Just a quick thought: I wonder whether the hingiest times were during periods of potential human population bottlenecks. E.g., Wikipedia says:
A 2005 study from Rutgers University theorized that the pre-1492native populations of the Americas are the descendants of only 70 individuals who crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America.
[...]
In 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a ‘long bottleneck’ to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change.[6] This would be consistent with suggestions that in sub-Saharan Africa numbers could have dropped at times as low as 2,000, for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age.
(Note that the Wikipedia article doesn’t seem super well done, and also that it appears there has been significant scholarly controversy around population bottleneck claims. I don’t want to claim that there in fact were population bottlenecks; I’m just curious what the implications in terms of hinginess would be if there were.)
As a first pass, it seems plausible to me that e.g. the action of any one of those 70 humans could have made the difference between this group surviving or not, with potentially momentous consequences. (What if the Vikings, or even later European colonialists, had found a continent without a human population?) Similarly, compared to any human today, if at some point the global human population really was just 2,000, then as a first pass—just based on a crude prior determined by the total population—it seems that one of these 2,000 people could have been enormously influential. Depending on how concentrated the population was and how much of a “close call” it was that modern humans didn’t go extinct, it might even be the case that some of these people’s actions had—without them realizing it—significant impacts on the probability of human survival (say, shifting the probability by more than 0.1%).
Some unstructured closing thoughts:
Scholars often use “history” in a narrow sense to refer to the period of time for which we have written descriptions. My impression is this would exclude periods of population bottlenecks—they’d all be in “prehistory.” It’s not clear to me if you intended to exclude prehistory based on the title of your post.
Even if there were drastic population bottlenecks and these were in fact the hingiest times, it’s not clear what would follow from this. E.g., it might be defensible to claim that prehistory is outside the relevant reference class.
During a human population bottleneck, the distinction between “direct work” and “investing” on which your definitions rest might cease to make sense. Quite possibly, the best thing one of the 70 people in North America could have done is helping to hunt a bison or some other garden-variety action that helps the group survive—this seems good from the point of view of “longtermist altruism”/direct work, “investment”, and selfish self-interest. This is a drastic example, but the direct work vs. investing distinction might also be quite blurry in less drastic times.
The potential example of 70 people settling North America also makes me wonder about the distribution of influence across people for any given period of time. Your definition currently talks about “a longtermist altruist living at ti”—but if different longtermist altruists would have vastly different amounts of influence at time ti, it becomes unclear how to understand this definition. Do I randomly draw a member of the human population at that time according to a uniform distribution, and then imagine they are a longtermist altruist? Do we refer to the person with the median influence? The maximum influence? Etc. (A more contemporary example: If I’m someone who could launch a nuclear weapon, then presumably I have a lot more influence than a poor peasant in the Chinese or Indian countryside. The latter observation points to a potential problem with spelling our your definition in terms of the median member of the world population: Todays “longtermist altruists” are very unusual people relative to the world population; it’s not clear how much influence a rural farmer in China, India, or Bangladesh has today even if, say, the Bostrom/Yudkowsky story about AI is correct.)
On a second thought, maybe what we should do is: take some person at ti (bracketing for a moment whether we draw someone uniformly at random, or take the one with most influence, or whatever) and then look at the difference between their actual actions (or the actions we’d expect them to take in the possible world we’re considering if the values of the person are also determined by our sampling procedure) and the actions they’d take if we “intervene” to assume this person in fact was a longtermist altruist.
This definition would suggest that hinginess in the periods I mentioned wasn’t that high: It’s true that one of 70 people helping to hunt a bison made a big difference when compared to doing nothing; however, probably there is approximately zero difference between what that person has actually done and what they would have done if there had been a longtermist altruists: they’d have helped hunting a bison in both cases.
I just realized that there are actually two separate reasons for thinking that the hingiest times in history were periods of population bottlenecks. First, because tiny populations are much more vulnerable to extinction than much larger populations are. Second, because in smaller populations an individual person has a larger share of influence than they do in larger populations, holding total influence constant.
Compare population bottlenecks to one of Will’s examples:
It could be the case [...] that the 20th century was a bigger deal than the 17th century, but that, because there were 1/5th as many people alive during the 17th century, a longtermist altruist could have had more direct impact in the 17th century than in the 20th century.
Unlike the 17th century, which is hingier only because comparatively fewer people exist, periods of population bottlenecks are hingier both because of their unusually low population and because they are “a bigger deal” than other periods.
Do you think that this effect only happens in very small populations settling new territory, or is it generally the case that a smaller population means more hinginess? If the latter, then that suggests that, all else equal, the present is hingier than the future (though the past is even hingier), if we assume that future populations are bigger (possibly by a large factor). While the current population is not small in absolute terms, it could plausibly be considered a population bottleneck relative to a future cosmic civilisation (if space colonisation becomes feasible).
[Epistemic status: have never thought about this issue specifically in a focused way.]
I think as a super rough first pass it makes sense to think that, all else equal, smaller populations mean more hinginess.
I feel uncertain to what extent this is just because we should then expect any single person to own a greater share of total resources at some point in time. One extreme assumption would be that the relative distribution of resources at any given point in time is the prior for everyone’s influence over the long-run future, perhaps weighted by how much they care about the long run. On that extreme assumption, this would probably mean that the maximum influence over all agents is higher today because global inequality is presumably higher than during population bottlenecks or in fact any past period. However, I think that assumption is too extreme: it’s not the case that every generation can propagate their values indefinitely, with the share of their influence staying constant; for example, it might be that certain developments are determined by environmental conditions or other factors that are independent from any human’s values. This turns on quite controversial questions around environmental/technological determinism that probably have a nuanced rather than simple answer.
