I really enjoyed reading this and it has strong implications for the allocation of resources in EA. With MEC framework, totalist theories dominate all the decision-making. I can't say that I am convinced by PRT but I hope it gets discussed more widely.

In the paper, you write:

Each theory-agent Aj is endowed with a share of the decision maker’s resources in χi proportional to the decision maker’s credence at the time of χn in the corresponding moral theory Tj .

So, that, effectively, resource shares always track credences in theories. Wouldn't this be unfair to the theories/theory-agents who invest disproportionately in growing or preserving their resources?

The theories/theory-agents could coordinate to save and invest to avoid tragedy of the commons, but some may still be more interested in saving/investing than others, and will effectively be forced to transfer wealth to those that spend more. Some may even be willing to put themselves in net debt, but this debt could be partially transferred to others.

Like in your example, I also don't think we'd want to leave all of the gains a theory-agent made with that theory-agent if their theory lost almost all of its support. Taking only from their initial endowment doesn't seem to go far enough.

There are probably different ways to redistribute resources after credences change, but I imagine they'll all be problematic or at least have weird consequences, even if not objectionable per se.

Some ideas and problems in this section of the comment.

(1) The approach that seemed at first most obvious to me is to rescale resources proportionally with the relative changes to credences at each step:

Suppose your current shares of resources are $s_1,s_2,...,s_n$ across theories $T_1,T_2,...,T_n$. These should sum to 1. They need not necessarily be nonnegative, in case we want to allow net debts. Suppose your credences have been multiplied by $f_1,f_2,...,f_n$ since you last checked and redistributed. Then, you would want to distribute resources proportionally to the products $f_1{s}_1,f_2{s}_2,...,f_n{s}_n$. This may not sum to 1, so you have to normalize by the dot product, $f_1{s}_1+f_2{s}_2+...+f_n{s}_n$ to get the actual shares.

I expect the renormalization to lead to problems. If your credences in $T_1$ increases, and your credence in $T_2$ decreases by the same in absolute terms, but your credence in $T_3$ is unaffected, it seems weird and potentially problematic for this to affect $T_3$'s resources, especially if it means losing resources.

Also, if a theory with net negative resources (net debt) has credence in it increased, it shouldn't be forced further into debt, and it should normally gain resources on net. In those cases, it's not clear what we should do and why. We could just replace $f_j$ with $1/f_j$ or 1, before renormalizing.

(2) Instead then, we might adjust resource shares identically with our absolute credence adjustments, $a_1,a_n,...,a_n$, i.e. if the credence in theory $j$ has changed in absolute terms from $c_j$ to $c_j+a_j$, theory $j$'s resources should change from $s_j$ to $s_j+a_j$. Because $a_1+a_2+...+a_n=0$ (including if we add or drop theories), we wouldn't need to renormalize, and theories whose credences don't change aren't affected. This seems more natural and less ad hoc than the first approach.

But, we may sometimes have $s_j+a_j<0$, even with $c_j+a_j>0,s_j>0$, because the theory-agent has been spending down its resources or growing them less than others, and a theory with net positive resources and still positive credence in it is forced into debt or to give up the rest of its resources, which doesn't seem fair. It's not clear how much it should lose.

(3) Another approach would be to let the theory-agents decide ahead of time how resources should be redistributed with changes in credences, by some kind of vote (moral parliament). We don't need to decide this for them. But this could disproportionately favour more popular views (or coalitions of views). You could have them vote as if they don't know the credences in and resources with each theory (or as if they assume they'd only get a small fraction of the resources) and impartially across theories to prevent some biased rules and tyranny of the majority.

(4) Or we could use ad hoc fixes to the first two and hack them together. In (2), don't let a theory that had net positive resources go into debt because of credence changes, but allow it to hit 0, and just redistribute less to the theories that should have gained, in proportion to how much they should have gained (from the theory that hit 0, ideally). Then we could average this with some version of (1).

At a minimum, I'd probably want:

1. If the credence in a theory hasn't decreased, it shouldn't lose resources when redistributing.
   1. In particular, if a theory-agent puts itself into net debt, it shouldn't get to transfer that debt to others just because the credence in that theory decreased. Or, maybe this should be an exception to the rule, but it could incentivize debt-taking in a bad way.
2. A theory shouldn't be put into debt or left with no resources after redistribution with credence changes, if it had positive net resources just before and still has positive overall credence in it after.
3. Changes in resources should scale with the changes in credences and go in the same direction (or not change, in some cases). Substantial changes in credences should normally lead to substantial changes in resources, and small changes in credences should lead to small (or 0) changes in resources. If a theory had positive resources before redistribution and lost (almost) all credence in it, it should transfer (almost) all of its resources to others (maybe paying debts to other theory-agents first?).

Finally, suppose that W is negative. In that case, Ahealth and Afuture ’s initial wealth endowments chealthW and cfutureW will likewise be negative. In other words: Ahealth and Afuture will initially be endowed with debts. Both Ahealth and Afuturewill have to earn enough money – either through working, or through trading with each other – to pay off their initial debts before they can donate any money to charitable causes.

This seems kind of inflexible to me, as a strict rule, rather than a guideline, if that's the intention. Why shouldn't they be able to donate? Maybe they expect to earn back more easily in the future and some donation opportunities are pressing now. Furthermore, "donation" is a somewhat artificial category: taking on some kinds of debt could be seen as donations if they will benefit future direct donations or future direct work. Taking on lower paying direct work instead of going for higher paying jobs to pay off the debt faster also seems like a donation.

I'm interested in promoting robustly positive portfolios of interventions (e.g. in my post here).

Could the property rights approach be adapted to internalize negative (and positive) externalities? Suppose view A pursues an intervention that is net negative according to view B. Should A compensate B at the minimum cost to make up for the harm or prevent it from actually materializing*? A and B could look for some compromise intervention together instead, but it may actually be better for A to pursue its own intervention that's harmful according to B and for B to make up for that harm (and also pursue its own ends separately).

*perhaps weighting this compensation by some function of the credences in each view, e.g. $\frac{credenceinB}{credenceinA}$? Otherwise fringe views could get disproportionate resources. On the other hand, if you do weight this way, this may not be enough to make up for or prevent the harm. I'm not sure there's any satisfactory way to do this.

TL;DR, so this might be addressed in the paper

FWIW my first impulse when reading the summary is that proportionality does not seem particularly desirable.

In particular:

1. I think it's reasonable for one of the moral theories to give up part of their alloted resources if the other moral theory believes the stakes are sufficiently high. The distribution should be stakes sensitive (though inter-moral theory comparisons of stakes is something that is not clear how to do)
2. The answer does not seem to guide individual action very well, at least in the example. Even accepting proportionality, it seems that how I split my portfolio should be influenced by the resource allocation of the world at large.

If you found this post helpful, please consider completing HLI's 2022 Impact Survey.

Most questions are multiple-choice and all questions are optional. It should take you around 15 minutes depending on how much you want to say.