Moreover, people generally prefer life to freedom (they wouldn't choose the death penalty as a punishment over prison or even modern slavery), and if you go out and talk to people in LMICs, you'll largely find they prioritize the lives and health of their kids and themselves + having a job & escaping poverty over abstract notions of freedom. If you want to centre people's preferences, you have to take that into account.
I don't see how this example shows anything. The reason governments have to expend effort enforcing their paternalistic regulations is because these regulations violate the preferences of consumers. Now maybe you think consumer preferences are wrong, but forcibly limiting people's abilities to take an option that they prefer is clearly not "centering people's preferences", unless you think your methodology is somehow better placed to figure out what people's preferences are than their actual choices.
In general it's okay for a person to look at a dozen different paintings and then make a new painting that's kind of like those paintings. This seems pretty analogous to what AI is doing and I'm not sure why it becomes not OK if it's done by a corporation training an AI model. Perhaps there are specific violations of IP laws, and those can be discussed (and some of them are being adjudicated in court as we speak), and of course there is a separate question of whether those IP laws are just. However, what AI models doing to me seems mostly like it's the sort of behavior we would be OK with individual people doing: i.e closer to the remixing/synthesizing end of the spectrum than the copying/"stealing" end.
I don't know how philosophically sound they are, but the following rules, taken from the RP moral parliament tool, would end up splitting donations among multiple causes:
Maximize Minimum; "Sometimes termed the 'Rawlsian Social Welfare Function', this method maximizes the payoff for the least-satisfied worldview. This method treats utilities for all worldviews as if they fall on the same scale, despite the fact that some worldviews see more avenues for value than others. The number of parliamentarians assigned to each worldview doesn't matter because the least satisfied parliamentarian is decisive."
Moral Marketplace: "This method gives each parliamentarian a slice of the budget to allocate as they each see fit, then combines each's chosen allocation into one shared portfolio. This process is relatively insensitive to considerations of decreasing cost-effectiveness. For more formal details, see this paper."
There are a few other other voting/bargaining style views they have that can also lead to splitting.
I don't really have anything intelligent to say about whether or not it makes sense to apply these rules for individual donations, or whether these rules make sense at all, but I thought they were worth mentioning.
You seem to be assuming a maximize-expected-choiceworthiness or a my-favorite-theory rule for dealing with moral uncertainty. There are other plausible rules, such as a moral parliament model, which could endorse splitting.
Why would this be? For example, could not an individual donor be uncertain of the moral status of animals and therefore morally uncertain about the relative value of donations to an animal welfare charity compared to a human welfare one?
my example was merely trying to show that if patient philanthropy is preferred, then a wait and donate strategy is better than relying on inter-generational transfers.
we have to assume that for some arbitrary reason we do not care about the first three generations of poor people at all, only about the poor people in 100 years' time
No, we don't. We merely have to believe (in expectation) that our marginal money is better spent a few generations in the future than on the current generation. This is of course contested but there are plenty of non-arbitrary reasons to believe it. For example, if you doubt catch-up growth, and you think there will still be some very poor (in absolute terms) countries around a few generations in the future, then a few generations the future you will expect to have
more money, due to compound returns of your savings
a population of people that are about as easy to help as they are now
So you can help people more then than you can now. (this is obviously glossing over a ton of details like those covered in Trammel's report but I think it helps get at the intuition).
Most individual-level income gains like we see from tin roofs do not compound across generations at anything like market rates (we can see inter-generational income elasticity is far less than 1 in low-income countries which implies income gains to one generation get diluted over time).
So lets say we are targeting population P - these are the recipients. P is the population of people most in need that will be around in 100 years. Most of them do not currently exist. We want to spend money to help P either in the form of direct cash transfers or health interventions.
We can do that by investing our money and then handing it out to the individuals in P once they come into existence. This is option A, aka the patient philanthropy strategy.
