you say you've got nothing on the scaling factors, and that you can't just set them all to 1 because utilities only come up to affine transformation. you can skip it anyway. you don't need to know the scaling factors, only that your guess about someone's scale doesn't depend on what they prefer.

write person i's utility over the menu as u_i = a_i·v_i + b_i, where v_i is normalized to [0,1] over the menu and (a_i, b_i) are the unknown scale and offset. condition on the profile of v_i's. behind the veil, with a uniform prior over a fixed finite set of n people, your expected utility for option x is (1/n)·Σ E[a_i·v_i(x) + b_i]. suppose knowing someone's preferences tells you nothing about their scale, meaning E[a_i | profile] is the same number c for everyone (unit: each person's best-to-worst range on the menu). then this equals (c/n)·Σ v_i(x) plus a term that doesn't depend on x. maximizing it means maximizing Σ v_i(x). the b_i drop out for the reason you gave, and the a_i drop out because your guess about each one is the same. the result is the sum of 0-1 normalized utilities, i.e. relative utilitarianism, which Dhillon–Mertens and Karni–Weymark axiomatize a different way.

on your utility monster worry: a monster changes the answer only if you know who it is and what it wants. then you should weight it. without that information you shouldn't.

a reader might also object that some people just have bigger scales than others. they can, but it tilts nothing unless you also know which option those people prefer, because without that you don't know which way it would bias the total. what breaks the argument is information linking scale to preferences, like knowing the people who favor x have bigger stakes than the people who favor y.

on your problem 1, for a fixed electorate uniform over the n voters is the natural prior.

i haven't seen this derivation written up. if someone knows prior work i'd like to read it.

why not just try to measure utils instead of QALY?

Hi, I'd be curious to hear a claim you think isn't supported by the evidence.

My view is that such a topic is far too important to be left humans. 

here's some of the virtual juror commentary.

socialism fundamentally confuses efficiency and equity: the two opposite sides of the economic policy coin.

utility is roughly log(wealth), so we maximize utility by maximizing the size of the pie, and also how evenly it's distributed. some redistributive mechanisms shrink the pie — they have what economists refer to as "deadweight loss". e.g. if i have an apple and you have an orange, but i think an orange is worth two apples and you think an apple is worth two oranges, then we double our utility by trading. that is a pareto improvement. but if a tax is imposed which makes the trade no longer pencil out, then we stick with the suboptimal allocation and derive less utility from the same goods.

we want to avoid these inefficient taxes in favor of methods that have zero (neutral) deadweight loss, or even negative deadweight loss where possible. chiefly these are:

• pigovian taxes (negative deadweight loss)
• land value taxes (neutral deadweight loss)
• UBI (neutral deadweight loss

we want to assiduously avoid the socialist conceptions of paying people in the form of company equity (which doesn't change the equilibrium price of their labor anyway). we want to avoid price controls, e.g. rent control and minimum wage. we want to avoid means testing and progressive marginal tax rates. just use efficient taxes and give people money, allowing of course for non-excludable goods (public and common goods).

socialism essentially gets everything wrong on these basic econ 101 concepts.

this doesn't appear to mention what is far and away the strongest EA argument for electoral reform: the superior human welfare impact as gauged rather objectively by voter satisfaction efficiency (aka bayesian regret).

ScoreVoting.net/LivesSaved

to me, electoral reform should be like 99% of what EA focuses on. nothing else can hold a candle to it.

i prioritized the center for election science because reforming our social choice mechanisms offers the highest expected utility of any available intervention. specifically, moving to methods that maximize voter satisfaction efficiency (vse)—such as approval or score voting—yields massive downstream benefits by improving government decision-making quality. as the analysis at ScoreVoting.net/LivesSaved explains, the economic and humanitarian impact of even a slight improvement in the quality of elected officials dwarfs the impact of direct aid like malaria nets. optimizing the decision-making stack is the necessary precursor to solving other global challenges effectively.

i prioritized the center for election science because reforming our social choice mechanisms offers the highest expected utility of any available intervention. specifically, moving to methods that maximize voter satisfaction efficiency (vse)—such as approval or score voting—yields massive downstream benefits by improving government decision-making quality. as the analysis at rangevoting.org/livessaved demonstrates, the economic and humanitarian impact of even a slight improvement in the quality of elected officials dwarfs the impact of direct aid like malaria nets. optimizing the decision-making stack is the necessary precursor to solving other global challenges effectively.

This is clearly not true. The example I gave was foreign aid, which benefits foreigners at the expense of citizens. Since only one of these groups can vote, there is little reason to think that the preferences of this subgroup will align with overall human welfare.

that's incorrect. a rational entity's goal is to rationalize the net utility of the smallest group that includes itself. genes are just trying to maximize their expected number of copies made. the appearance of "altruism" is an illusion caused by:

1. kin selection.
2. reciprocal altruism.

it's logically and empirically proven that you cannot actually aim for maximizing the welfare of the "universe". if you try to maximize the sum of utility, that would justify trying to make as many new people as possible, so as not to "pre-murder" them and it would mean people should decrease their personal utility as much as possible, as long as it increases net utility. or kill one person if it helps cause two people to be born. whereas if you try to maximize average utility, then you want to kill people who are less happy than average. both of these are obviously untenable and don't remotely fit with observed actual human behavior. this is arguably the most elementary fact in the whole of ethical theory.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

i discuss all of this in my "ethics 101" primer here.

This is true for most EA cause areas. Existential risk work is about protecting the interests of future generations; animal welfare work is about protecting the interests of animals - neither of which groups can vote.

the point is that if you want to altruistically help future generations, or animals for that matter, it makes sense to do so in the most efficient way possible. but the fundamental desire to be truly altruistic in the first place is irrational. "altruism" as we normally use the term is just the selfish behavior of genes trying to help copies of. themselves that happen to be in other bodies. again, clearly explained in this veritasium video and is just trivial biology 101.

No methodology or source is given for why we should expect a 5% decline in the risk of 2 billion deaths.

it's absolutely given, right there in plain english. the BR figures are cited, and there are multiple plausible independent lines of reasoning from which to derive comparable figures. i don't know why you're just ignoring that as if it's not right there written plain as day.