Thanks for your answer. I don’t think I under stand what you’re saying, though. As I understand it, it makes a huge difference to the resource distribution that longtermism recommends, because if you allow for e.g. Bostrom’s 10^52 happy lives to be the baseline utility, avoiding x-risk becomes vastly more important than if you just consider the 10^10 people alive today. Right?
In principal I agree, although in practice there are other mitigating factors which means it doesn’t seem to be that relevant.
This is partly because the 10^52 number is not very robust. In particular, once you start postulating such large numbers of future people I think you have to take the simulation hypothesis much more seriously, so that the large size of the far future may in fact be illusory. But even on a more mundane level we should probably worry that achieving 10^52 happy lives might be much harder than it looks.
It is partly also because at a practical level the interventions long-termists consider don’t rely on the possibility of 10^52 future lives, but are good even over just the next few hundred years. I am not aware of many things that have smaller impacts and yet still remain robustly positive, such that we would only pursue them due to the 10^52 future lives. This is essentially for the reasons that asolomonr gives in their comment.
Thanks for your answer. I don’t think I under stand what you’re saying, though. As I understand it, it makes a huge difference to the resource distribution that longtermism recommends, because if you allow for e.g. Bostrom’s 10^52 happy lives to be the baseline utility, avoiding x-risk becomes vastly more important than if you just consider the 10^10 people alive today. Right?
In principal I agree, although in practice there are other mitigating factors which means it doesn’t seem to be that relevant.
This is partly because the 10^52 number is not very robust. In particular, once you start postulating such large numbers of future people I think you have to take the simulation hypothesis much more seriously, so that the large size of the far future may in fact be illusory. But even on a more mundane level we should probably worry that achieving 10^52 happy lives might be much harder than it looks.
It is partly also because at a practical level the interventions long-termists consider don’t rely on the possibility of 10^52 future lives, but are good even over just the next few hundred years. I am not aware of many things that have smaller impacts and yet still remain robustly positive, such that we would only pursue them due to the 10^52 future lives. This is essentially for the reasons that asolomonr gives in their comment.