Excellent work; some less meritorious (and borderline repetitious) remarks:
1) One corollary of this line of argument is that even if one is living at a âhinge of historyâ, one should not reasonably believe this, given the very adverse prior and the likely weak confirmatory evidence one would have access to.
2) The invest for the future strategy seems to rely on our descendants improving their epistemic access to the point where they can reliably determine whether theyâre at a âhingeâ or not, and deploying resources appropriately. There are grounds for pessimism about this ability ever being attained. Perhaps history (or the universe as a whole) is underpowered for these inferences.
3) Although with the benefit of hindsight over previous times we could assess the distribution of hingeyness/âinfluence across these, to get a sense of the distribution, and so a steer as to whether we should think there are hingey periods of vastly outsized influence in the first place.
4) If we grant the ground truth is occasional âcrucial momentsâ, but we expect evidence at-the-time for living in one of these is scant, my intuition is the optimal strategy would to husband resources to spend these disproportionately when the evidence gives some (but not decisive) indication one of these crucial moments is now.
Depending on how common these âprobably false alarmsâ are (plus things like how reliably can we steward resources for long periods of time), this might amount to monomaniacal work on immediate challenges. E.g., the prior is (say) 1/âmillion this decade, but if the evidence suggests it is 1%, perhaps we should drop everything to work on it, if we wonât expect our credence to be this high again for another millenia.
5) Minor: Although partly priced in to considerations about how âearlyâ we are, there are also issues of conditional dependence. If extinction risk is 1% this century but 10% the next, one should probably spend somewhat disproportionately on the first one (and other cases where getting access to a âbigger hingeâ relies on going the right way on an earlier, smaller, one).
The way Iâd think about it is that we should be uncertain about how justifiably confident people can be that theyâre at the HoH. If our current credence in HoH is low, then the chance that it might be justifiably much higher in the future should be the significant consideration. At least if we put aside simulation worries, I can imagine evidence which would lead me to have high confidence that Iâm at the HoH.
E.g., the prior is (say) 1/âmillion this decade, but if the evidence suggests it is 1%, perhaps we should drop everything to work on it, if we wonât expect our credence to be this high again for another millenia.
I think if that were oneâs credences, what you say makes sense. But it seems hard for me to imagine a (realistic) situation where I think that itâs 1% chance of HoH this decade, but Iâm confident that the chance will much much lower than that for all of the next 99 decades.
For what itâs worth, my intuition is that pursuing a mixed strategy is best; some people aiming for impact now, in case now is a hinge, and some people aiming for impact in many many years, at some future hinge moment.
Excellent work; some less meritorious (and borderline repetitious) remarks:
1) One corollary of this line of argument is that even if one is living at a âhinge of historyâ, one should not reasonably believe this, given the very adverse prior and the likely weak confirmatory evidence one would have access to.
2) The invest for the future strategy seems to rely on our descendants improving their epistemic access to the point where they can reliably determine whether theyâre at a âhingeâ or not, and deploying resources appropriately. There are grounds for pessimism about this ability ever being attained. Perhaps history (or the universe as a whole) is underpowered for these inferences.
3) Although with the benefit of hindsight over previous times we could assess the distribution of hingeyness/âinfluence across these, to get a sense of the distribution, and so a steer as to whether we should think there are hingey periods of vastly outsized influence in the first place.
4) If we grant the ground truth is occasional âcrucial momentsâ, but we expect evidence at-the-time for living in one of these is scant, my intuition is the optimal strategy would to husband resources to spend these disproportionately when the evidence gives some (but not decisive) indication one of these crucial moments is now.
Depending on how common these âprobably false alarmsâ are (plus things like how reliably can we steward resources for long periods of time), this might amount to monomaniacal work on immediate challenges. E.g., the prior is (say) 1/âmillion this decade, but if the evidence suggests it is 1%, perhaps we should drop everything to work on it, if we wonât expect our credence to be this high again for another millenia.
5) Minor: Although partly priced in to considerations about how âearlyâ we are, there are also issues of conditional dependence. If extinction risk is 1% this century but 10% the next, one should probably spend somewhat disproportionately on the first one (and other cases where getting access to a âbigger hingeâ relies on going the right way on an earlier, smaller, one).
The way Iâd think about it is that we should be uncertain about how justifiably confident people can be that theyâre at the HoH. If our current credence in HoH is low, then the chance that it might be justifiably much higher in the future should be the significant consideration. At least if we put aside simulation worries, I can imagine evidence which would lead me to have high confidence that Iâm at the HoH.
I think if that were oneâs credences, what you say makes sense. But it seems hard for me to imagine a (realistic) situation where I think that itâs 1% chance of HoH this decade, but Iâm confident that the chance will much much lower than that for all of the next 99 decades.
For what itâs worth, my intuition is that pursuing a mixed strategy is best; some people aiming for impact now, in case now is a hinge, and some people aiming for impact in many many years, at some future hinge moment.