I agree that our earliness gives a dramatic update in favor of us being influential. I don’t have a stable view on the magnitude of that.
I’m not convinced that the negative exponential form of Toby’s distribution is the right one, but I don’t have any better suggestions
Like Lukas, I think that Toby’s distribution gives too much weight to early people, so the update I would make is less dramatic than Toby’s
Seeing as Toby’s prior is quite sensitive to choice of reference-class, I would want to choose the reference class of all observer-moments, where an observer is a conscious being. This means we’re not as early as we would say if we used the distribution of Homo sapiens, or of hominids. I haven’t thought about what exactly that means, though my intuition is that it means the update isn’t nearly as big.
So I guess the answer to your question is ‘no’: our earliness is an enormous update, but not as big as Toby would suggest.
Thanks, I agree that this is key. My thoughts:
I agree that our earliness gives a dramatic update in favor of us being influential. I don’t have a stable view on the magnitude of that.
I’m not convinced that the negative exponential form of Toby’s distribution is the right one, but I don’t have any better suggestions
Like Lukas, I think that Toby’s distribution gives too much weight to early people, so the update I would make is less dramatic than Toby’s
Seeing as Toby’s prior is quite sensitive to choice of reference-class, I would want to choose the reference class of all observer-moments, where an observer is a conscious being. This means we’re not as early as we would say if we used the distribution of Homo sapiens, or of hominids. I haven’t thought about what exactly that means, though my intuition is that it means the update isn’t nearly as big.
So I guess the answer to your question is ‘no’: our earliness is an enormous update, but not as big as Toby would suggest.