It’s fascinating to me to see people changing their recommended meta-ethics due to a very public bad actor and related financial meltdown. How does the FTX meltdown and fraud change your fundamental priorities OR your mechanisms for evaluating actions within those priorities?
Sure, adding some humility to the evaluation function is wise. Recognize that things probably aren’t as linear as you think (and certainly not as precise), when you get toward very large or small numbers. Update to focus on nearer-term, safer improvements. And reducing your trust (for those of you who had it) in the assumption that rich people who say comforting words are actually aligned in any useful way is … so obvious that I’m sad to have to say it.
But if you have believed for years that you can aggregate and compare future population utility against current experiences, and predict what actions will have large impacts on that future, it’s really odd if you give that up based on things that happened recently.
[ note: I am not utilitarian, but I am consequentialist. I never made the assumption that SBF was a pure (or even net) good, nor that his methods were likely to sustain. But even if I were surprised by this, I don’t see how it’s new evidence about something so fundamental. ]
I feel like FTX is a point against utilitarianism for the same reasons Bentham is a point for utilitarianism. If you take an ethical system to logical conclusions and anticipate feminism, animal rights, etc. this is evidence for a certain algorithm creating good in practice. If you commit massive fraud this is evidence against.
This also doesn’t shift my meta-ethics much, so maybe I’m not one of the people you’re talking about?
It’s fascinating to me to see people changing their recommended meta-ethics due to a very public bad actor and related financial meltdown. How does the FTX meltdown and fraud change your fundamental priorities OR your mechanisms for evaluating actions within those priorities?
Sure, adding some humility to the evaluation function is wise. Recognize that things probably aren’t as linear as you think (and certainly not as precise), when you get toward very large or small numbers. Update to focus on nearer-term, safer improvements. And reducing your trust (for those of you who had it) in the assumption that rich people who say comforting words are actually aligned in any useful way is … so obvious that I’m sad to have to say it.
But if you have believed for years that you can aggregate and compare future population utility against current experiences, and predict what actions will have large impacts on that future, it’s really odd if you give that up based on things that happened recently.
[ note: I am not utilitarian, but I am consequentialist. I never made the assumption that SBF was a pure (or even net) good, nor that his methods were likely to sustain. But even if I were surprised by this, I don’t see how it’s new evidence about something so fundamental. ]
I feel like FTX is a point against utilitarianism for the same reasons Bentham is a point for utilitarianism. If you take an ethical system to logical conclusions and anticipate feminism, animal rights, etc. this is evidence for a certain algorithm creating good in practice. If you commit massive fraud this is evidence against.
This also doesn’t shift my meta-ethics much, so maybe I’m not one of the people you’re talking about?
I agree, and I’m unsure why EAs are updating so much, short of PR reasons.
This doesn’t change much for me, because it doesn’t change the probabilities of moral realism being true.