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Despite efforts to teach agents about their privilege by minimizing cost of information, Kinney & Bright argue risksensitive frameworks like Buchak's allow privileged agents to rationally shield themselves from this costless and relevant information. In response, I show that uncertainty about inform...

Decision Theory
Contributed Papers

Research on the credit economy in academic science has typically assumed that academics are expected credit maximizers without argument. How might this assumption be justified? And how might the measure-theoretic foundations of credit be secured? Two approaches are considered. One in which credit is...

Decision Theory
Contributed Papers

If you can’t or don’t want to ascribe probabilities to the consequences of your actions, classic causal decision theory won’t let you reap the undeniable benefits of causal reasoning for decision making. The following theory fixes this problem. I explain why it’s good to have a causal decisi...

Decision Theory
Contributed Papers

In a recent paper Winsberg (2021) argues in favor of research into geoengineering by relying on Good's theorem, which states that conducting research maximizes one's expected utility. However, Good's theorem sometimes fails for risk-avoidant agents (Buchak 2010). Since risk-avoidance captures some o...

Decision Theory
Contributed Papers

The precautionary principle is often put forward as potentially useful guide to avoiding catastrophe under conditions of uncertainty. But finding an adequate formulation of the principle runs into a problem when needed precautionary measures also have potentially catastrophic consequences – the im...

Decision Theory
Contributed Papers