greater than the corresponding difference.

Thanks for all the replies. As I said in the post, I also don't think Adams is completely serious. Here is the weaker version of his argument that I find interesting: if someone can make you (or maybe other rational/informed people) laugh at your beliefs, should that cause you to reassess your level of certainty in those beliefs?

In other words, I don't think Adams really believes that someone "successfully" mocking your opinions automatically makes them false -- but he's asserting at least some connection between this kind of humor and truth. Which feels right to me, though I can't really articulate it any better than he did.

Or maybe it's more of a connection to self-deception -- the easier it is to laugh at your own beliefs, the more likely they are to be somehow insincere, regardless of their truth or falsehood.

Besides, it's not like muggles are a protected class. And if they were? Just keep them from applying in the first place, by building your office somewhere they can't get to. There aren't any legal restrictions on that.

You joke, but the world [1] really is choking with inefficient, kludgey workarounds for the legal prohibition of effective employment screening. For example, the entire higher education market has become, basically, a case of employers passing off tests to universities that they can't legally administer themselves. You're a terrorist if you give an IQ test to applicants, but not if you require a completely irrelevant college degree that requires taking the SAT (or the military's ASVAB or whatever the call it now).

It feels so good to ban discrimination, as long as you don't have to directly face the tradeoff you're making.

[1] Per MattherW's correction, this should read "Western developed economies" instead of "the world" -- though I'm sure the phenomenon I've described is more general the form it takes in the West.

I have two concerns about the practical implementation of this sort of thing:

1. It seems like there are cases where if a rule is being used then people could abuse it. For example, in job applications or admissions to medical schools. A better understanding of how the rule relates to what it predicts would be needed.

If X+Y predicts Z does that mean enhancing X and Y will up the probability of Z? Not necessarily, consider the example of happy marriages. Will having more sex make your relationship happier? Or does the rule work because happy couples tend to have more sex?

1. It is not true in every case that we equally value all true beliefs, and equally value all false beliefs. Certain rules might work better if we take into consideration a person's race, sex, religion and nationality. But most people find this sort of thing unpalatable because it can lead to the systematic persecution of sub groups, even if it results in more true, and fewer false, beliefs overall. It also might be the case that some of these rules discriminate against groups of people in more subtle ways that won't be immediately obvious.

Of course neither of these problems mean that there won't be perfectly good cases where these rules would improve decision making a lot.

In part 2, I sort of glossed over the technical stuff, but I was not talking about making up political dimensions like "more anti-war" and rating the answers to poll questions by hand. That is way too arbitrary for my taste. I'm talking about plain old dimensionality reduction. I had something like PCA in mind (if we were careful we might use a different method, but this is just illustrative.)

If you don't know about Principal Components Analysis, it's an important notion.

Wiki

Tutorial with a practical example

Another intro

The principle is that if you decide a priori what the "coordinates" are, you might pick wrong. You might not explain the variability in the data very well. Amazon.com doesn't have a pre-set category called "horror" and recommend you horror movies based on the fact that you've watched other horror movies. Amazon gauges "similarity" based on coordinates that arise naturally from the data (and maybe don't easily correspond to a property that can be given an English name.)

Maybe I'll write a top-level post explaining this sometime, if it isn't common knowledge.

I think trolley problems suffer from a different type of oversimplification.

Suppose in your system of ethics the correct action in this sort of situation depends on why the various different people got tied to the various bits of track, or on why 'you' ended up being in the situation where you get to control the direction of the trolley.

In that case, the trolley problem has abstracted away the information you need (and would normally have in the real world) to choose the right action.

(Or if you have a formulation which explicitly mentions the 'mad philosopher' and you take that bit seriously, then the question becomes an odd corner case rather than a simplifying thought experiment.)

Actually, something like this exists:

Reading the Mind in the Eyes

Apparently, people with high-functioning autism or Aspergers do much worse than control subjects.

ETA: I took the test myself and scored below normal:

Your score: 20
A typical score is in the range 22-30. If you scored over 30, you are very accurate at decoding a person's facial expressions around their eyes. A score under 22 indicates you find this quite difficult

I did, indeed, find the test extremely difficult. I usually look at the mouth more than the eyes when trying to read faces...

I think it's quite normal that if someone is acknowledged by their peers to be among the very best at what they do, they won't waste much time with status games.

There's an exception if doing what they do requires publicity to bring in sales or votes.

The analysis if all you know is that Omega is right 60% of the time would look different.

How exactly different?

All these thought experiments are realizable as simple computer programs, not only PD. In fact the post I linked to shows how to implement Newcomb's Problem.

The 99% case is not very different from the 100% case, it's continuous. If you're facing a 99% Omega (or even a 60% Omega) in Newcomb's Problem, you're still better off being a one-boxer. That's true even if both boxes are transparent and you can see what's in them before choosing whether to take one or two - a fact that should make any intellectually honest CDT-er stop and scratch their head.

No offense, but I think you should try to understand what's already been done (and why) before criticizing it.