Adam Elga
Biographic Data
| ID | 1095500 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adam Elga |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adam |
| FAMILY NAME | Elga |
| SIGNATURE | ELGA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1354-6032 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
People make suboptimal decisions about existential risks
Allocating resources to maximize the probability that humanity survives a set of existential risks has a different structure from many decision problems, as the objective is the product of the probabilities of desired outcomes rather than the sum. We derive the optimal solution to this problem and use this solution to evaluate the choices that people make when presented with decisions that have this multiplicative structure. Our participants (tot…
Boltzmann brains and cognitive instability
A Boltzmann brain is a randomly‐formed configuration of matter that is conscious. According to some theories that cosmologists take seriously, the universe is so spatiotemporally large that it contains a great many Boltzmann brains that are duplicates of you. In the light of this it seems to follow that you should have significant confidence that you are a Boltzmann brain. What's worse, your situation seems to be “cognitively unstable”: It seems …
Fragmentation and logical omniscience
It would be good to have a Bayesian decision theory that assesses our decisions and thinking according to everyday standards of rationality—standards that do not require logical omniscience (Garber, 1983; Hacking, 1967). To that end we develop a “fragmented” decision theory in which a single state of mind is represented by a family of credence functions, each associated with a distinct choice condition (Lewis, 1982; Stalnaker, 1984). The theory i…
The policy consequences of cascade blindness
One way to reduce waste and to make a system more robust is to allow its components to pool resources. For example, banks might insure each other or share a common capital reserve. Systems whose resources have been pooled in this way are highly prevalent in such diverse domains as finance, infrastructure, health care, emergency response and engineering. However, these systems have a combination of characteristics that leave them vulnerable to poo…
Bayesian Humility
Say that an agent is epistemically humble if she is less than fully confident that her opinions will converge to the truth, given appropriate evidence. Is such humility rationally permissible? According to Gordon Belot’s orgulity argument: the answer is yes, but long-run convergence-to-the-truth theorems force Bayesians to answer no. That argument has no force against Bayesians who reject countable additivity as a requirement of rationality. Such…
I Can’t Believe I’m Stupid 1
Defeating Dr. Evil with Self‐Locating Belief
Dr. Evil learns that a duplicate of Dr. Evil has been created. Upon learning this, how seriously should he take the hypothesis that he himself is that duplicate? I answer: very seriously. I defend a principle of indifference for self‐locating belief which entails that after Dr. Evil learns that a duplicate has been created, he ought to have exactly the same degree of belief that he is Dr. Evil as that he is the duplicate. More generally, the prin…
Statistical Mechanics and the Asymmetry of Counterfactual Dependence
In “Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow”, David Lewis defends an analysis of counterfactuals intended to yield the asymmetry of counterfactual dependence : that later affairs depend counterfactually on earlier ones, and not the other way around. I argue that careful attention to the dynamical properties of thermodynamically irreversible processes shows that in many ordinary cases, Lewis's analysis fails to yield this asymmetry. Furthermore…
Defeating Dr. Evil with Self‐Locating Belief
Dr. Evil learns that a duplicate of Dr. Evil has been created. Upon learning this, how seriously should he take the hypothesis that he himself is that duplicate? I answer: very seriously. I defend a principle of indifference for self‐locating belief which entails that after Dr. Evil learns that a duplicate has been created, he ought to have exactly the same degree of belief that he is Dr. Evil as that he is the duplicate. More generally, the prin…
Statistical Mechanics and the Asymmetry of Counterfactual Dependence
In “Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow”, David Lewis defends an analysis of counterfactuals intended to yield the asymmetry of counterfactual dependence : that later affairs depend counterfactually on earlier ones, and not the other way around. I argue that careful attention to the dynamical properties of thermodynamically irreversible processes shows that in many ordinary cases, Lewis's analysis fails to yield this asymmetry. Furthermore…
I Can’t Believe I’m Stupid 1
Bayesian Humility
Say that an agent is epistemically humble if she is less than fully confident that her opinions will converge to the truth, given appropriate evidence. Is such humility rationally permissible? According to Gordon Belot’s orgulity argument: the answer is yes, but long-run convergence-to-the-truth theorems force Bayesians to answer no. That argument has no force against Bayesians who reject countable additivity as a requirement of rationality. Such…
Statistical Mechanics and the Asymmetry of Counterfactual Dependence
In “Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow”, David Lewis defends an analysis of counterfactuals intended to yield the asymmetry of counterfactual dependence : that later affairs depend counterfactually on earlier ones, and not the other way around. I argue that careful attention to the dynamical properties of thermodynamically irreversible processes shows that in many ordinary cases, Lewis's analysis fails to yield this asymmetry. Furthermore…
Defeating Dr. Evil with Self‐Locating Belief
Dr. Evil learns that a duplicate of Dr. Evil has been created. Upon learning this, how seriously should he take the hypothesis that he himself is that duplicate? I answer: very seriously. I defend a principle of indifference for self‐locating belief which entails that after Dr. Evil learns that a duplicate has been created, he ought to have exactly the same degree of belief that he is Dr. Evil as that he is the duplicate. More generally, the prin…
I Can’t Believe I’m Stupid 1
Bayesian Humility
Say that an agent is epistemically humble if she is less than fully confident that her opinions will converge to the truth, given appropriate evidence. Is such humility rationally permissible? According to Gordon Belot’s orgulity argument: the answer is yes, but long-run convergence-to-the-truth theorems force Bayesians to answer no. That argument has no force against Bayesians who reject countable additivity as a requirement of rationality. Such…
The policy consequences of cascade blindness
One way to reduce waste and to make a system more robust is to allow its components to pool resources. For example, banks might insure each other or share a common capital reserve. Systems whose resources have been pooled in this way are highly prevalent in such diverse domains as finance, infrastructure, health care, emergency response and engineering. However, these systems have a combination of characteristics that leave them vulnerable to poo…
Fragmentation and logical omniscience
It would be good to have a Bayesian decision theory that assesses our decisions and thinking according to everyday standards of rationality—standards that do not require logical omniscience (Garber, 1983; Hacking, 1967). To that end we develop a “fragmented” decision theory in which a single state of mind is represented by a family of credence functions, each associated with a distinct choice condition (Lewis, 1982; Stalnaker, 1984). The theory i…
People make suboptimal decisions about existential risks
Allocating resources to maximize the probability that humanity survives a set of existential risks has a different structure from many decision problems, as the objective is the product of the probabilities of desired outcomes rather than the sum. We derive the optimal solution to this problem and use this solution to evaluate the choices that people make when presented with decisions that have this multiplicative structure. Our participants (tot…
Boltzmann brains and cognitive instability
A Boltzmann brain is a randomly‐formed configuration of matter that is conscious. According to some theories that cosmologists take seriously, the universe is so spatiotemporally large that it contains a great many Boltzmann brains that are duplicates of you. In the light of this it seems to follow that you should have significant confidence that you are a Boltzmann brain. What's worse, your situation seems to be “cognitively unstable”: It seems …
Epistemology (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Economics (4 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (4 works) · Mathematical economics (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Computer Science (2 works) · Free Will and Agency (2 works) · Physics (2 works) · Psychology (2 works)