“Will’s resolution is to say that in fact, we shouldn’t expect early times in human history to be hingey, because that would violate his strong prior that any time in human history is equally likely to be hingey.”
I don’t see why you think I think this. (I also don’t know what “violating” a prior would mean.)
The situation is: I have a prior over how influential I’m likely to be. Then I wake up, find myself in the early 21st century, and make a whole bunch of updates. This include updates on the facts that: I’m on one planet, I’m at a period of unusually high economic growth and technological progress, I *seem* to be unusually early on and can’t be very confident that the future is short. So, as I say in the original post and the comments, I update (dramatically) on my estimate of my influentialness, on the basis of these considerations. But by how much? Is it a big enough update to conclude that I should be spending my philanthropy this year rather than next, or this century rather than next century? I say: no. And I haven’t seen a quantitative argument, yet, for thinking that the argument is ‘yes’, whereas the inductive argument seems to give a positive argument for thinking ‘no’.
One reason for thinking that the update, on the basis of earliness, is not enough, is related to the inductive argument: that it would suggest that hunter-gatherers, or Medieval agriculturalists, could do even more direct good than we can. But that seems wrong. Imagine you can give an altruistic person at one of these times a bag of oats, or sell that bag today at market prices. Where would you do more good? The case in favour of earlier is if you think that speeding up economic growth / technological progress is so good that the greater impact you’d have at earlier times outweighs the seemingly better opportunities we have today. But I don’t think you believe that, and at least the standard EA view is that the benefits of speed-up are small compared to x-risk reduction or other proportional impacts on the value of the long-run future.
I’m confused as to what your core outside-view argument is Will. My initial understanding of it was the following: (A1) We are in a potentially large future with many trillions of trillions of humans (A2) Our prior should be that we are randomly chosen amongst all living humans then we conclude that (C) We should have extremely low a prior odds of being amongst the most influential To be very crudely quantitative about this, multiplying the number of humans on earth by the number of stars in the visible universe and the lifetime of the Earth, we quickly end up with estimates of ~1e38 total humans, and so priors on the order of ~1e-38.
As Buck points out, this argument doesn’t work unless you are willing to also accept with similarly extremely likelihood that the fact we appear to be very early humans is wrong. Otherwise the sheer weight of 1e38 pushes you extremely strongly to the conclusion that either (A1) is false or that we are almost certainly in a simulation.
Perhaps a somewhat different argument is closer to what you actually think. Here I’ve tried to frame the argument in a way that I think both you and Buck would find reasonable: (A1′) A prior it is plausible that the most influential human is early. For simplicity, let’s say we have a 10% prior that the most influential human lives while the majority of humanity is still all on earth. (A2′) The number of humans that will be alive up to the end of this period is plausible on the scale of a 100 billion people. (A3′) Our evidence that humanity is restricted to one planet is incontrivertible (ie, no simulation) We now conclude that (C’) We should have low, but not absurdly astronomically low odds of being amongst the most influential humans
Note that compared to the previous argument, the a prior odds on being the most influential person is now 1e-10, so our earliness essentially increases our belief that we are the most influential by something like 1e28. But of course a 1-in-a-100 billion prior is still pretty low, and you don’t think our evidence is sufficiently strong to signficantly reduce it.
Do you agree with this argument Will? Or have a I misunderstood you?
Note that compared to the previous argument, the a prior odds on being the most influential person is now 1e-10, so our earliness essentially increases our belief that we are the most influential by something like 1e28. But of course a 1-in-a-100 billion prior is still pretty low, and you don’t think our evidence is sufficiently strong to signficantly reduce it.
The argument is not about whether Will is the most influential person ever, but about whether our century has the best per person influence. With population of 10 billion+ (78 billion alive now, plus growth and turnover for the rest of the century), it’s more like 1 in 13 people so far alive today if you buy the 100 billion humans thus far population figure (I have qualms about other hominids, etc, but still the prior gets quite high given A1, and A1 is too low).
I should also point out that, if I’ve understood your position correctly Carl, I agree with you. Given my second argument, that a prior we have something like 1 in a trillion odds of being the most influential, I don’t think we should end up concluding much about this.
Most importantly, this is because whether or not I am the most influential person is not actually relevant decision making question.
But even aside from this I have a lot more information about the world than just a prior odds. For instance, any long-termist has information about their wealth and education which would make them fairly exceptional compared to the average human that has ever lived. They also have reasonable evidence about existential risk this century and plausible (for some loose definition of plausible) ways to influence this. At the end of the day each of us still has low odds of being the most influential person ever, but perhaps with odds more in the 1 in 10 million range, rather than 1 in a trillion.
