Abstract: 

Despite efforts to teach agents about their privilege by minimizing the cost of information, Kinney & Bright argue risk-sensitive frameworks like Lara Buchak’s allow privileged agents to rationally shield themselves from costless and relevant information about said privilege.

In response, I show that uncertainty about information’s relevance may block someone from rationally upholding that ignorance. I explore the implications and interpretations of the agent’s uncertainty; these educational initiatives may not be as doomed as suggested, and agents may feel better-off having learned something but rationally decline to learn it now. This has upshots for the viability of risk-sensitive expected utility theory in explaining elite group ignorance.

Biography:

Yong Xin Hui is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. They work broadly on epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of economics. She is interested in how tools from formal modeling bear on socio-political questions and their upshots.

They currently have projects modelling information resistance and the sociopolitical relevance of such modelling efforts. They are also pursuing a project in human-machine interactions, especially whether/how we interact with algorithmic systems as if they were epistemic agents. On the theoretical side, they are also exploring multi-model interactions, particularly of different scales.