This is another great post from this already-great sequence. However, I think this one may have the most profound implications for EA and I think it deserves more reflection from Forum and Community members. It certainly seems like it undercuts the overwhelming value thesis that has supported a lot of EA’s movement towards longtermism, and my intuitive sense is that many longtermist or longtermist-adjacent EAs haven’t really reckoned with these assumptions or used them in their explicit or implicit EV calculations.
Are there any more plans from the RP team not just to lay out the assumptions here, but perhaps quantify them even if it’s at an OOM level (I’m thinking of the Sandberg/Drexler/Ord paper on the Fermi Paradox here) and seeing under what scenarios longtermist interventions hold up?
Thanks so much for the vote of confidence, JWS. While we’d certainly be interested in working more on these assumptions, we haven’t yet committed to taking this particular project further. But if funding were to become available for that extension, we would be glad to keep going!
This is another great post from this already-great sequence. However, I think this one may have the most profound implications for EA and I think it deserves more reflection from Forum and Community members. It certainly seems like it undercuts the overwhelming value thesis that has supported a lot of EA’s movement towards longtermism, and my intuitive sense is that many longtermist or longtermist-adjacent EAs haven’t really reckoned with these assumptions or used them in their explicit or implicit EV calculations.
Are there any more plans from the RP team not just to lay out the assumptions here, but perhaps quantify them even if it’s at an OOM level (I’m thinking of the Sandberg/Drexler/Ord paper on the Fermi Paradox here) and seeing under what scenarios longtermist interventions hold up?
Thanks so much for the vote of confidence, JWS. While we’d certainly be interested in working more on these assumptions, we haven’t yet committed to taking this particular project further. But if funding were to become available for that extension, we would be glad to keep going!