Tiny Points of Vast Value

Pascal’s Hell

May 3, 2023

In the beginning, on a small planet in the Solar System, in the Milky Way galaxy...

Satan: I have an offer for you, Pascal, as I have heard that you might be interested in a small probability of a huge payoff.

Pascal: Anything that maximizes expected utility!

EA, Rationality, Gender Ratios and Harassment

April 28, 2023

If the gender ratio in some group is significantly skewed in favor of men, each woman in that group probably experiences more harassment than women in other social settings with more even gender ratios.

Consider a simplified case with two social clubs: Even and Uneven. 50% of members of Even are women, while only 10% of Uneven are. Now, suppose that 1% of men harass women. Then, in a gathering of Uneven with 1000 attendees, there would be 9 harassers targeting 100 women (~1:11 ratio). In contrast, in a same-sized gathering of Even, there would be 5 harassers targeting 500 women (1:100 ratio). So, the probability of each woman being targeted by a harasser is lower in Even than in Uneven. For it to be the case that women in Uneven experience the same amount of harassment as women in Even, men in Uneven would need to be less likely to harass women than the average man in Even…

Longtermism and Tiny Probabilities

March 22, 2023

If you discount small probabilities to zero, should you still be a longtermist? Yes! Or so I argue in an interview I gave to Future Matters-newsletter, reposted with permission (and with small changes).

Some of your research focuses on what you call “probability discounting” and whether it undermines longtermism. Could you tell us what you mean by “probability discounting” and your motivation for looking at this?

Probability discounting is the idea that we should ignore tiny probabilities in practical decision-making. Probability discounting has been proposed in response to cases that involve very small probabilities of huge payoffs, like Pascal’s Mugging…