For the record I’m not really sure about 1030 times, but I’m open 1000s of times.
And differences of 1030 are almost impossible, because everything we do now may affect the whole far future and therefore has nontrivial expected impact on vast numbers of lives.
Pretty much every action has an expected impact on the future in that we know it will radically alter the future e.g. by altering the times of conceptions and therefore who lives in the future. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we have any idea on the magnitude or sign of this expected impact. When it comes to giving to the Against Malaria Foundation for example I have virtually no idea of what the expected long-run impacts are and if this would even be positive or negative—I’m just clueless. I also have no idea what the flow-through effects of giving to AMF are on existential risks.
If I’m utterly clueless about giving to AMF but I think giving to an AI research org has an expected value of 1030 then in a sense my expected value of giving to the AI org is astronomically greater than giving to AMF (although it’s sort of like comparing 1030 to undefined so it does get a bit weird...).
For the record I’m not really sure about 1030 times, but I’m open 1000s of times.
Pretty much every action has an expected impact on the future in that we know it will radically alter the future e.g. by altering the times of conceptions and therefore who lives in the future. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we have any idea on the magnitude or sign of this expected impact. When it comes to giving to the Against Malaria Foundation for example I have virtually no idea of what the expected long-run impacts are and if this would even be positive or negative—I’m just clueless. I also have no idea what the flow-through effects of giving to AMF are on existential risks.
If I’m utterly clueless about giving to AMF but I think giving to an AI research org has an expected value of 1030 then in a sense my expected value of giving to the AI org is astronomically greater than giving to AMF (although it’s sort of like comparing 1030 to undefined so it does get a bit weird...).
Does that make any sense?