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Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
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This post is part of the Cross-Cause Fund (CCF) series by Rethink Priorities — a sequence of articles dedicated to effective giving across philanthropic areas.
TL;DR:
There is a seemingly plausible argument that do...
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Will MacAskill's "Saturation View" write-up describes a view that tries to get around the Mere Addition Paradox and the Repugnant Conclusion by valuing variety.
This fails "Non-Anti-Egalitarianism" i.e. it sometimes places a lower value on a world where the same people have a more equal welfare and also a greater average welfare. He claims that it satisfies a weaker version in which the people don't change their "types" but I think that's not correct.
For his toy example (see screenshot): Call the top-left and bottom-right squares in the 3x3 grid red and blue. Consider two worlds:
The unequal world has total welfare 16 while the equal world has total welfare 18. The cumulative welfare of the lowest-welfare N members is also greater for the equal world for all N from 1 to 9.
However, Toy-Saturationism awards the unequal world a value of 24/5 = 4.8, which is greater than the equal world's value of 232/5 ≈ 4.2.
The choice of
In reality, I expect saturation views suffer badly from this problem of creating inequality for the sake of the "variety" values they introduce.
I think this is a strong objection. If the equal world has higher total welfare and higher cumulative welfare at every population cutoff, yet saturationism still prefers the unequal world, then the variety bonus seems to be doing too much work. It effectively rewards inequality even when equalization benefits everyone. This also makes the claim that the view satisfies a weaker form of Non-Anti-Egalitarianism worth reconsidering, especially if the individuals retain their types.
Pangram identifies this reply as 100% AI written; I checked because the writing seemed to me like AI text.