I don’t make any claims about how likely it is that we are part of a very long future. Only that, a priori, the probability that we’re *both* in a very large future *and* one of the most influential people ever is very low. For that reason, there aren’t any implications from that argument to claims about the magnitude of extinction risk this century.
I don’t understand why there are implications from that argument to claims about the magnitude of our influentialness either.
As an analogy, suppose Alice bought a lottery ticket that will win her $100,000,000 with an extremely small probability. The lottery is over, and she is now looking at the winning numbers on her phone, comparing them one by one to the numbers on her ticket. Her excitement grows as she finds more and more of the winning numbers on her ticket. She managed to verify that she got 7 numbers right (amazing!), but before she finished comparing the rest of the numbers, her battery died. She tries to find a charger, and in the meantime she’s considering whether to donate the money to FHI if she wins. It occurs to her that the probability that *both* [a given person wins the lottery] *and* [donating $100,000,000 to FHI will reduce existential risk] is extremely small. She reasons that, sure, there are some plausible arguments that donating $100,000,000 to FHI will have a huge positive impact, but are those arguments strong enough considering her extremely small prior probability in the above conjunction?
I don’t understand why there are implications from that argument to claims about the magnitude of our influentialness either.
As an analogy, suppose Alice bought a lottery ticket that will win her $100,000,000 with an extremely small probability. The lottery is over, and she is now looking at the winning numbers on her phone, comparing them one by one to the numbers on her ticket. Her excitement grows as she finds more and more of the winning numbers on her ticket. She managed to verify that she got 7 numbers right (amazing!), but before she finished comparing the rest of the numbers, her battery died. She tries to find a charger, and in the meantime she’s considering whether to donate the money to FHI if she wins. It occurs to her that the probability that *both* [a given person wins the lottery] *and* [donating $100,000,000 to FHI will reduce existential risk] is extremely small. She reasons that, sure, there are some plausible arguments that donating $100,000,000 to FHI will have a huge positive impact, but are those arguments strong enough considering her extremely small prior probability in the above conjunction?