Is the value of humanity increasing? A critical-level enquiry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We assess whether the value of humanity (or global social welfare) has improved in the last decades despite (or because of) the substantial increa se in global population sizes. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach based on critical-level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU). CLGU posits that social welfare increases with population size if and only the new lives come with a utility level higher than that of a critical level. Despite its attractiveness, CLGU poses a number of practical difficulties that may explain why the literature has left it largely unexp lored. The most important of these difficulties deal with the choice of an individual welfare ag gregation function and with the value of the critical level. We address these difficulties by developing new procedures for making partial social orderings over classes of CLGU evaluation functions. These orderings are designed to be robust to choices of individual welfare aggregation functions (within certain classes of such functions) and to ranges of the critical leve l. The headline result is that we can robustly conclude that world welfare has increased between 1990 and 2005 if we judge that lives with per capita yearly consumption of more than $1,288 necessarily increase the value of humanity; the same conclusion applies to Sub-Saharan Africa if and only if we are willing to make that same judgement for lives with any level of per capita yearly consumption above $230. Otherwise, some of the admissible Paretian CLGU functions will judge the last two decades’ increase in global population size to have lowered the value of humanity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".