Hi Karthik,

Your comment inspired me to write my own quick take, which is here. Quoting the first paragraph as a preview:

I feel pretty disappointed by some of the comments (e.g. this one) on Vasco Grilo's recent post arguing that some of GiveWell's grants are net harmful because of the meat eating problem. Reflecting on that disappointment, I want to articulate a moral principle I hold, which I'll call non-dogmatism. Non-dogmatism is essentially a weak form of scope sensitivity.

I decided to spin off a quick take rather than replying here, because I think it would be interesting to have a discussion about non-dogmatism in a context that's somewhat separated from this particular context, but I wanted to mention the quick take as a reply to your comment, since it's relevant.

I feel pretty disappointed by some of the comments (e.g. this one) on Vasco Grilo's recent post arguing that some of GiveWell's grants are net harmful because of the meat eating problem. Reflecting on that disappointment, I want to articulate a moral principle I hold, which I'll call non-dogmatism. Non-dogmatism is essentially a weak form of scope sensitivity.^[1]

Let's say that a moral decision process is dogmatic if it's completely insensitive to the numbers on either side of the trade-off. Non-dogmatism rejects dogmatic moral decision processes.

A central example of a dogmatic belief is: "Making a single human happy is more morally valuable than making any number of chickens happy." The corresponding moral decision process would be, given a choice to spend money on making a human happy or making chickens happy, spending the money on the human no matter what the number of chickens made happy is. Non-dogmatism rejects this decision-making process on the basis that it is dogmatic.

(Caveat: this seems fine for entities that are totally outside one's moral circle of concern. For instance, I'm intuitively fine with a decision-making process that spends money on making a human happy instead of spending money on making sure that a pile of rocks doesn't get trampled on, no matter the size of the pile of rocks. So maybe non-dogmatism says that so long as two entities are in your moral circle of concern -- so long as you assign nonzero weight to them -- there ought to exist numbers, at least in theory, for which either side of a moral trade-off could be better.)

And so when I see comments saying things like "I would axiomatically reject any moral weight on animals that implied saving kids from dying was net negative", I'm like... really? There's no empirical facts that could possibly cause the trade-off to go the other way?

Rejecting dogmatic beliefs requires more work. Rather than deciding that one side of a trade-off is better than the other no matter the underlying facts, you actually have to examine the facts and do the math. But, like, the real world is messy and complicated, and sometimes you just have to do the math if you want to figure out the right answer.

1. ^{^}

   Per the Wikipedia article on scope neglect, scope sensitivity would mean actually doing multiplication: making 100 people happy is 100 times better than making 1 person happy. I'm not fully sold on scope sensitivity; I feel much more strongly about non-dogmatism, which means that the numbers have to at least enter the picture, even if not multiplicatively.

I haven't looked at your math, but I actually agree, in the sense that I also got about 1 in 1 million when doing the estimate again a week before the election!

I think my 1 in 3 million estimate was about right at the time that I made it. The information that we gained between then and 1 week before the election was that the election remained close, and that Pennsylvania remained the top candidate for the tipping point state.

Could you say more about "practically possible"? What steps do you think one could have taken to have reached, say, a 70% credence?

Oh cool, Scott Alexander just said almost exactly what I wanted to say about your #2 in his latest blog post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/congrats-to-polymarket-but-i-still

I don't have time to write a detailed response now (might later), but wanted to flag that I either disagree or "agree denotatively but object connotatively" with most of these. I disagree most strongly with #3: the polls were quite good this year. National and swing state polling averages were only wrong by 1% in terms of Trump's vote share, or in other words 2% in terms of margin of victory. This means that polls provided a really large amount of information.

(I do think that Selzer's polls in particular are overrated, and I will try to articulate that case more carefully if I get around to a longer response.)

Looks like it'll be about 250,000 votes.

I just want to register that, because the election continues to look extremely close, I now think the probability that the election is decided by fewer than 100,000 votes is more like 60%.

I wanted to highlight one particular U.S. House race that Matt Yglesias mentions:

Amish Shah (AZ-01): A former state legislator, Amish Shah won a crowded primary in July. He faces Rep. David Schweikert, a Republican who supported Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Primaries are costly, and in Shah’s pre-primary filing, he reported just $216,508.02 cash on hand compared to $1,548,760.87 for Schweikert.

In addition to running in a swing district, Amish Shah is an advocate for animal rights. See my quick take about him here.

Yeah, it was intended to be a crude order-of-magnitude estimate. See my response to essentially the same objection here.