#46 - Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academia

Global Priorities Institute (GPI) Overview & Recruitment

• Mission: Conducts and promotes world-class foundational research on how to most effectively do good, aiming to set global priorities using evidence and reason.
• Head of Research Operations:
  • Reports directly to Hilary Graves (Director).
  • Responsible for strategy, communications, finance, and fundraising.
  • Contract: 4-year term.
  • Salary: £40,000 – £49,000 per year.
  • Location: Remote (open to global applicants).
  • Application Deadline: 19 November.
• Summer Research Visitor Program (Summer 2019):
  • Target audience: Economists working on PhDs or early in their careers.
  • Application Deadline: 30 November.
• Upcoming Fellowships: Postdoctoral and senior fellowships for philosophers and economists launching next September.
• General Research Inquiries: Open to researchers from master's students to emeritus professors; applications accepted via email (contact@globalprioritiesinstitute.org).

Hilary Graves' Research Background & Shift

• Previous Focus: Philosophy of physics, specifically the interpretation of quantum mechanics and the "many-worlds" theory.
  • Researched probability within many-worlds theory, arguing probability concerns are resolved by decision theory weights rather than objective frequencies.
• Current Focus: Moral philosophy, effective altruism (EA), and global priorities.
  • Motivation for Shift: Desire to address fundamental questions of practical action and human principles rather than abstract technicalities; felt academic career incentives rewarded incremental output over meaningful impact.
  • Career Risk: Switching fields entails a "fallow period" of 2–3 years where the scholar has few publications, acting as a deterrent in a tenure-track environment.
• Transferable Skills: Background in physics provided strong mathematical and decision-theoretic grounding; formal epistemology training facilitated work on Bayesian belief formation.

Current Research Projects at GPI

• Moral Uncertainty: Exploring the "parliamentary model" as an alternative to standard expected value approaches for making decisions under conflicting normative views.
• Long-Termism & Extinction Risk:
  • Rigorously formalizing the argument that long-run impact necessitates prioritizing extinction risk mitigation over near-term causes.
  • Investigating the "long-termism paradigm" where the vast majority of value lies in the far future.
• Methodology in Cost-Benefit Analysis: Resolving debates between economists (summing monetary values) and philosophers (weighting by value to the person) in public policy recommendations.

Key Philosophical Topics & Findings

• Discounting Future Welfare:
  • Moral philosophers largely agree on a zero discount rate for future welfare; some economically-minded individuals still debate this.
  • Excessive Sacrifice Concern: Debate exists on whether a zero discount rate implies individuals must sacrifice all current consumption for the future; Graves argues constraints on moral demands can be modeled without altering the value function itself.
• Population Ethics:
  • The Problem: Comparing states of affairs with different population sizes leads to "impossibility theorems" where no theory satisfies all intuitive desiderata.
  • Total Utilitarianism: Maximizes total welfare; committed to the "Repugnant Conclusion" (a world with many barely worth-living lives is better than one with few high-quality lives).
  • Average Utilitarianism: Maximizes average welfare; committed to "population axiology" paradoxes where adding people with negative welfare can increase average if the population size is manipulated correctly.
  • Person-Affecting Views: Struggle with the "non-identity problem" (future people's identities depend on current actions), often leading to inconsistency or incomparability between worlds.
  • Graves' Stance: Finds the Repugnant Conclusion less repugnant than the alternatives; finds "saturating counterpart relations" (Chris Meacham) as the most promising recent person-affecting work, though still imperfect.
• Moral Cluelessness:
  • The Issue: Actions have vast, unpredictable long-term effects that dominate expected value calculations, yet we cannot assign sensible credences to them.
  • Chaotic Effects vs. Systematic Effects: Gravitates toward the view that chaotic, identity-altering effects (e.g., throwing a tennis ball) cancel out in expectation, but systematic, knock-on effects (e.g., funding bed nets) do not cancel out.
  • Implication for Charity Evaluation: Standard evaluations (e.g., GiveWell) measure near-term effects; if long-term effects dominate and do not cancel, the sign of the intervention's value could flip, making near-term proxies potentially misleading for cross-cause comparisons.
  • Conclusion: Rational donors must rely on "judgment calls" regarding the likely sign of long-term effects rather than ignoring them or assuming they cancel.
• Risk Aversion:
  • Argues that risk aversion regarding the total value in the universe supports long-termism (specifically extinction risk mitigation) because it avoids the worst outcome (total loss of future value).
  • Contrasts with the intuition of risk aversion regarding personal impact variance, which often favors near-term, measurable interventions like saving lives now.

Decision Theory & Epistemology

• Newcomb's Problem: Graves identifies as a Causal Decision Theorist but acknowledges the rationality of pre-committing to Evidential Decision Theory in specific predictive contexts.
• Epistemic Decision Theory:
  • Searched for decision theories analogous to practical domains (causal vs. evidential) but found none map well to intuitive notions of epistemic rationality (e.g., updating beliefs).
  • Concluded that the intuitive notion of epistemic rationality may not be consequentialist in the standard sense.
• Parliamentary Model for Moral Uncertainty:
  • Attempts to formalize moral theories as "delegates" in a bargaining game to determine action under uncertainty.
  • Current formalization (using Nash bargaining) struggles to produce robust Pareto improvements compared to expected moral value maximization, though it handles structurally awkward theories better.

Academic Culture & Career Advice

• Institutional Challenges:
  • Economics vs. Philosophy: Economics is more cutthroat regarding publication pressure; philosophy is more receptive to EA themes among younger scholars.
  • Interdisciplinary Work: Often less prestigious in traditional departments due to lack of understanding by peers; requires high intrinsic motivation.
  • GPI Model: Adopts a collaborative "team" approach where the goal is producing high-quality research rather than individual prestige, contrasting with the "lone scholar" model.
• Career Strategy:
  • Tenure-Track: Advise prioritizing career prestige and high-quality publications during the PhD/postdoc if tenure is the goal; keep EA topics as "side projects" if they are too controversial for current department norms.
  • Non-Academic Path: Strong case for disregarding academic incentives if the long-term goal is not tenure; direct engagement with EA orgs or industry is viable.
  • Signal of Success: Publishing in top journals or receiving strong mentor feedback during a PhD are reliable indicators of research capability.
  • Psychological Fit: Research requires a timescale of years for publication; those seeking quick project turnover may find academia demoralizing.
• Funding Strategy:
  • GPI requires significant reserves to hire academic economists due to Oxford's requirement of pre-funded contracts.
  • Scholarships are designed to offset funding asymmetries between UK (often 2-3 years) and US (5 years) PhD programs to retain top talent in Oxford.

Future Vision

• 10–30 Year Goal:
  • Significantly increased academic attention on EA-relevant questions (e.g., cause prioritization, population ethics).
  • Integration of these topics into undergraduate and graduate syllabi.
  • Higher proportion of global brainpower focused on practically important research questions.
• Influence Pathways:
  • Direct: Consulting with governments and policy bodies.
  • Indirect: Shaping the next generation of world leaders through university education.