There can’t be too many things that reduce the expected value of the future by 10%; if there were, there would be no expected value left.
Why is it unlikely that there is little to no expected value left? Wouldn’t it be conceivable that there are a lot of risks in the future and that therefore there is little expected value left? What am I missing?
I think the argument is that we don’t know how much expected value is left, but our decisions will have a much higher expected impact if the future is high-EV, so we should make decisions that would be very good conditional on the future being high-EV.
In the beginning of the Christiano part it says
Why is it unlikely that there is little to no expected value left? Wouldn’t it be conceivable that there are a lot of risks in the future and that therefore there is little expected value left? What am I missing?
See this comment thread.
I think the argument is that we don’t know how much expected value is left, but our decisions will have a much higher expected impact if the future is high-EV, so we should make decisions that would be very good conditional on the future being high-EV.