New information argues for a change on the margin, so the new equilibrium is different, though it may not be far away. The arguments are not “cancelled out”, but they do only have bounded impact. Compare with charity evaluation in effective altruism: if we take the impact of certain decisions as sufficiently significant, it calls for their organized study, so that the decisions are no longer made based on first impressions. On the other hand, if there is already enough infrastructure for making good decisions of that type, then significant changes are unnecessary.
In the case of acausal impact, large reference classes imply that at least that many people are already affected, so if organized evaluation of such decisions is feasible to set up, it’s probably already in place without any need for the acausal impact argument. So actual changes are probably in how you pay attention to info that’s already available, not in creating infrastructure for generating better info. On the other hand, a source of info about sizes of reference classes may be useful.
New information argues for a change on the margin, so the new equilibrium is different, though it may not be far away. The arguments are not “cancelled out”, but they do only have bounded impact. Compare with charity evaluation in effective altruism: if we take the impact of certain decisions as sufficiently significant, it calls for their organized study, so that the decisions are no longer made based on first impressions. On the other hand, if there is already enough infrastructure for making good decisions of that type, then significant changes are unnecessary.
In the case of acausal impact, large reference classes imply that at least that many people are already affected, so if organized evaluation of such decisions is feasible to set up, it’s probably already in place without any need for the acausal impact argument. So actual changes are probably in how you pay attention to info that’s already available, not in creating infrastructure for generating better info. On the other hand, a source of info about sizes of reference classes may be useful.