Or perhaps extinction risk is high, but will stay high indefinitely, in which case the future is not huge in expectation, and the grounds for strong longtermism fall away.
I don’t think this necessarily follows. If the present generation can reduce the risk of extinction for all future generations, the present value of extinction reduction may still be high enough to vindicate strong longtermism. For example, suppose that each century will be exposed to a 2% constant risk of extinction, and that we can bring that risk down to 1% by devoting sufficient resources to extinction risk reduction. Assuming a stable population of 10 billion, then thanks to our efforts an additional 500 billion lives will exist in expectation, and most of these lives will exist more than 10,000 years from now. Relaxing the stable population assumption strengthens this conclusion.
Agreed, good point; I was thinking just of the case where you reduce extinction risk in one period but not in others.
I’ll note, though, that reducing extinction risk at all future times seems very hard to do. I can imagine, if we’re close to a values lock-in point, we could shift societal values such that they care about future extinction risk much more than they would otherwise have done. But if that’s the pathway, then the Time of Perils view wouldn’t provide an argument for HoH independent of the Value Lock-In view.
I liked this post. One comment:
I don’t think this necessarily follows. If the present generation can reduce the risk of extinction for all future generations, the present value of extinction reduction may still be high enough to vindicate strong longtermism. For example, suppose that each century will be exposed to a 2% constant risk of extinction, and that we can bring that risk down to 1% by devoting sufficient resources to extinction risk reduction. Assuming a stable population of 10 billion, then thanks to our efforts an additional 500 billion lives will exist in expectation, and most of these lives will exist more than 10,000 years from now. Relaxing the stable population assumption strengthens this conclusion.
Agreed, good point; I was thinking just of the case where you reduce extinction risk in one period but not in others.
I’ll note, though, that reducing extinction risk at all future times seems very hard to do. I can imagine, if we’re close to a values lock-in point, we could shift societal values such that they care about future extinction risk much more than they would otherwise have done. But if that’s the pathway, then the Time of Perils view wouldn’t provide an argument for HoH independent of the Value Lock-In view.