So I would say both the population and pre-emption (by earlier stabillization) factors intensely favor earlier eras in per resource hingeyness, constrained by the era having any significant lock-in opportunities and the presence of longtermists.
I think this is a really important comment; I see I didn’t put these considerations into the outside-view arguments, but I should have done as they are make for powerful arguments.
The factors you mention are analogous to the parameters that go into the Ramsey model for discounting: (i) a pure rate of time preference, which can account for risk of pre-emption; (ii) a term to account for there being more (and, presumably, richer) future agents and some sort of diminishing returns as a function of how many future agents (or total resources) there are. Then given uncertainty about these parameters, in the long run the scenarios that dominate the EV calculation are where there’s been no pre-emption and the future population is not that high. e.g. There’s been some great societal catastrophe and we’re rebuilding civilization from just a few million people. If we think the inverse relationship between population size and hingeyness is very strong, then maybe we should be saving for such a possible scenario; that’s the hinge moment.
For the later scenarios here you’re dealing with much larger populations. If the plausibility of important lock-in is similar for solar colonization and intergalactic colonization eras, but the population of the latter is billions of times greater, it doesn’t seem to be at all an option that it could be the most HoH period on a per resource unit basis.
I agree that other things being equal a time with a smaller population (or: smaller total resources) seems likelier to be a more influential time. But ‘doesn’t seem to be at all an option’ seems overstated to me.
Simple case: consider a world where there just aren’t options to influence the very long-run future. (Agents can make short-run perturbations but can’t affect long-run trajectories; some sort of historical determinism is true). Then the most influential time is just when we have the best knowledge of how to turn resources into short-run utility, which is presumably far in the future.
Or, more importantly, where hingeyness is essentially 0 up until a certain point far in the future. If our ability to positively influence the very long-run future were no better than a dart-throwing chimp until we’ve got computers the size of solar systems, then the most influential times would also involve very high populations
More generally, per-resource hingeyness increases with:
Availability of pivotal moments one can influence, and their pivotality
Knowledge / understanding of how to positively influence the long-run future
And hingeyness decreases with:
Population size
Level of expenditure on long-term influence
Chance of being pre-empted already
If knowledge or availability of pivotal moments at a time is 0, then hingeyness at the time is 0, and lower populations can’t outweigh that.
> Then given uncertainty about these parameters, in the long run the scenarios that dominate the EV calculation are where there’s been no pre-emption and the future population is not that high. e.g. There’s been some great societal catastrophe and we’re rebuilding civilization from just a few million people. If we think the inverse relationship between population size and hingeyness is very strong, then maybe we should be saving for such a possible scenario; that’s the hinge moment.
I agree (and have used in calculations about optimal disbursement and savings rates) that the chance of a future altruist funding crash is an important reason for saving (e.g. medium-scale donors can provide insurance against a huge donor like the Open Philanthropy Project not entering an important area or being diverted). However, the particularly relevant kind of event for saving is the possibility of a ‘catastrophe’ that cuts other altruistic funding or similar while leaving one’s savings unaffected. Good Ventures going awry fits that bill better than a nuclear war (which would also destroy a DAF saving for the future with high probability).
Saving extra for a catastrophe that destroys one’s savings and the broader world at the same rate is a bet on proportional influence being more important in the poorer smaller post-disaster world, which seems like a weaker consideration. Saving or buying insurance to pay off in those cases, e.g. with time capsule messages to post-apocalyptic societies, or catastrophe bonds/insurance contracts to release funds in the event of a crash in the EA movement, get more oomph.
I’ll also flag that we’re switching back and forth here between the question of which century has the highest marginal impact per unit resources and which periods are worth saving/expending how much for.
>Then given uncertainty about these parameters, in the long run the scenarios that dominate the EV calculation are where there’s been no pre-emption and the future population is not that high.
I think this is true for what little EV of ‘most important century’ remains so far out, but that residual is very small. Note that Martin Weitzman’s argument for discounting the future at the lowest possible rate (where we consider even very unlikely situations where discount rates remain low to get a low discount rate for the very long-term) gives different results with an effectively bounded utility function. If we face a limit like ‘~max value future’ or ‘utopian light-cone after a great reflection’ then we can’t make up for increasingly unlikely scenarios with correspondingly greater incremental probability of achieving ~ that maximum: diminishing returns mean we can’t exponentially grow our utility gained from resources indefinitely (going from 99% of all wealth to 99.9% or 99.999% and so on will yield only a bounded increment to the chance of a utopian long-term). A related limit to growth (although there is some chance it could be avoided, making it another drag factor) comes if the chances of expropriation rise as one’s wealth becomes a larger share of the world (a foundation with 50% of world wealth would be likely to face new taxes).
inverse relationship between population size and hingeyness
Maybe it’s a nitpick but I don’t think this is always right. For instance, suppose that from now on, population size declines by 20% each century (indefinitely). I don’t think that would mean that later generations are more hingy? Or, imagine a counterfactual where population levels are divided by 10 across all generations – that would mean that one controls a larger fraction of resources but can also affect fewer beings, which prima facie cancels out.
It seems to me that the relevant question is whether the present population size is small compared to the future, i.e. whether the present generation is a “population bottleneck”. (Cf. Max Daniel’s comment.) That’s arguably true for our time (especially if space colonisation becomes feasible at some point) and also in the rebuilding scenario you mentioned.
But ‘doesn’t seem to be at all an option’ seems overstated to me.
