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Christian Tarsney

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Paper summary: The Epistemic Challenge to Longtermism (Christian Tarsney), published by Global Priorities Institute on October 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Note: The Global Priorities Institute (GPI) has started to create summaries of some working papers by GPI researchers with the aim to make our research more accessible to people outside of academic philosophy (e.g. interested people in the effective altruism community). We welcome any feedback on the usefulness of these summaries.Summary: The Epistemic Challenge to LongtermismThis is a summary of the GPI Working Paper "The epistemic challenge to longtermism" by Christian Tarsney. The summary was written by Elliott Thornley.According to longtermism, what we should do mainly depends on how our actions might affect the long-term future. This claim faces a challenge: the course of the long-term future is difficult to predict, and the effects of our actions on the long-term future might be so unpredictable as to make longtermism false. In “The epistemic challenge to longtermism”, Christian Tarsney evaluates one version of this epistemic challenge and comes to a mixed conclusion. On some plausible worldviews, longtermism stands up to the epistemic challenge. On others, longtermism’s status depends on whether we should take certain high-stakes, long-shot gambles.Tarsney begins by assuming expectational utilitarianism: roughly, the view that we should assign precise probabilities to all decision-relevant possibilities, value possible futures in line with their total welfare, and maximise expected value. This assumption sets aside ethical challenges to longtermism and focuses the discussion on the epistemic challenge.Persistent-difference strategiesTarsney outlines one broad class of strategies for improving the long-term future: persistent-difference strategies. These strategies aim to put the world into some valuable state S when it would otherwise have been in some less valuable state ¬S, in the hope that this difference will persist for a long time. Epistemic persistence skepticism is the view that identifying interventions likely to make a persistent difference is prohibitively difficult — so difficult that the actions with the greatest expected value do most of their good in the near-term. It is this version of the epistemic challenge that Tarsney focuses on in this paper.To assess the truth of epistemic persistence skepticism, Tarsney compares the expected value of a neartermist benchmark intervention N to the expected value of a longtermist intervention L. In his example, N is spending $1 million on public health programmes in the developing world, leading to 10,000 extra quality-adjusted life years in expectation. L is spending $1 million on pandemic-prevention research, with the aim of preventing an existential catastrophe and thereby making a persistent difference.Exogenous nullifying eventsPersistent-difference strategies are threatened by what Tarsney calls exogenous nullifying events (ENEs), which come in two types. Negative ENEs are far-future events that put the world into the less valuable state ¬S. In the context of the longtermist intervention L, in which the valuable target state S is the existence of an intelligent civilization in the accessible universe, negative ENEs are existential catastrophes that might befall such a civilization. Examples include self-destructive wars, lethal pathogens, and vacuum decay. Positive ENEs, on the other hand, are far-future events that put the world into the more valuable state S. In the context of L, these are events that give rise to an intelligent civilization in the accessible universe where none existed previously. This might happen via evolution, or via the arrival of a civilization from outside the accessible universe.What unites negative...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Paper summary: The Epistemic Challenge to Longtermism (Christian Tarsney), published by Global Priorities Institute on October 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Note: The Global Priorities Institute (GPI) has started to create summaries of some working papers by GPI researchers with the aim to make our research more accessible to people outside of academic philosophy (e.g. interested people in the effective altruism community). We welcome any feedback on the usefulness of these summaries. Summary: The Epistemic Challenge to Longtermism This is a summary of the GPI Working Paper "The epistemic challenge to longtermism" by Christian Tarsney. The summary was written by Elliott Thornley. According to longtermism, what we should do mainly depends on how our actions might affect the long-term future. This claim faces a challenge: the course of the long-term future is difficult to predict, and the effects of our actions on the long-term future might be so unpredictable as to make longtermism false. In “The epistemic challenge to longtermism”, Christian Tarsney evaluates one version of this epistemic challenge and comes to a mixed conclusion. On some plausible worldviews, longtermism stands up to the epistemic challenge. On others, longtermism’s status depends on whether we should take certain high-stakes, long-shot gambles. Tarsney begins by assuming expectational utilitarianism: roughly, the view that we should assign precise probabilities to all decision-relevant possibilities, value possible futures in line with their total welfare, and maximise expected value. This assumption sets aside ethical challenges to longtermism and focuses the discussion on the epistemic challenge. Persistent-difference strategies Tarsney outlines one broad class of strategies for improving the long-term future: persistent-difference strategies. These strategies aim to put the world into some valuable state S when it would otherwise have been in some less valuable state ¬S, in the hope that this difference will persist for a long time. Epistemic persistence skepticism is the view that identifying interventions likely to make a persistent difference is prohibitively difficult — so difficult that the actions with the greatest expected value do most of their good in the near-term. It is this version of the epistemic challenge that Tarsney focuses on in this paper. To assess the truth of epistemic persistence skepticism, Tarsney compares the expected value of a neartermist benchmark intervention N to the expected value of a longtermist intervention L. In his example, N is spending $1 million on public health programmes in the developing world, leading to 10,000 extra quality-adjusted life years in expectation. L is spending $1 million on pandemic-prevention research, with the aim of preventing an existential catastrophe and thereby making a persistent difference. Exogenous nullifying events Persistent-difference strategies are threatened by what Tarsney calls exogenous nullifying events (ENEs), which come in two types. Negative ENEs are far-future events that put the world into the less valuable state ¬S. In the context of the longtermist intervention L, in which the valuable target state S is the existence of an intelligent civilization in the accessible universe, negative ENEs are existential catastrophes that might befall such a civilization. Examples include self-destructive wars, lethal pathogens, and vacuum decay. Positive ENEs, on the other hand, are far-future events that put the world into the more valuable state S. In the context of L, these are events that give rise to an intelligent civilization in the accessible universe where none existed previously. This might happen via evolution, or via the arrival of a civilization from outside the accessible universe. What unites negative...