We could also give to the parents or grandparents of P, some of which are alive today, which we can call P_p and P_g. I am assuming this is what you mean by "Give it to their ancestors.". I call this Option B. Option B is worse because:
some of the money is consumed by P_p and P_g instead of passed thru to P. In this example we are assuming P is where our money is the most cost-effective so this is bad.
since we don't know what areas will be most in need for the next few generations we don't know quite who P_p and P_g are.
Option A: Put money in an index fund, let it grow, spend it in 100 years
Option B: give it to people who will spend some of it now, invest some, pass on some to their children, who will in turn spend some of it, invest some of it, and pass it onto their children, leaving some for their grandchildren to spend in 100 years.
Option A leads to a bigger counterfactual increase in spending-100-years-from-now which is what we care about in this (admittedly contrived) example
Plausibly Excel has obtained superintelligence but is, as per the aestivation hypothesis, biding its time and storing energy until the universe cools.
I don't see how this example shows anything. The reason governments have to expend effort enforcing their paternalistic regulations is because these regulations violate the preferences of consumers. Now maybe you think consumer preferences are wrong, but forcibly limiting people's abilities to take an option that they prefer is clearly not "centering people's preferences", unless you think your methodology is somehow better placed to figure out what people's preferences are than their actual choices.
In general it's okay for a person to look at a dozen different paintings and then make a new painting that's kind of like those paintings. This seems pretty analogous to what AI is doing and I'm not sure why it becomes not OK if it's done by a corporation training an AI model. Perhaps there are specific violations of IP laws, and those can be discussed (and some of them are being adjudicated in court as we speak), and of course there is a separate question of whether those IP laws are just. However, what AI models doing to me seems mostly like it's the sort of behavior we would be OK with individual people doing: i.e closer to the remixing/synthesizing end of the spectrum than the copying/"stealing" end.
https://www.interceptfund.com/
I don't know how philosophically sound they are, but the following rules, taken from the RP moral parliament tool, would end up splitting donations among multiple causes:
There are a few other other voting/bargaining style views they have that can also lead to splitting.
I don't really have anything intelligent to say about whether or not it makes sense to apply these rules for individual donations, or whether these rules make sense at all, but I thought they were worth mentioning.
You seem to be assuming a maximize-expected-choiceworthiness or a my-favorite-theory rule for dealing with moral uncertainty. There are other plausible rules, such as a moral parliament model, which could endorse splitting.
Why would this be? For example, could not an individual donor be uncertain of the moral status of animals and therefore morally uncertain about the relative value of donations to an animal welfare charity compared to a human welfare one?
my example was merely trying to show that if patient philanthropy is preferred, then a wait and donate strategy is better than relying on inter-generational transfers.
No, we don't. We merely have to believe (in expectation) that our marginal money is better spent a few generations in the future than on the current generation. This is of course contested but there are plenty of non-arbitrary reasons to believe it. For example, if you doubt catch-up growth, and you think there will still be some very poor (in absolute terms) countries around a few generations in the future, then a few generations the future you will expect to have
So you can help people more then than you can now. (this is obviously glossing over a ton of details like those covered in Trammel's report but I think it helps get at the intuition).
Most individual-level income gains like we see from tin roofs do not compound across generations at anything like market rates (we can see inter-generational income elasticity is far less than 1 in low-income countries which implies income gains to one generation get diluted over time).
So lets say we are targeting population P - these are the recipients. P is the population of people most in need that will be around in 100 years. Most of them do not currently exist. We want to spend money to help P either in the form of direct cash transfers or health interventions.
We can do that by investing our money and then handing it out to the individuals in P once they come into existence. This is option A, aka the patient philanthropy strategy.
We could also give to the parents or grandparents of P, some of which are alive today, which we can call P_p and P_g. I am assuming this is what you mean by "Give it to their ancestors.". I call this Option B. Option B is worse because:
see my previous comment:
Giving it to their ancestors is choosing option B