Cross-posted from my Substack.

Summary. I state the “Ideal Reflection” principle, which says that our beliefs should match our expectations of what an ideal version of ourselves would believe. I argue that Ideal Reflection can help rationalize how Effective Altruists use the concept of expected value, and that whether we accept Ideal Reflection has important real-world implications.

Here's an aspect of Effective Altruist discourse that has confused me for the longest time: EAs will often talk about “the” expected value of an intervention. This suggests that “the” expected value is an objective feature of the world. But this clashes with the usual Bayesian story, where expected values are a matter of subjective belief.

For example, the 80,000 Hours page on expected value says (my emphasis):

Making explicit estimates of expected value is sometimes useful as a method — such as when you’re comparing two global health interventions — but it's often better to look for useful rules of thumb and robust arguments, or even use gut intuitions and snap decisions to save time… little of our work at 80,000 Hours involves explicit or quantitative estimates of the impact of different careers. Rather, we focus on finding good proxies [...]

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.