EA - Paper summary: The Epistemic Challenge to Longtermism (Christian Tarsney) by Global Priorities Institute

Imagine that you’re in the hospital for surgery. This kind of procedure is always safe, and always successful — but it can take anywhere from one to ten hours. You can’t be knocked out for the operation, but because it’s so painful — you’ll be given a drug that makes you forget the experience.   You wake up, not remembering going to sleep. You ask the nurse if you’ve had the operation yet. They look at the foot of your bed, and see two different charts for two patients. They say “Well, you’re one of these two — but I’m not sure which one. One of them had an operation yesterday that lasted ten hours. The other is set to have a one-hour operation later today.”    So it’s either true that you already suffered for ten hours, or true that you’re about to suffer for one hour.   Which patient would you rather be?   Most people would be relieved to find out they’d already had the operation. Normally we prefer less pain rather than more pain, but in this case, we prefer ten times more pain — just because the pain would be in the past rather than the future.   Christian Tarsney, a philosopher at Oxford University's Global Priorities Institute, has written a couple of papers about this ‘future bias’ — that is, that people seem to care more about their future experiences than about their past experiences. Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.   That probably sounds perfectly normal to you. But do we actually have good reasons to prefer to have our positive experiences in the future, and our negative experiences in the past?   One of Christian’s experiments found that when you ask people to imagine hypothetical scenarios where they can affect their own past experiences, they care about those experiences more — which suggests that our inability to affect the past is one reason why we feel mostly indifferent to it.   But he points out that if that was the main reason, then we should also be indifferent to inevitable future experiences — if you know for sure that something bad is going to happen to you tomorrow, you shouldn't care about it. But if you found out you simply had to have a horribly painful operation tomorrow, it’s probably all you’d care about!   Another explanation for future bias is that we have this intuition that time is like a videotape, where the things that haven't played yet are still on the way.   If your future experiences really are ahead of you rather than behind you, that makes it rational to care more about the future than the past. But Christian says that, even though he shares this intuition, it’s actually very hard to make the case for time having a direction. It’s a live debate that’s playing out in the philosophy of time, as well as in physics.   For Christian, there are two big practical implications of these past, present, and future ethical comparison cases.    The first is for altruists: If we care about whether current people’s goals are realised, then maybe we should care about the realisation of people's past goals, including the goals of people who are now dead.   The second is more personal: If we can’t actually justify caring more about the future than the past, should we really worry about death any more than we worry about all the years we spent not existing before we were born?   Christian and Rob also cover several other big topics, including:   • A possible solution to moral fanaticism  • How much of humanity's resources we should spend on improving the long-term future  • How large the expected value of the continued existence of Earth-originating civilization might be  • How we should respond to uncertainty about the state of the world  • The state of global priorities research  • And much more Producer: Keiran Harris. Audio mastering: Ryan Kessler. Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel.

