My view is that, in the aggregate, these outside-view arguments should substantially update one from one’s prior towards HoH, but not all the way to significant credence in HoH.
[3] Quantitatively: These considerations push me to put my posterior on HoH into something like the [1%, 0.1%] interval. But this credence interval feels very made-up and very unstable.
What credence to ‘this century is the most HoH-ish there will ever be henceforth?’ That claim soaks up credence from trends towards diminishing influence over time, and our time is among the very first to benefit from longtermist altruists actually existing to get non-zero returns from longtermist strategies and facing plausible x-risks. The combination of those two factors seems to have a good shot at ‘most HoH century’ but substantially better than that for ‘most HoH century remaining.’
What credence to ‘this century is the most HoH-ish there will ever be henceforth?’ That claim soaks up credence from trends towards diminishing influence over time, and our time is among the very first to benefit from longtermist altruists actually existing to get non-zero returns from longtermist strategies and facing plausible x-risks. The combination of those two factors seems to have a good shot at ‘most HoH century’ but substantially better than that for ‘most HoH century remaining.’