‘Crucial Considerations and Wise Philanthropy’, by Nick Bostrom

Short summary: This is a transcript of a talk Nick Bostrom gave about a framework to think about how to deal with potential major shifts in our reasoning when evaluating risks in a GCR context.

something like the Parliamentary Model for taking normative uncertainty into account looks fairly robust. This is the idea that if you are unsure as to which moral theory is true, then you should assign probabilities to different moral theories and imagine that there were a parliament where each moral theory got to send delegates to that parliament in proportion to their probability.

Until now, I don't think a strong voice ever gave me permission to cringe along the middle road as an unambitious, teleologically inconsistent, hand-wringing moderate, a bastard child of prudence and myopia with no vision and no sense of opportunity.

But, like, once you formulate that as a method for acknowledging and managing profound collective uncertainty, it kind of makes sense. So many ideologies claim to know far more than anyone really could about complex social systems, and I still don't think I fully understand how they get away with it.