Firstly, it’s more reasonable to instead have a prior that early times in human history (such as our time) are more likely to be hingey—for example because we should expect humanity to expand over time, and also from considering technological advances.
I don’t really get this. It seems that there are good reasons to believe early times are influential, but also good reasons to believe that later times are influential, and it isn’t clear to me which of these dominates.
For example, Will’s inductive argument against HH pulls towards later times being influential. From Will’s paper:
P1. The influentialness of comparable people in the past has been increasing over time, with increasing knowledge and opportunities being the most important factor.
P2. We should expect our knowledge and opportunities to continue into the future.
C. So we should expect the influentialness of those future people who we can pass resources on to be greater, too.
On the other hand, the observation that we are living on a single planet pulls in the direction of this time being more influential, and Toby had some reasons for thinking that early times should be more influential:
there are also good reasons to suspect that the chance of a century being the most influential should diminish over time. Especially because there are important kinds of significant event (such as the value lock-in or an existential catastrophe) where early occurrence blocks out later occurrence.
Overall it isn’t clear to me from this that we should have a decreasing prior over time? Can anyone help me out here?
I don’t really get this. It seems that there are good reasons to believe early times are influential, but also good reasons to believe that later times are influential, and it isn’t clear to me which of these dominates.
For example, Will’s inductive argument against HH pulls towards later times being influential. From Will’s paper:
On the other hand, the observation that we are living on a single planet pulls in the direction of this time being more influential, and Toby had some reasons for thinking that early times should be more influential:
Overall it isn’t clear to me from this that we should have a decreasing prior over time? Can anyone help me out here?