This was very interesting, thank you! I wish someone made an interactive model online where you could just plug in the relevant parameters such as the amount of existential risk in the future, the length of time of perils, how much you think extreme bliss scenarios are likelier compared to extreme suffering risks, and so on and see how much value the future holds. I’m curious what are the weakest assumptions you need to show that longtermist interventions are cost-effective. Tarsney’s Epistemic Challenge to Longtermism paper was pretty good at this.
Thanks Emre! I think Sascha Cooper is working on something like the model you mention. I forget what exactly goes into his model, but I’m quite sure he has parameters for the time of perils.
I’m also a big fan of Tarsney’s paper. We were colleagues until very recently. Fingers crossed that the paper finds a good home soon.
GPI is editing an (open-access) anthology on longtermism. We’ll have a paper by Elliott Thornley and Carl Shulman about whether some longtermist interventions can be justified based on standard cost-effectiveness metrics even if you don’t care about future people. Hopefully that will help a bit with your question about weakest-possible assumptions for cost-effectiveness of longtermist interventions. I hope we can get the anthology out in 2023, but it might take until 2024.
This was very interesting, thank you! I wish someone made an interactive model online where you could just plug in the relevant parameters such as the amount of existential risk in the future, the length of time of perils, how much you think extreme bliss scenarios are likelier compared to extreme suffering risks, and so on and see how much value the future holds. I’m curious what are the weakest assumptions you need to show that longtermist interventions are cost-effective. Tarsney’s Epistemic Challenge to Longtermism paper was pretty good at this.
Thanks Emre! I think Sascha Cooper is working on something like the model you mention. I forget what exactly goes into his model, but I’m quite sure he has parameters for the time of perils.
I’m also a big fan of Tarsney’s paper. We were colleagues until very recently. Fingers crossed that the paper finds a good home soon.
GPI is editing an (open-access) anthology on longtermism. We’ll have a paper by Elliott Thornley and Carl Shulman about whether some longtermist interventions can be justified based on standard cost-effectiveness metrics even if you don’t care about future people. Hopefully that will help a bit with your question about weakest-possible assumptions for cost-effectiveness of longtermist interventions. I hope we can get the anthology out in 2023, but it might take until 2024.
Thank you for sharing this, I’m glad to learn some people are working on these. Excited for these projects.