Thanks so much for taking the time to write this excellent response, I really appreciate it, and you make a lot of great points. I’ll divide up my reactions into different comments; hopefully that helps ease of reading.
I’d like to flag that I would really like to see a more elegant term than ‘hingeyness’ become standard for referring to the ease of influence in different periods.
This is a good idea. Some options: influentialness; criticality; momentousness; importance; pivotality; significance.
I’ve created a straw poll here to see as a first pass what the Forum thinks.
Thinking further, I would go with importance among those options for ‘total influence of an era’ but none of those terms capture the ‘per capita/resource’ element, and so all would tend to be misleading in that way. I think you would need an explicit additional qualifier to mean not ‘this is the century when things will be decided’ but ‘this is the century when marginal influence is highest, largely because ~no one tried or will try.’
Criticality is confusing because it describes the point when nuclear reaction becomes self-sustaining, and relates to “critical points” in the related area of dynamical systems, which is somewhat different from what we’re talking about.
I think Hingeyness should have a simple name because it is not a complicated concept—It’s how much actions affect long-run outcomes. In RL, in discussion of prioritized experience replay, we would just use something like “importance”. I would generally use “(long-run) importance” or “(long-run) influence” here, though I guess pivotality (from Yudkowsky’s “pivotal act”) is alright in a jargon-liking context (like academic papers).
Edit: From Carl’s comment, and from rereading the post, the per-resource component seems key. So maybe per-resource importance.
Hi Carl,
Thanks so much for taking the time to write this excellent response, I really appreciate it, and you make a lot of great points. I’ll divide up my reactions into different comments; hopefully that helps ease of reading.
This is a good idea. Some options: influentialness; criticality; momentousness; importance; pivotality; significance.
I’ve created a straw poll here to see as a first pass what the Forum thinks.
[Edit: Results:
Pivotality − 26% (17 votes)
Criticality − 22% (14 votes)
Hingeyness − 12% (8 votes)
Influentialness − 11% (7 votes)
Importance − 11% (7 votes)
Significance − 11% (7 votes)
Momentousness − 8% (5 votes)]
Now it’s officially on BBC: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200923-the-hinge-of-history-long-termism-and-existential-risk
Although it also says:
Thinking further, I would go with importance among those options for ‘total influence of an era’ but none of those terms capture the ‘per capita/resource’ element, and so all would tend to be misleading in that way. I think you would need an explicit additional qualifier to mean not ‘this is the century when things will be decided’ but ‘this is the century when marginal influence is highest, largely because ~no one tried or will try.’
Criticality is confusing because it describes the point when nuclear reaction becomes self-sustaining, and relates to “critical points” in the related area of dynamical systems, which is somewhat different from what we’re talking about.
I think Hingeyness should have a simple name because it is not a complicated concept—It’s how much actions affect long-run outcomes. In RL, in discussion of prioritized experience replay, we would just use something like “importance”. I would generally use “(long-run) importance” or “(long-run) influence” here, though I guess pivotality (from Yudkowsky’s “pivotal act”) is alright in a jargon-liking context (like academic papers).
Edit: From Carl’s comment, and from rereading the post, the per-resource component seems key. So maybe per-resource importance.