Interesting, thanks, will try to find more info!

"OpenPhil’s Worldview Investigations team" refers I think to Rethink Priorities', or another one at Open Philanthrophy? Thanks!

Hi Joe,

I much appreciated your post on deep atheism, and will still finish that. I also found this above post, and I thought I could contribute to the understanding at some points (as a Thesean myself).

• You seem to move to discussing content, not distinguished this from consciousness (as in Dennett's work), and perhaps even conflate the two concepts. Consciousness, I would refer with to, the mere platform, the capability that enables content to be featured. The self/I Dennett (r.i.p.) would conceive as "center of narrative gravity", in line with your reflections.
• Pragmatically there are tradeoffs in wrongly or rightly having confidence or not having confidence in your first person perspectives. Most commonly a belief in the reality of (the content of) consciousness co-occurs with the belief that one simply cannot be wrong about certain aspects of it, as opposed to them being "mere illusions", that not necessarily have realism. This is I think particulary relevant in, among many other highly relevant ethical applications, interpersonal power-dynamics, where the assertions in the necessary realism of some of (the content in) consciousness can only be effectively countered with a retalliatory healthy skepticism on this front. I also agree that how this should exactly look is not yet most clear, as is even also the case for a very senior scientist like Anil Seth, according to his reflections prompted by Daniel Dennett's passing.

Best,

Indra

"many causes we choose to support tend to be the result of" should I think be "many choices to support a cause tend to be the result of" as what follows should I think refer to the choice as opposed to the cause or charity.

“So holding lifespans fixed, a greater capacity for synchronic welfare does entail a greater capacity for diachronic welfare.” I’m missing here a discussion of adaptation, e.g. I might really like my first donut, but with more donuts my welfare capacity from another donut rapidly declines. The rate of this declining might differ across species. As such momentary peaks might be higher in one species while less rate of decline and less variance in another species inclunes larger diachronic welfare, despite lower synchronic welfare, at times, or, sustainably.

Thanks for this post and for drawing attention to the topic. I specialized in OR within my master degree with much enjoyment. I would very much enjoy a seminar series with EA-aligned or -adjacent OR-talks and/or OR research projects. Happy to connect on these topics!

In addition, we might also want to use - and take in account - our abilities to look ahead. Suppose for example a worthwhile task that requires two people to engage in it. The first person to engage in it gains zero marginal returns, while the latter gets everything (all of the returns as marginal returns). The first person might however predict the second person's behavior and based on the expectation that results engage with this task. By contrast, chimpanzees are not able to do this; You would never see two of them cooperate to together e.g. carry a log (research by Joseph Henrich).