In his first comment Will says he prefers to frame it as “influential people” rather than “influential times”. In particular if you read his article (rather than the blog post), then in the end of section 5 he says he thinks it is plausible that the most influential people may live within the next few thousand years, so I don’t his odds that this century is the most influential can be very low (at a guess, one in a thousand?). I might be wrong though; I’d be very curious to know what Will’s prior is that the most influential person will be alive this century.
(C) We should have extremely low a prior odds of being amongst the most influential To be very crudely quantitative about this, multiplying the number of humans on earth by the number of stars in the visible universe and the lifetime of the Earth, we quickly end up with estimates of ~1e38 total humans, and so priors on the order of ~1e-38.
I think the prior probability of this being the most important century is less than 1 % based on i) the self-sampling assumption (SSA), ii) a loguniform distribution of the effective computation this century as a fraction of that throughout all time, and iii) all effective computation being more than 10^44 times as large as that this century.
[...]
In agreement with section 2 of Mogensen 2022, the self-sampling assumption says the prior probability of being the most influential person among a population of size N, comprising past, present and future people, is the expected value of 1/N, not the reciprocal of the expected value of N.
I’m at a period of unusually high economic growth and technological progress
I think it’s not clear whether higher economic growth or technological progress implies more influence. This claim seems plausible, but you could also argue that it might be easier to have an influence in a stable society (with little economic or technological change), e.g. simply because of higher predictability.
So, as I say in the original post and the comments, I update (dramatically) on my estimate of my influentialness, on the basis of these considerations. But by how much? Is it a big enough update to conclude that I should be spending my philanthropy this year rather than next, or this century rather than next century? I say: no.
I’m very sympathetic to patient philanthropy, but this seems to overstate the required amount of evidence. Taking into account that each time has donors (and other resources) of their own, and that there are diminishing returns to spending, you don’t need to have extreme beliefs about your elevated influentialness to think that spending now is better. However, the arguments you gave are not very specific to 2020; presumably they still hold in 2100, so it stands to reason that we should invest at least over those timeframes (until we expect the period of elevated influentialness to end).
One reason for thinking that the update, on the basis of earliness, is not enough, is related to the inductive argument: that it would suggest that hunter-gatherers, or Medieval agriculturalists, could do even more direct good than we can. But that seems wrong. Imagine you can give an altruistic person at one of these times a bag of oats, or sell that bag today at market prices. Where would you do more good?
A bag of oats is presumably much more relative wealth in those other times than now. The current price of a ton of oats is GBP 120 per ton, so if the bag contains 50 kg, it’s worth just GBP 6.
People in earlier times also have less ‘competition’. Presumably the medieval person could have been the first to write up arguments for antispeciesism or animal welfare; or perhaps they could have a significant impact on establishing science, increasing rationality, improving governance, etc.
(All things considered, I think it’s not clear if earlier times are more or less influential.)
(Comment 3⁄5)
Earliness
“Will’s resolution is to say that in fact, we shouldn’t expect early times in human history to be hingey, because that would violate his strong prior that any time in human history is equally likely to be hingey.”
I don’t see why you think I think this. (I also don’t know what “violating” a prior would mean.)
The situation is: I have a prior over how influential I’m likely to be. Then I wake up, find myself in the early 21st century, and make a whole bunch of updates. This include updates on the facts that: I’m on one planet, I’m at a period of unusually high economic growth and technological progress, I *seem* to be unusually early on and can’t be very confident that the future is short. So, as I say in the original post and the comments, I update (dramatically) on my estimate of my influentialness, on the basis of these considerations. But by how much? Is it a big enough update to conclude that I should be spending my philanthropy this year rather than next, or this century rather than next century? I say: no. And I haven’t seen a quantitative argument, yet, for thinking that the argument is ‘yes’, whereas the inductive argument seems to give a positive argument for thinking ‘no’.
One reason for thinking that the update, on the basis of earliness, is not enough, is related to the inductive argument: that it would suggest that hunter-gatherers, or Medieval agriculturalists, could do even more direct good than we can. But that seems wrong. Imagine you can give an altruistic person at one of these times a bag of oats, or sell that bag today at market prices. Where would you do more good? The case in favour of earlier is if you think that speeding up economic growth / technological progress is so good that the greater impact you’d have at earlier times outweighs the seemingly better opportunities we have today. But I don’t think you believe that, and at least the standard EA view is that the benefits of speed-up are small compared to x-risk reduction or other proportional impacts on the value of the long-run future.
