Eight: Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness, population ethics, & harnessing the brainpower of academia to tackle the most important research questions
Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours
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What Are the Principles of Epistemic Rationality?
In practical decision theory the goal is to maximise some kind of expected value. But we also have a second notion of rationality, which you might call 'epistemic rationality' This is about having beliefs that are in correspondence with the world as much as possible. We wanted to work out what are the principles of this epistemic rationality thing - even when doing what's practically rational may conflict with it. And our depressing conclusion is that none of the decision theories weve veloped for the practical domain seem to have the property that the analogue of that one performs very well in the Epistemic domain.
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