There’s a bunch of stuff we think is valuable. IQ, sex, wealth, happiness, being interesting, being honest, etc. But we have massively diverging intuitions about (a) how possessing these things effects the intrinsic value of a person, (b) how they ought to be distributed - both regarding the process (any consensual transaction? Only non-monetary ones?) and outcome (does equality or sufficiency of distribution matter?), (c) how other resources like money, power, and privileges ought to be distributed as a function of these valuable traits, (e.g. questions around merit/meritocracy), and (d) whether people like to take credit for having it/blame others for lacking it. How do these different intuitions highlight different kinds of valuing, and do they reflect different genealogies? (See SSC on parable of the talents/meritocracy, Hanson on strange equalities, SEP on merit(ocracy)).
- How do different ideas about expressivity and responsibility relate to this? The sociality of personhood, moral knowledge, and responsibility Continuity of Responsibility Account of Personal Identity
Think about the ancestral environment and status games here, it should explain a lot.
At least some of the desire for safe-bet philanthropy, the desire to take sure thinks over higher EV options is explained by altruism not being the only motive. So long as the value of social status doesn’t scale linearly with the EV or ex-post value of the intervention, we should expect people to prefer sure things, and legibly-good sure things, over pure EV-maximisation. This is partly because ‘flukes’ don’t get people credit, the good done by long shots doesn’t tell you much about the character of the do-gooder, and so they don’t garner much credit, (unless they can spin it as being low-variance). Instead people will want to do many small
Different kinds of relation to determinism and choice and stuff