The problem your talking about is actually being taken into account by “t”.
If you intended it that way, then the formula is technically correct, but only because you’ve offloaded all the difficulty into defining this parameter. The value of t is now strongly dependent on the net proportion of well-being vs. suffering in the entire universe, which is extremely difficult to estimate and not something that people usually mean by tractability of a cause. (And in fact, it’s also not what you talk about in this post in the section on tractability.)
The value we care about here is something like well-beingwell-being −sufering. If well-being and suffering are close together, this quantity becomes explosively larger, and so does the relative impact of improving WAW permanently relative to x-risk reduction. Since again, I don’t think this is what anyone thinks of when they talk about tractability, I think it should be in the formula.
I do agree that t in the formula is quite complicated to understand (and does not mean the same as the typical meant by tractability), I tried to explain it, but since no one edited my work, I might be overestimating the understandability of my formulations. “t” is something like “the cost-effectiveness of reducing the likelihood of x-risk by 1 percentage point” divided by “the cost-effectiveness of increasing net happiness of x-risk by 1 percent”.
When that’s been said, I still think that the analysis lacks an estimation for how good the future will be. Which could make the numbers for “t” and “net negative future” (or u(negative)) “more objective”.
If you intended it that way, then the formula is technically correct, but only because you’ve offloaded all the difficulty into defining this parameter. The value of t is now strongly dependent on the net proportion of well-being vs. suffering in the entire universe, which is extremely difficult to estimate and not something that people usually mean by tractability of a cause. (And in fact, it’s also not what you talk about in this post in the section on tractability.)
The value we care about here is something like well-beingwell-being −sufering. If well-being and suffering are close together, this quantity becomes explosively larger, and so does the relative impact of improving WAW permanently relative to x-risk reduction. Since again, I don’t think this is what anyone thinks of when they talk about tractability, I think it should be in the formula.
I do agree that t in the formula is quite complicated to understand (and does not mean the same as the typical meant by tractability), I tried to explain it, but since no one edited my work, I might be overestimating the understandability of my formulations. “t” is something like “the cost-effectiveness of reducing the likelihood of x-risk by 1 percentage point” divided by “the cost-effectiveness of increasing net happiness of x-risk by 1 percent”.
When that’s been said, I still think that the analysis lacks an estimation for how good the future will be. Which could make the numbers for “t” and “net negative future” (or u(negative)) “more objective”.