“It’s not clear why you’d think that the evidence for x-risk is strong enough to think we’re one-in-a-million, but not stronger than that.” This seems pretty strange as an argument to me. Being one-in-a-thousand is a thousand times less likely than being one-in-a-million, so of course if you think the evidence pushes you to thinking that you’re one-in-a-million, it needn’t push you all the way to thinking that you’re one-in-a-thousand. This seems important to me.
So you are saying that you do think that the evidence for longtermism/x-risk is enough to push you to thinking you’re at a one-in-a-million time?
EDIT: Actually I think maybe you misunderstood me? When I say “you’re one-in-a-million”, I mean “your x-risk is higher than 99.9999% of other centuries’ x-risk”; “one in a thousand” means “higher than 99.9% of other centuries’ x-risk”. So one-in-a-million is a stronger claim which means higher x-risk.
What I’m saying is that if you believe that x-risk is 0.1%, then you think we’re at least one in a million. I don’t understand why you’re willing to accept that we’re one-in-a-million; this seems to me force you to have absurdly low x-risk estimates.
What I’m saying is that if you believe that x-risk is 0.1%, then you think we’re at least one in a million.
I think you’re saying “if you believe that x-risk this century is 0.1%, then survival probability this century is 99.9%, and for total survival probability over the next trillion years to be 0.01%, there can be at most 9200 centuries with risk that high over the next trillion years (.999^9200=0.0001), which means we’re in (most generously) a one-in-one-million century, as a trillion years is 10 billion centuries, which divided by ten thousand is a million.” That seem right?
So you are saying that you do think that the evidence for longtermism/x-risk is enough to push you to thinking you’re at a one-in-a-million time?
EDIT: Actually I think maybe you misunderstood me? When I say “you’re one-in-a-million”, I mean “your x-risk is higher than 99.9999% of other centuries’ x-risk”; “one in a thousand” means “higher than 99.9% of other centuries’ x-risk”. So one-in-a-million is a stronger claim which means higher x-risk.
What I’m saying is that if you believe that x-risk is 0.1%, then you think we’re at least one in a million. I don’t understand why you’re willing to accept that we’re one-in-a-million; this seems to me force you to have absurdly low x-risk estimates.
I think you’re saying “if you believe that x-risk this century is 0.1%, then survival probability this century is 99.9%, and for total survival probability over the next trillion years to be 0.01%, there can be at most 9200 centuries with risk that high over the next trillion years (.999^9200=0.0001), which means we’re in (most generously) a one-in-one-million century, as a trillion years is 10 billion centuries, which divided by ten thousand is a million.” That seem right?