Effective Altruism: An Introduction – 80,000 Hours cover image

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

CHAPTER

Is There Really a Problem With Expected Value Calculations?

When the dust settles from that aspect of the debate, we see in the end that there's not really a problem. Because if your credences behave sensibly, according to me, regarding these completely unpredictable future effects, then when you do your expected value theory, is just more or less precisely cancelled out by the equally plause al mere possibility that you might make things worse  in equally unpredictable ways. So those are cases where i think there isn't, in the end, any practical, real world's problem for real decision making. But i think things are different where we're not talking about the mere possibility that, by something like some chaotic mechanism, we might turn out to make

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