Just a quick thought: I wonder whether the hingiest times were during periods of potential human population bottlenecks. E.g., Wikipedia says:
(Note that the Wikipedia article doesn’t seem super well done, and also that it appears there has been significant scholarly controversy around population bottleneck claims. I don’t want to claim that there in fact were population bottlenecks; I’m just curious what the implications in terms of hinginess would be if there were.)
As a first pass, it seems plausible to me that e.g. the action of any one of those 70 humans could have made the difference between this group surviving or not, with potentially momentous consequences. (What if the Vikings, or even later European colonialists, had found a continent without a human population?) Similarly, compared to any human today, if at some point the global human population really was just 2,000, then as a first pass—just based on a crude prior determined by the total population—it seems that one of these 2,000 people could have been enormously influential. Depending on how concentrated the population was and how much of a “close call” it was that modern humans didn’t go extinct, it might even be the case that some of these people’s actions had—without them realizing it—significant impacts on the probability of human survival (say, shifting the probability by more than 0.1%).
Some unstructured closing thoughts:
Scholars often use “history” in a narrow sense to refer to the period of time for which we have written descriptions. My impression is this would exclude periods of population bottlenecks—they’d all be in “prehistory.” It’s not clear to me if you intended to exclude prehistory based on the title of your post.
Even if there were drastic population bottlenecks and these were in fact the hingiest times, it’s not clear what would follow from this. E.g., it might be defensible to claim that prehistory is outside the relevant reference class.
During a human population bottleneck, the distinction between “direct work” and “investing” on which your definitions rest might cease to make sense. Quite possibly, the best thing one of the 70 people in North America could have done is helping to hunt a bison or some other garden-variety action that helps the group survive—this seems good from the point of view of “longtermist altruism”/direct work, “investment”, and selfish self-interest. This is a drastic example, but the direct work vs. investing distinction might also be quite blurry in less drastic times.
The potential example of 70 people settling North America also makes me wonder about the distribution of influence across people for any given period of time. Your definition currently talks about “a longtermist altruist living at ti”—but if different longtermist altruists would have vastly different amounts of influence at time ti, it becomes unclear how to understand this definition. Do I randomly draw a member of the human population at that time according to a uniform distribution, and then imagine they are a longtermist altruist? Do we refer to the person with the median influence? The maximum influence? Etc. (A more contemporary example: If I’m someone who could launch a nuclear weapon, then presumably I have a lot more influence than a poor peasant in the Chinese or Indian countryside. The latter observation points to a potential problem with spelling our your definition in terms of the median member of the world population: Todays “longtermist altruists” are very unusual people relative to the world population; it’s not clear how much influence a rural farmer in China, India, or Bangladesh has today even if, say, the Bostrom/Yudkowsky story about AI is correct.)
On a second thought, maybe what we should do is: take some person at ti (bracketing for a moment whether we draw someone uniformly at random, or take the one with most influence, or whatever) and then look at the difference between their actual actions (or the actions we’d expect them to take in the possible world we’re considering if the values of the person are also determined by our sampling procedure) and the actions they’d take if we “intervene” to assume this person in fact was a longtermist altruist.
This definition would suggest that hinginess in the periods I mentioned wasn’t that high: It’s true that one of 70 people helping to hunt a bison made a big difference when compared to doing nothing; however, probably there is approximately zero difference between what that person has actually done and what they would have done if there had been a longtermist altruists: they’d have helped hunting a bison in both cases.
I just realized that there are actually two separate reasons for thinking that the hingiest times in history were periods of population bottlenecks. First, because tiny populations are much more vulnerable to extinction than much larger populations are. Second, because in smaller populations an individual person has a larger share of influence than they do in larger populations, holding total influence constant.
Compare population bottlenecks to one of Will’s examples:
Unlike the 17th century, which is hingier only because comparatively fewer people exist, periods of population bottlenecks are hingier both because of their unusually low population and because they are “a bigger deal” than other periods.
Do you think that this effect only happens in very small populations settling new territory, or is it generally the case that a smaller population means more hinginess? If the latter, then that suggests that, all else equal, the present is hingier than the future (though the past is even hingier), if we assume that future populations are bigger (possibly by a large factor). While the current population is not small in absolute terms, it could plausibly be considered a population bottleneck relative to a future cosmic civilisation (if space colonisation becomes feasible).
[Epistemic status: have never thought about this issue specifically in a focused way.]
I think as a super rough first pass it makes sense to think that, all else equal, smaller populations mean more hinginess.
I feel uncertain to what extent this is just because we should then expect any single person to own a greater share of total resources at some point in time. One extreme assumption would be that the relative distribution of resources at any given point in time is the prior for everyone’s influence over the long-run future, perhaps weighted by how much they care about the long run. On that extreme assumption, this would probably mean that the maximum influence over all agents is higher today because global inequality is presumably higher than during population bottlenecks or in fact any past period. However, I think that assumption is too extreme: it’s not the case that every generation can propagate their values indefinitely, with the share of their influence staying constant; for example, it might be that certain developments are determined by environmental conditions or other factors that are independent from any human’s values. This turns on quite controversial questions around environmental/technological determinism that probably have a nuanced rather than simple answer.