Thanks for the post. I agree that this is an important question. I do, however, have many disagreements.
2 objects to the OP using an example from science fiction, and immediately goes on to propose a science fiction intervention.
1 seems like an irrelevant objection. Animal welfare interventions are marketed as Effective Altruist or utilitarian interventions because of the amount of suffering we can avert by improving conditions in factory farms or reducing the amount of food produced that way. This doesn't imply that other people don't have other reasons to care about animals. The OP's argument is that the specifically utilitarian, aggregativist argument for animal welfare interventions favors wireheading chickens over other interventions pushed more frequently.
Re point 2: I agree that vat-grown meat would eventually be a viable approach, and the least controversial one. I am less optimistic about the timeframe, the taste. the acceptance rate and the costs.
Re point 1: See my reply to Ozy and others.
Re point 3: While I disagree with your assessment of "major flaws" (talk about being dismissive!), I accept the critique of the tone of the post sounding dismissive. If I were writing a formal report or a presentation at an EA event, I would take a lot more time and a lot more care to sound appropriately professional. I will endeavor to spend more time on polishing the presentation next time I write a controversial LW post.
This Berkeley Dad TRIPLED His Karma With One Weird Trick (Mods HATE Him!):
This is a good start but you really need to implement differential kerning. Lofty words like 'Behoove' and 'Splendiferous' must be given the full horizontal space commanded by their dignity.
I strongly agree. Despite appearances, I wouldn't say someone with 10 bitcoin today has "won" at all. Winning means getting more of what you ultimately care about, like goods and services. You only win if you convert your bitcoin into goods or dollars at the right time. I am reminded of "buy low, sell high": an empty phrase that can sound deceptively like good investment advice.
Okay, this project overshot my expectations. Congratulations to the winners!
Ord (2014) is all I'm aware of and it's unpublished.
Your editor chokes on URLs with underscores. I had to go to a URL shortener! https://goo.gl/NtauDz
This paper contains some interesting results regarding how exactly one should aggregate credences.
Abstract:
How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? In a Bayesian setting, the natural question is how to aggregate credences: how to use a single credence function to naturally represent a collection of different credence functions. An extension of the standard Dutch-book arguments that apply to individual decision-makers recommends that group credences should be updated by conditionalization. This imposes a natural const...
Good answer :)
I'm curious why you chose Thrasymachus as your username. Do you agree with him, as portrayed in the Republic?
No. I chose him as a mark of self-effacement. When I was younger I went around discussion forums about philosophy, and people commonly named themselves after ancient greats like Socrates, Hume, etc. Given Thrasymachus's claim to fame is being rude, making some not great arguments, and getting spanked by Socrates before the real discussion started (although I think most experts think Socrates's techne based reply was pretty weak), I thought he would be a more accurate pseudonym,
Your comment is a little bit confusing.
The key claim is that it's perfectly feasible for a lay-person to confidently know a better monetary policy than the BoJ. This generalises such that
I assume you mean "the key claim" to apply to the second sentence as well. As in:
The key claim is that this generalises such that when you read someone making such a passing claim that BoJ's monetary policy is insane, this is basically zero evidence regarding whether the speaker is overconfident or not, because given the world we live in they could to...
Even if we believed that central bankers are purely selfish, and don't care at all about the mandate they have nominally taken on, they still have some incentive to produce higher employment (inflation being equal). Politicians encourage them to do so, and they get prestige among macroeconomists (e.g. "wow FED chairperson X presided over the longest period of peacetime growth since 1900."). To paraphrase evolution-is-just-a-theorem: what incentive do central bankers have not to puruse adequately loose monteray policy?
This was fun!
Effective altruism does not imply utilitarianism. Utilitarianism (on most definitions) does not imply hedonism. I would guess less than 10% of EAs (or of animal-focused EAs) would consider themselves thoroughgoing hedonists, of the kind that would endorse e.g. injecting a substance that would numb humans to physical pain or amputating human body parts, if this reduced suffering even a little bit. So on the contrary, I think the objection is relevant.