In expectation, just as a result of combining comparability within a few OOM on likelihood of a hinge in the era/transition, but far more in population. I was not ruling out specific scenarios, in the sense that it is possible that a random lottery ticket is the winner and worth tens of millions of dollars, but not an option for best investment.
Generally, I’m thinking in expectations since they’re more action-guiding.
I think this is a really important comment; I see I didn’t put these considerations into the outside-view arguments, but I should have done as they are make for powerful arguments.
The factors you mention are analogous to the parameters that go into the Ramsey model for discounting: (i) a pure rate of time preference, which can account for risk of pre-emption; (ii) a term to account for there being more (and, presumably, richer) future agents and some sort of diminishing returns as a function of how many future agents (or total resources) there are. Then given uncertainty about these parameters, in the long run the scenarios that dominate the EV calculation are where there’s been no pre-emption and the future population is not that high. e.g. There’s been some great societal catastrophe and we’re rebuilding civilization from just a few million people. If we think the inverse relationship between population size and hingeyness is very strong, then maybe we should be saving for such a possible scenario; that’s the hinge moment.
I agree that other things being equal a time with a smaller population (or: smaller total resources) seems likelier to be a more influential time. But ‘doesn’t seem to be at all an option’ seems overstated to me.
Simple case: consider a world where there just aren’t options to influence the very long-run future. (Agents can make short-run perturbations but can’t affect long-run trajectories; some sort of historical determinism is true). Then the most influential time is just when we have the best knowledge of how to turn resources into short-run utility, which is presumably far in the future.
Or, more importantly, where hingeyness is essentially 0 up until a certain point far in the future. If our ability to positively influence the very long-run future were no better than a dart-throwing chimp until we’ve got computers the size of solar systems, then the most influential times would also involve very high populations
More generally, per-resource hingeyness increases with:
Availability of pivotal moments one can influence, and their pivotality
Knowledge / understanding of how to positively influence the long-run future
And hingeyness decreases with:
Population size
Level of expenditure on long-term influence
Chance of being pre-empted already
If knowledge or availability of pivotal moments at a time is 0, then hingeyness at the time is 0, and lower populations can’t outweigh that.
> Then given uncertainty about these parameters, in the long run the scenarios that dominate the EV calculation are where there’s been no pre-emption and the future population is not that high. e.g. There’s been some great societal catastrophe and we’re rebuilding civilization from just a few million people. If we think the inverse relationship between population size and hingeyness is very strong, then maybe we should be saving for such a possible scenario; that’s the hinge moment.
I agree (and have used in calculations about optimal disbursement and savings rates) that the chance of a future altruist funding crash is an important reason for saving (e.g. medium-scale donors can provide insurance against a huge donor like the Open Philanthropy Project not entering an important area or being diverted). However, the particularly relevant kind of event for saving is the possibility of a ‘catastrophe’ that cuts other altruistic funding or similar while leaving one’s savings unaffected. Good Ventures going awry fits that bill better than a nuclear war (which would also destroy a DAF saving for the future with high probability).
Saving extra for a catastrophe that destroys one’s savings and the broader world at the same rate is a bet on proportional influence being more important in the poorer smaller post-disaster world, which seems like a weaker consideration. Saving or buying insurance to pay off in those cases, e.g. with time capsule messages to post-apocalyptic societies, or catastrophe bonds/insurance contracts to release funds in the event of a crash in the EA movement, get more oomph.
I’ll also flag that we’re switching back and forth here between the question of which century has the highest marginal impact per unit resources and which periods are worth saving/expending how much for.
>Then given uncertainty about these parameters, in the long run the scenarios that dominate the EV calculation are where there’s been no pre-emption and the future population is not that high.
I think this is true for what little EV of ‘most important century’ remains so far out, but that residual is very small. Note that Martin Weitzman’s argument for discounting the future at the lowest possible rate (where we consider even very unlikely situations where discount rates remain low to get a low discount rate for the very long-term) gives different results with an effectively bounded utility function. If we face a limit like ‘~max value future’ or ‘utopian light-cone after a great reflection’ then we can’t make up for increasingly unlikely scenarios with correspondingly greater incremental probability of achieving ~ that maximum: diminishing returns mean we can’t exponentially grow our utility gained from resources indefinitely (going from 99% of all wealth to 99.9% or 99.999% and so on will yield only a bounded increment to the chance of a utopian long-term). A related limit to growth (although there is some chance it could be avoided, making it another drag factor) comes if the chances of expropriation rise as one’s wealth becomes a larger share of the world (a foundation with 50% of world wealth would be likely to face new taxes).
Maybe it’s a nitpick but I don’t think this is always right. For instance, suppose that from now on, population size declines by 20% each century (indefinitely). I don’t think that would mean that later generations are more hingy? Or, imagine a counterfactual where population levels are divided by 10 across all generations – that would mean that one controls a larger fraction of resources but can also affect fewer beings, which prima facie cancels out.
It seems to me that the relevant question is whether the present population size is small compared to the future, i.e. whether the present generation is a “population bottleneck”. (Cf. Max Daniel’s comment.) That’s arguably true for our time (especially if space colonisation becomes feasible at some point) and also in the rebuilding scenario you mentioned.
In expectation, just as a result of combining comparability within a few OOM on likelihood of a hinge in the era/transition, but far more in population. I was not ruling out specific scenarios, in the sense that it is possible that a random lottery ticket is the winner and worth tens of millions of dollars, but not an option for best investment.
Generally, I’m thinking in expectations since they’re more action-guiding.