We can also approach the issue abstractly: disruption can be seen as injecting more noise into a previously more stable global system, increasing the probability that the world settles into a different semi-stable configuration. If there are many more undesirable configurations of the world than desirable ones, increasing randomness is more likely to lead to an undesirable state of the world. I am convinced that, unless we are currently in a particularly bad state of the world, global disruption would have a very negative effect (in expectation) on the value of the long-term future.
If there are many more undesirable configurations of the world than desirable ones, then we should, a priori, expect that our present configuration is an undesirable one. Also, if the only effect of disruption was to re-randomize the world order, then the only thing you’d need for disruption to be positive is for the current state to be worse than the average civilisation from the distribution. Maybe this is what you mean with “particularly bad state”, but intuitively, I interpret that more like the bottom 15 %.
There are certainly arguments to make for our world being better than average. But I do think that you actually have to make those arguments, and that without them, this abstract model won’t tell you if disruption is good or bad.
Hmm, I have not phrased my idea clearly, so thank you for your comment, because now I am improving my concepts :)
If there are many more undesirable configurations of the world than desirable ones, then we should, a priori, expect that our present configuration is an undesirable one.
I agree with this. But that does not imply that disruption would not have a negative effect on expectation.
I don’t see disruption as ‘re-randomization’ and picking any new configuration out of the space of all possible futures. Rather, I see disruption as a ‘random departure’ from a current state, and not each possible future is equally close to the current state. And because I expect there to almost always be more ways to go ‘down’ than ‘up’, I expect this random departure to be (highly) negative.
If there are many more undesirable configurations of the world than desirable ones, then we should, a priori, expect that our present configuration is an undesirable one. Also, if the only effect of disruption was to re-randomize the world order, then the only thing you’d need for disruption to be positive is for the current state to be worse than the average civilisation from the distribution. Maybe this is what you mean with “particularly bad state”, but intuitively, I interpret that more like the bottom 15 %.
There are certainly arguments to make for our world being better than average. But I do think that you actually have to make those arguments, and that without them, this abstract model won’t tell you if disruption is good or bad.
Hmm, I have not phrased my idea clearly, so thank you for your comment, because now I am improving my concepts :)
I agree with this. But that does not imply that disruption would not have a negative effect on expectation.
I don’t see disruption as ‘re-randomization’ and picking any new configuration out of the space of all possible futures. Rather, I see disruption as a ‘random departure’ from a current state, and not each possible future is equally close to the current state. And because I expect there to almost always be more ways to go ‘down’ than ‘up’, I expect this random departure to be (highly) negative.