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Reposted by Rhys Southan

Jakob Lohmar @jakoblohmar.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

My paper on "The Moral Importance of Low-Welfare Species" is now available online first: journals.publishing.umich.edu/jpe/news/207/ It discusses whether benefits for species with small welfare ranges can outweigh significant human goods.

journals.publishing.umich.edu

The Moral Importance of Low-Welfare Species. Forthcoming article by Jakob Lohmar

Abstract: Many species seem to have much smaller welfare ranges than we do. Which importance should we assign to the welfare of these low-welfare species when we have to decide …

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

So really, I think your objection is the goal-first objection, not the delay objection

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

So, there's nothing necessarily irrational or mistaken about having a goal that humans settle Mars and also wanting future people to have that goal. The point is just that there is nothing instrumentally irrational about abandoning that goal, because as soon as you do, it's not your goal anymore

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

I realized I responded to this in a confusing way. What you say here is consistent with the timing problem argument in the paper. The timing problem just entails that if you abandon your goal, you have not done something that violates your goal, since it's not your goal anymore...

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

I think because I have a hedonic-phenomenal notion of desires, and we couldn't assume that a superintelligence will have desires in that sense. In the paper as it is, your objection is closest to the Delay Objection

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

At some point I was thinking about having a potential objection be that we are relying on a very strict concurrentist notion of desire satisfactionism (with the objection being that this is controversial, or at least debatable), but I changed my mind about this

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

So, it's only a problem if you and your future self exist at the same time, which by definition you don't

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

You prefer your future self to have value X concurrently with X being your value, and are indifferent about your future self having value X if X is not your value. If you abandon the value X, your future self will not value X, but this will not go against your value of X, since you no longer value X

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

You prefer others to share your value X while you have the value X, but are indifferent about whether they have the value X when X is not your value. Same with your future self....

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

I had an additional thought after our chat. I wonder if you see wide scope as collapsing into narrow scope, whereas we see narrow scope as collapsing into wide scope

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Has anyone written about whether Barron Trump's being a student at NYU protects NYU against Trump's attacks on universities? Last I checked, NYU wasn't on Trump's list of universities to defund

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

Every time I get a head rush, I think about whether my life would be worth living if I had a head rush every waking moment, and I can never settle on an answer

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Rhys Southan @rhysso.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Hehehe good thing no one can see what I'm writing in my secret scratchpad

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