I also found this to be a great framing of absorbers and hadn’t really got this before. It’s an argument against ‘all actions we take have huge effects on the future’, and I’m not sure how to weigh them up against each other empirically. Like how would I know if the world was more absorber-y or more sensitive to small changes?
I think conception events are just one example and there a bunch of other examples of this, the general idea being that the world has systems which are complex, hard to predict and very sensitive to initial conditions. Eg. the weather and climate system (a butterfly flapping its wings in China causing hurricane in Texas). But these are cases of simple cluelessness where we have evidential symmetry.
My claim is that we are faced with complex cluelessness, where there are some kind of systematic effects going on. To apply this to conception events—imagine we changed conception events so that girls were much more likely to be conceived than boys (say because in the near-term that had some good effects eg. say women tended to be happier at the time). My intuition here is that there could be long-term effects of indeterminate sign (eg. from increased/decreased population growth) which might dominate the near-term effects. Does that match your intuition?
Like how would I know if the world was more absorber-y or more sensitive to small changes?
I’m not sure; that’s a pretty interesting question.
Here’s a tentative idea: using the evolution of brains, we can conclude that whatever sensitivity the world has to small changes, it can’t show up *too* quickly. You could imagine a totally chaotic world, where the whole state at time t+(1 second) is radically different depending on minute variations in the state at time t. Building models of such a world that were useful on 1 second timescales would be impossible. But brains are devices for modelling the world that are useful on 1 second timescales. Brains evolved; hence they conferred some evolutionary advantage. Hence we don’t live in this totally chaotic world; the world must be less chaotic than that.
It seems like this argument gets less strong the longer your timescales are, as our brains perhaps faced less evolutionary pressure to be good at prediction on timescales of like 1 year, and still less to be good at prediction on timescales of 100 years. But I’m not sure; I’d like to think about this more.
To apply this to conception events—imagine we changed conception events so that girls were much more likely to be conceived than boys (say because in the near-term that had some good effects eg. say women tended to be happier at the time). My intuition here is that there could be long-term effects of indeterminate sign (eg. from increased/decreased population growth) which might dominate the near-term effects. Does that match your intuition?
Yes, that matches my intuition. This action creates a sweeping change a really complex system; I would be surprised if there were no unexpected effects.
But I don’t see why we should believe all actions are like this. I’m raising the “long-term effects don’t persist” objection, arguing that it seems true of *some* actions.
I also found this to be a great framing of absorbers and hadn’t really got this before. It’s an argument against ‘all actions we take have huge effects on the future’, and I’m not sure how to weigh them up against each other empirically. Like how would I know if the world was more absorber-y or more sensitive to small changes?
I think conception events are just one example and there a bunch of other examples of this, the general idea being that the world has systems which are complex, hard to predict and very sensitive to initial conditions. Eg. the weather and climate system (a butterfly flapping its wings in China causing hurricane in Texas). But these are cases of simple cluelessness where we have evidential symmetry.
My claim is that we are faced with complex cluelessness, where there are some kind of systematic effects going on. To apply this to conception events—imagine we changed conception events so that girls were much more likely to be conceived than boys (say because in the near-term that had some good effects eg. say women tended to be happier at the time). My intuition here is that there could be long-term effects of indeterminate sign (eg. from increased/decreased population growth) which might dominate the near-term effects. Does that match your intuition?
I’m not sure; that’s a pretty interesting question.
Here’s a tentative idea: using the evolution of brains, we can conclude that whatever sensitivity the world has to small changes, it can’t show up *too* quickly. You could imagine a totally chaotic world, where the whole state at time t+(1 second) is radically different depending on minute variations in the state at time t. Building models of such a world that were useful on 1 second timescales would be impossible. But brains are devices for modelling the world that are useful on 1 second timescales. Brains evolved; hence they conferred some evolutionary advantage. Hence we don’t live in this totally chaotic world; the world must be less chaotic than that.
It seems like this argument gets less strong the longer your timescales are, as our brains perhaps faced less evolutionary pressure to be good at prediction on timescales of like 1 year, and still less to be good at prediction on timescales of 100 years. But I’m not sure; I’d like to think about this more.
Hey, glad this was helpful! : )
Yes, that matches my intuition. This action creates a sweeping change a really complex system; I would be surprised if there were no unexpected effects.
But I don’t see why we should believe all actions are like this. I’m raising the “long-term effects don’t persist” objection, arguing that it seems true of *some* actions.