Have you come across Toby Ordâs Shaping Humanityâs Longterm Trajectory? I think it might expand on the ways you might do longtermist âaccountingâ to figure out what matters and compare different kinds of intervention. Saving future lives probably sits under the âGainsâ section.
I wasnât aware of that essay. I think itâs ambitious in exactly the right direction: finding a way to analyze value objectively and quantitatively.
That being said, I think itâs flawed as a physical model of value.
Because itâs a complex topic, Iâll just mention a few quick points (we can expand on them later): 1. The future is not a thing that already exists and merely waits to be predicted. It is an unfolding computation. Because the systems generating it are chaotic, the only way to know the exact future is to run the process itself, step by step. At that point, prediction becomes identical to running through it in reality. 2. So you canât shift the curve to the left. You canât just bring an identical version of the future closer. Because by doing that, youâre changing it. In chaotic systems, tiny changes compound into wildly different trajectories. 3. The whole âarea under the curveâ is problematic. Think about a piece of knowledge that existed in the past and that was lost. That knowledge was valuable when it was saved on at least one substrate. Now that value doesnât exist. Same with the future. Again⌠the future doesnât exist. There is no value under the curve past this moment. 4. I believe there is a much cleaner way to measure objective value. You measure the present momentâs Functional Information (FI), in bits. Another way to think of it is as the structured information that exists now (itâs hard to understand this without the context). The future is a branching consequence of the present structure. 5. Present FI persists by reducing hazard. Reducing hazard over longer horizons requires better models, better coordination, better tools, and better memory. Those successful structures accumulate as new FI.
Have you come across Toby Ordâs Shaping Humanityâs Longterm Trajectory? I think it might expand on the ways you might do longtermist âaccountingâ to figure out what matters and compare different kinds of intervention. Saving future lives probably sits under the âGainsâ section.
I wasnât aware of that essay. I think itâs ambitious in exactly the right direction: finding a way to analyze value objectively and quantitatively.
That being said, I think itâs flawed as a physical model of value.
Because itâs a complex topic, Iâll just mention a few quick points (we can expand on them later):
1. The future is not a thing that already exists and merely waits to be predicted. It is an unfolding computation. Because the systems generating it are chaotic, the only way to know the exact future is to run the process itself, step by step. At that point, prediction becomes identical to running through it in reality.
2. So you canât shift the curve to the left. You canât just bring an identical version of the future closer. Because by doing that, youâre changing it. In chaotic systems, tiny changes compound into wildly different trajectories.
3. The whole âarea under the curveâ is problematic. Think about a piece of knowledge that existed in the past and that was lost. That knowledge was valuable when it was saved on at least one substrate. Now that value doesnât exist. Same with the future. Again⌠the future doesnât exist. There is no value under the curve past this moment.
4. I believe there is a much cleaner way to measure objective value. You measure the present momentâs Functional Information (FI), in bits. Another way to think of it is as the structured information that exists now (itâs hard to understand this without the context). The future is a branching consequence of the present structure.
5. Present FI persists by reducing hazard. Reducing hazard over longer horizons requires better models, better coordination, better tools, and better memory. Those successful structures accumulate as new FI.
Open to discussion. I know itâs a lot :D