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.
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.