David Thorstad: Bounded Rationality and the Case Against Longtermism

Episode 122
I spoke with Professor David Thorstad (x.com/DavidThorstad) about:
* The practical difficulties of doing interdisciplinary work
* Why theories of human rationality should account for boundedness, heuristics, and other cognitive limitations
* why EA epistemics suck (ok, it’s a little more nuanced than that)
Professor Thorstad is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, a Senior Research Affiliate at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, and a Research Affiliate at the MINT Lab at Australian National University. One strand of his research asks how cognitively limited agents should decide what to do and believe. A second strand asks how altruists should use limited funds to do good effectively.
Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.
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Outline:
* () Intro
* () David’s interest in rationality
* () David’s crisis of confidence, models abstracted from psychology
* () Blending formal models with studies of the mind
* () Interaction between academic communities
* () Recognition of and incentives for interdisciplinary work
* () Movement towards interdisciplinary work
* () The Standard Picture of rationality
* () Why the Standard Picture was attractive
* () Violations of and rebellion against the Standard Picture
* () Mistakes made by critics of the Standard Picture
* () Other competing programs vs Standard Picture
* () Characterizing Bounded Rationality
* () A worry: faculties criticizing themselves
* () Self-improving critique and longtermism
* () Central claims in bounded rationality and controversies
* () Heuristics and formal theorizing
* () Violations of Standard Picture, vindicatory epistemology
* () The Reason Responsive Consequentialist View (RRCV)
* () Objective and subjective pictures
* () Reason responsiveness
* () There are no epistemic norms for inquiry
* () Norms vs reasons
* () Arguments against epistemic nihilism for belief
* () Norms and self-delusion
* () Difficulty of holding beliefs for pragmatic reasons
* () The Gibbardian picture, inquiry as an action
* () Thinking how to act and thinking how to live — the power of inquiry
* () Overthinking and conducting inquiry
* () Is thinking how to inquire as an all-things-considered matter?
* () Arguments for the RRCV
* () Deciding on minimal criteria for the view, stereotyping
* () Eliminating stereotypes from the theory
* () Theory construction in epistemology and moral intuition
* () Refusing theories for moral reasons and disciplinary boundaries
* () The argument from minimal criteria, evaluating against competing views
* () Comparing to other theories
* () The explanatory argument
* () Parfit and Railton, norms of friendship vs utility
* () Should you call out your friend for being a womanizer
* () Vindicatory Epistemology
* () Panglossianism and meliorative epistemology
* () Heuristics and recognition-driven investigation
* () Rational inquiry leading to irrational beliefs — metacognitive processing
* () Stakes of inquiry and costs of metacognitive processing
* () When agents are incoherent, focuses on inquiry
* () Indirect normative assessment and its consequences
* () Against the Singularity Hypothesis
* () Superintelligence and the ontological argument
* () Hardware growth and general intelligence growth, AGI definitions
* () Difficulties in arguing for hyperbolic growth
* () Chalmers and the proportionality argument
* () Arguments for/against diminishing growth, research productivity, Moore’s Law
* () On progress studies
* () Improving research productivity and technology growth
* () Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk, longtermist epistemics
* () Cumulative and per-unit risk
* () Back and forth with longtermists, time of perils
* () Background risk — risks we can and can’t intervene on, total existential risk
* () The case for longtermism is inflated
* () Epistemic humility and longtermism
* () Knowledge production — reliable sources, blog posts vs peer review
* () Compounding potential errors in knowledge
* () Group deliberation dynamics, academic consensus
* () The scope of longtermism
* () Money in effective altruism and processes of inquiry
* () Swamping longtermist options
* () Washing out arguments and justified belief
* () The difficulty of long-term forecasting and interventions
* () Theory of change in the bounded rationality program
* () Outro

Links:
* David’s homepage (dthorstad.com) and Twitter (x.com/DavidThorstad) and ineffectivealtruismblog.com
* Papers mentioned/read
* Bounded rationality and inquiry
* Why bounded rationality (in epistemology)? (philarchive.org/rec/THOWBR-2)
* Against the newer evidentialists (philarchive.org/rec/THOATN)
* The accuracy-coherence tradeoff in cognition (philarchive.org/rec/THOTAT-17)
* There are no epistemic norms of inquiry (philarchive.org/rec/THOTAN-5)
* Permissive metaepistemology (philarchive.org/rec/THOPM)
* Global priorities and effective altruism
* What David likes about EA (ineffectivealtruismblog.com/2022/11/30/what-like)
* Against the singularity hypothesis (philarchive.org/rec/THOATS-5) (+ blog posts (ineffectivealtruismblog.com/2023/12/15/against…))
* Three mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk (philarchive.org/rec/THOTMI-5) (+ blog posts (ineffectivealtruismblog.com/category/my-papers…))
* The scope of longtermism (philarchive.org/rec/THOTSO-54)
* Epistemics (ineffectivealtruismblog.com/category/epistemics)

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David Thorstad: Bounded Rationality and the Case Against Longtermism

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