Big fan of ALLFED’s work! Good point on the issue of arithmetic vs geometric means—it’s something I’m trying to think more about. On falling discount rates; I may be wrong, but some of the testing I did finds that declining discount rates doesn’t materially affect your headline cost-effectiveness estimate too much (since a lot of the discounting is already baked in at earlier years + the effects are swamped in the long run future by a constant uncertainty discount, as CEARCH uses)
Even though it is very unlikely that all of the three countries would dramatically reduce their arsenals if it is uncorrelated, if they are correlated, but I think it would become more likely. Also, if you could just get one country to reduce arsenals, this would reduce the expected damage of the nuclear war significantly, so then I think it would be competitive cost effectiveness.
As a simple example, if one thinks there is a 1% chance of settling the galaxy (lots of X risk, but then X security) with Dyson spheres that last 1 billion years, then I think this is around 10^33 expected future biological human lives. With digital minds, it would be far higher.
Big fan of ALLFED’s work! Good point on the issue of arithmetic vs geometric means—it’s something I’m trying to think more about. On falling discount rates; I may be wrong, but some of the testing I did finds that declining discount rates doesn’t materially affect your headline cost-effectiveness estimate too much (since a lot of the discounting is already baked in at earlier years + the effects are swamped in the long run future by a constant uncertainty discount, as CEARCH uses)
Thanks!
Even though it is very unlikely that all of the three countries would dramatically reduce their arsenals if it is uncorrelated, if they are correlated, but I think it would become more likely. Also, if you could just get one country to reduce arsenals, this would reduce the expected damage of the nuclear war significantly, so then I think it would be competitive cost effectiveness.
As a simple example, if one thinks there is a 1% chance of settling the galaxy (lots of X risk, but then X security) with Dyson spheres that last 1 billion years, then I think this is around 10^33 expected future biological human lives. With digital minds, it would be far higher.