As I understand it, he gives two possibilities. 1. Our capacity for happiness is symmetric while our “reality” (i.e. humanity’s historical environment) has been asymmetric. 2. Our preferences themselves were asymmetric, because we were “trained” to suffer more from adverse events, making us have greater capacity for suffering. (1) gives more reason for optimism than (2) because we are more able to change the environment than our capability for happiness/suffering.
FWIW, I think we might be able to change our capability for happiness/suffering too, and so thinking along these lines, the question might ultimately hang on energy efficiency arguments anyway.
Cheers for the response; I’m still a bit puzzled as to how this reasoning would lead to the ratio being as extreme as 1:a million/bajillion/quadrillion, which he mentions as something he puts some non-negligible credence on (which confuses me as even a small probability of this being the case would surely dominate & make the future net-negative.)
It could be very extreme in case (2) if for some reason you think that the worse suffering is a million times worse than the best happiness (maybe you are imagining severe torture) but I agree that this seems implausibly extreme. Re how to weigh the different possibilities, it depends whether you: 1) scale it as +1 vs 1M, 2) scale it as +1 vs 1/1M, or 3) give both models equal vote in a moral parliament.
As I understand it, he gives two possibilities. 1. Our capacity for happiness is symmetric while our “reality” (i.e. humanity’s historical environment) has been asymmetric. 2. Our preferences themselves were asymmetric, because we were “trained” to suffer more from adverse events, making us have greater capacity for suffering. (1) gives more reason for optimism than (2) because we are more able to change the environment than our capability for happiness/suffering.
FWIW, I think we might be able to change our capability for happiness/suffering too, and so thinking along these lines, the question might ultimately hang on energy efficiency arguments anyway.
Cheers for the response; I’m still a bit puzzled as to how this reasoning would lead to the ratio being as extreme as 1:a million/bajillion/quadrillion, which he mentions as something he puts some non-negligible credence on (which confuses me as even a small probability of this being the case would surely dominate & make the future net-negative.)
It could be very extreme in case (2) if for some reason you think that the worse suffering is a million times worse than the best happiness (maybe you are imagining severe torture) but I agree that this seems implausibly extreme. Re how to weigh the different possibilities, it depends whether you: 1) scale it as +1 vs 1M, 2) scale it as +1 vs 1/1M, or 3) give both models equal vote in a moral parliament.