there are an expected 1 million centuries to come, and the natural prior on the claim that we’re in the most influential century ever is 1 in 1 million. This would be too low in one important way, namely that the number of future people is decreasing every century, so it’s much less likely that the final century will be more influential than the first century. But even if we restricted ourselves to a uniform prior over the first 10% of civilisation’s history, the prior would still be as low as 1 in 100,000.
Half-baked thought: you might think that the very very long futures will mostly have been locked in very close to their start—i.e. that timescales for locking in the best futures are much much shorter than the maximum lifespan for civilisation. This would push you towards a prior over an even smaller chunk of the expected future.
Something like this view seems implicit in some ways of talking about the future, and feels plausible to me, though I’m not sure what the best arguments are.
Half-baked thought: you might think that the very very long futures will mostly have been locked in very close to their start—i.e. that timescales for locking in the best futures are much much shorter than the maximum lifespan for civilisation. This would push you towards a prior over an even smaller chunk of the expected future.
Something like this view seems implicit in some ways of talking about the future, and feels plausible to me, though I’m not sure what the best arguments are.