I actually think the negative exponential gives too little weight to later people, because I’m not certain that late people can’t be influential. But if I had a person from the first 1e-89 of all people who’ve ever lived and a random person from the middle, I’d certainly say that the former was more likely to be one of the most influential people. They’d also be more likely to be one of the least influential people! Their position is just so special!
Maybe my prior would be like 30% to a uniform function, 40% to negative exponentials of various slopes, and 30% to other functions (e.g. the last person who ever lived seems more likely to be the most influential than a random person in the middle.)
Only using a single, simple function for something so complicated seems overconfident to me. And any mix of functions where one of them assigns decent probability to early people being the most influential is enough that it’s not super unlikely that early people are the most influential.
“Only using a single, simple function for something so complicated seems overconfident to me. And any mix of functions where one of them assigns decent probability to early people being the most influential is enough that it’s not super unlikely that early people are the most influential.”
I strongly agree with this. The fact that under a mix of distributions, it becomes not super unlikely that early people are the most influential, is really important and was somewhat buried in the original comments-discussion.
And then we’re also very distinctive in other ways: being on one planet, being at such a high-growth period, etc.
I actually think the negative exponential gives too little weight to later people, because I’m not certain that late people can’t be influential. But if I had a person from the first 1e-89 of all people who’ve ever lived and a random person from the middle, I’d certainly say that the former was more likely to be one of the most influential people. They’d also be more likely to be one of the least influential people! Their position is just so special!
Maybe my prior would be like 30% to a uniform function, 40% to negative exponentials of various slopes, and 30% to other functions (e.g. the last person who ever lived seems more likely to be the most influential than a random person in the middle.)
Only using a single, simple function for something so complicated seems overconfident to me. And any mix of functions where one of them assigns decent probability to early people being the most influential is enough that it’s not super unlikely that early people are the most influential.
“Only using a single, simple function for something so complicated seems overconfident to me. And any mix of functions where one of them assigns decent probability to early people being the most influential is enough that it’s not super unlikely that early people are the most influential.”
I strongly agree with this. The fact that under a mix of distributions, it becomes not super unlikely that early people are the most influential, is really important and was somewhat buried in the original comments-discussion.
And then we’re also very distinctive in other ways: being on one planet, being at such a high-growth period, etc.