Imagine that you’re in the hospital for surgery. This kind of procedure is always safe, and always successful — but it can take anywhere from one to ten hours. You can’t be knocked out for the operation, but because it’s so painful — you’ll be given a drug that makes you forget the experience. You wake up, not remembering going to sleep. You ask the nurse if you’ve had the operation yet. They look at the foot of your bed, and see two different charts for two patients. They say “Well, you’re one of these two — but I’m not sure which one. One of them had an operation yesterday that lasted ten hours. The other is set to have a one-hour operation later today.” So it’s either true that you already suffered for ten hours, or true that you’re about to suffer for one hour. Which patient would you rather be? Most people would be relieved to find out they’d already had the operation. Normally we prefer less pain rather than more pain, but in this case, we prefer ten times more pain — just because the pain would be in the past rather than the future. Christian Tarsney, a philosopher at Oxford University's Global Priorities Institute, has written a couple of papers about this ‘future bias’ — that is, that people seem to care more about their future experiences than about their past experiences. <a href="https://80k.link/GHZ" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.</a> That probably sounds perfectly normal to you. But do we actually have good reasons to prefer to have our positive experiences in the future, and our negative experiences in the past? One of Christian’s experiments found that when you ask people to imagine hypothetical scenarios where they can affect their own past experiences, they care about those experiences more — which suggests that our inability to affect the past is one reason why we feel mostly indifferent to it. But he points out that if that was the main reason, then we should also be indifferent to inevitable future experiences — if you know for sure that something bad is going to happen to you tomorrow, you shouldn't care about it. But if you found out you simply had to have a horribly painful operation tomorrow, it’s probably all you’d care about! Another explanation for future bias is that we have this intuition that time is like a videotape, where the things that haven't played yet are still on the way. If your future experiences really are ahead of you rather than behind you, that makes it rational to care more about the future than the past. But Christian says that, even though he shares this intuition, it’s actually very hard to make the case for time having a direction. It’s a live debate that’s playing out in the philosophy of time, as well as in physics. For Christian, there are two big practical implications of these past, present, and future ethical comparison cases. The first is for altruists: If we care about whether current people’s goals are realised, then maybe we should care about the realisation of people's past goals, including the goals of people who are now dead. The second is more personal: If we can’t actually justify caring more about the future than the past, should we really worry about death any more than we worry about all the years we spent not existing before we were born? Christian and Rob also cover several other big topics, including: • A possible solution to moral fanaticism • How much of humanity's resources we should spend on improving the long-term future • How large the expected value of the continued existence of Earth-originating civilization might be • How we should respond to uncertainty about the state of the world • The state of global priorities research • And much more Producer: Keiran Harris. Audio mastering: Ryan Kessler. Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel.

#98 – Christian Tarsney on future bias and a possible solution to moral fanaticism

Christian Tarsney, a research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, summarizes some of the key strengths and weaknesses of a common argument against doing EA work focused on the long term: that the far future is too unpredictable to justify spending time on it. Rather than taking a “for” or “against” position, he makes the case that the questions around this argument are underexplored and present many opportunities for high-value research. This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: London. Find out how to attend a future EA Global conference: https://www.eaglobal.org/.Learn more about effective altruism: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/.Original VideoEffective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube. 

Christian Tarsney, a research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, summarizes some of the key strengths and weaknesses of a common argument against doing EA work focused on the long term: that the far future is too unpredictable to justify spending time on it. Rather than taking a “for” or “against” position, he makes the case that the questions around this argument are underexplored and present many opportunities for high-value research. This talk was filmed at EA Global 2019: London. Find out how to attend a future EA Global conference: <a href="https://www.eaglobal.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.eaglobal.org/</a>.Learn more about effective altruism: <a href="https://www.effectivealtruism.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.effectivealtruism.org/</a>.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5_bv_IjIcQ" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Original Video</a><a href="https://www.effectivealtruism.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Effective Altruism</a> is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. <a href="https://www.eaglobal.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">EA Global</a> conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/EffectiveAltruismVideos" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">YouTube</a>.

EAG London 2019: Can we predictably improve the far future? (Christian Tarsney)