Thanks for this post. However, HoH still seems ambiguous to me, particularly when we take uncertainty seriously. For example, what kind of comparison is happening in “T is the most influential time ever”—and, consequently, what kind of probability function does one use to model credence in it?
1) Weak-HoH: “the sentence ‘t is hingey’ is more likely to be true for now (or for the next n years) than for any other similar set t in the future”
If you interpret hingey events as produced by stochastic processes modeled by an exponential distribution, then weak-HoH has a trivial explanation.
If the risk of rain is p= .03 per day, then today is most likely to be the next rainy day—because the risk of it being tomorrow is (.97 * .03) – i.e., the probability of not raining today multiplied by the probability of raining tomorrow, and so on.
So, even though it’s very unlikely that we’ll go extinct in the next year, if I had to bet on an exact year, 2020 is a priori more likely to be it than 2021 - we can only die once. Something similar for AGI: though I don’t think it’s gonna happen in the next decade, this century is more likely to be The One than the next—but not more likely than the next 900 years, for example.
2) The strongest version of HoH is (A): “Now is THE most important time ever”, which is so unlikely that it looks like a strawman. But (B): “Now is more important than the median / average” is very tempting: first, the prior is high – you need evidence 99 times weaker (1:99 against 1:1 odds) to ascertain (B) instead of (C): “Now is in the first percentile of the importance distribution”. Second, it fits the historical record better – it looks like most of the last 200 kyr were boring in comparison with now (of course, I agree there are some huge biases affecting this assessment). Also, the HoH defender may limit the considered time-span: “the next decade will be the most important in the century / the next 100 years”
3) In (1) and (2), I supposed HoH refers only to the future, but some of the arguments against HoH refer any time, even the past. What’s the relevance (and meaning) of comparing the influence of now to important times in the past – besides assessing the odds of existing more hingey times in the future?
Influence is asymmetric: the past influences both the present and the future. Also, It seems plausible that hingeness is not a “timeless property” or absolute property: 3 different rational individuals, X, Y and Z, each located in different times Tx, Ty and Tz, would have different impartial assessments of the set (Tx, Ty, Tz) – mostly because of uncertainty, or the path-dependency of their actions, or value differences. And since “hingeness” is an ordering, not a cardinal relation, it might be hard (if not impossible) to aggregate X-Y-Z assessments.
Thanks for this post. However, HoH still seems ambiguous to me, particularly when we take uncertainty seriously. For example, what kind of comparison is happening in “T is the most influential time ever”—and, consequently, what kind of probability function does one use to model credence in it?
1) Weak-HoH: “the sentence ‘t is hingey’ is more likely to be true for now (or for the next n years) than for any other similar set t in the future”
If you interpret hingey events as produced by stochastic processes modeled by an exponential distribution, then weak-HoH has a trivial explanation.
If the risk of rain is p= .03 per day, then today is most likely to be the next rainy day—because the risk of it being tomorrow is (.97 * .03) – i.e., the probability of not raining today multiplied by the probability of raining tomorrow, and so on.
So, even though it’s very unlikely that we’ll go extinct in the next year, if I had to bet on an exact year, 2020 is a priori more likely to be it than 2021 - we can only die once. Something similar for AGI: though I don’t think it’s gonna happen in the next decade, this century is more likely to be The One than the next—but not more likely than the next 900 years, for example.
2) The strongest version of HoH is (A): “Now is THE most important time ever”, which is so unlikely that it looks like a strawman. But (B): “Now is more important than the median / average” is very tempting: first, the prior is high – you need evidence 99 times weaker (1:99 against 1:1 odds) to ascertain (B) instead of (C): “Now is in the first percentile of the importance distribution”. Second, it fits the historical record better – it looks like most of the last 200 kyr were boring in comparison with now (of course, I agree there are some huge biases affecting this assessment). Also, the HoH defender may limit the considered time-span: “the next decade will be the most important in the century / the next 100 years”
3) In (1) and (2), I supposed HoH refers only to the future, but some of the arguments against HoH refer any time, even the past. What’s the relevance (and meaning) of comparing the influence of now to important times in the past – besides assessing the odds of existing more hingey times in the future?
Influence is asymmetric: the past influences both the present and the future. Also, It seems plausible that hingeness is not a “timeless property” or absolute property: 3 different rational individuals, X, Y and Z, each located in different times Tx, Ty and Tz, would have different impartial assessments of the set (Tx, Ty, Tz) – mostly because of uncertainty, or the path-dependency of their actions, or value differences. And since “hingeness” is an ordering, not a cardinal relation, it might be hard (if not impossible) to aggregate X-Y-Z assessments.