I’m confused as to what your core outside-view argument is Will. My initial understanding of it was the following:
(A1) We are in a potentially large future with many trillions of trillions of humans
(A2) Our prior should be that we are randomly chosen amongst all living humans
then we conclude that
(C) We should have extremely low a prior odds of being amongst the most influential
To be very crudely quantitative about this, multiplying the number of humans on earth by the number of stars in the visible universe and the lifetime of the Earth, we quickly end up with estimates of ~1e38 total humans, and so priors on the order of ~1e-38.
As Buck points out, this argument doesn’t work unless you are willing to also accept with similarly extremely likelihood that the fact we appear to be very early humans is wrong. Otherwise the sheer weight of 1e38 pushes you extremely strongly to the conclusion that either (A1) is false or that we are almost certainly in a simulation.
Perhaps a somewhat different argument is closer to what you actually think. Here I’ve tried to frame the argument in a way that I think both you and Buck would find reasonable:
(A1′) A prior it is plausible that the most influential human is early. For simplicity, let’s say we have a 10% prior that the most influential human lives while the majority of humanity is still all on earth.
(A2′) The number of humans that will be alive up to the end of this period is plausible on the scale of a 100 billion people.
(A3′) Our evidence that humanity is restricted to one planet is incontrivertible (ie, no simulation)
We now conclude that
(C’) We should have low, but not absurdly astronomically low odds of being amongst the most influential humans
Note that compared to the previous argument, the a prior odds on being the most influential person is now 1e-10, so our earliness essentially increases our belief that we are the most influential by something like 1e28. But of course a 1-in-a-100 billion prior is still pretty low, and you don’t think our evidence is sufficiently strong to signficantly reduce it.
Do you agree with this argument Will? Or have a I misunderstood you?
The argument is not about whether Will is the most influential person ever, but about whether our century has the best per person influence. With population of 10 billion+ (78 billion alive now, plus growth and turnover for the rest of the century), it’s more like 1 in 13 people so far alive today if you buy the 100 billion humans thus far population figure (I have qualms about other hominids, etc, but still the prior gets quite high given A1, and A1 is too low).
I should also point out that, if I’ve understood your position correctly Carl, I agree with you. Given my second argument, that a prior we have something like 1 in a trillion odds of being the most influential, I don’t think we should end up concluding much about this.
Most importantly, this is because whether or not I am the most influential person is not actually relevant decision making question.
But even aside from this I have a lot more information about the world than just a prior odds. For instance, any long-termist has information about their wealth and education which would make them fairly exceptional compared to the average human that has ever lived. They also have reasonable evidence about existential risk this century and plausible (for some loose definition of plausible) ways to influence this. At the end of the day each of us still has low odds of being the most influential person ever, but perhaps with odds more in the 1 in 10 million range, rather than 1 in a trillion.
In his first comment Will says he prefers to frame it as “influential people” rather than “influential times”. In particular if you read his article (rather than the blog post), then in the end of section 5 he says he thinks it is plausible that the most influential people may live within the next few thousand years, so I don’t his odds that this century is the most influential can be very low (at a guess, one in a thousand?). I might be wrong though; I’d be very curious to know what Will’s prior is that the most influential person will be alive this century.
It’s the time when people are most influential per person or per resource.
(It appears you dropped a closing parenthesis in this comment)
I will now consider everything that Carl writes henceforth to be in a parenthetical.
Hi Damon,
I do not think your calculation is correct:
I think it’s not clear whether higher economic growth or technological progress implies more influence. This claim seems plausible, but you could also argue that it might be easier to have an influence in a stable society (with little economic or technological change), e.g. simply because of higher predictability.
I’m very sympathetic to patient philanthropy, but this seems to overstate the required amount of evidence. Taking into account that each time has donors (and other resources) of their own, and that there are diminishing returns to spending, you don’t need to have extreme beliefs about your elevated influentialness to think that spending now is better. However, the arguments you gave are not very specific to 2020; presumably they still hold in 2100, so it stands to reason that we should invest at least over those timeframes (until we expect the period of elevated influentialness to end).
A bag of oats is presumably much more relative wealth in those other times than now. The current price of a ton of oats is GBP 120 per ton, so if the bag contains 50 kg, it’s worth just GBP 6.
People in earlier times also have less ‘competition’. Presumably the medieval person could have been the first to write up arguments for antispeciesism or animal welfare; or perhaps they could have a significant impact on establishing science, increasing rationality, improving governance, etc.
(All things considered, I think it’s not clear if earlier times are more or less influential.)