Here’s one application. You posit a divergent ‘exponentially splitting’ path for a universe. There are better versions of this story with baby universes (which work better on their own terms than counting branches equally irrespective of measure, which assigns ~0 probability to our observations).
But in any case you get some kind of infinite exponentially growing branching tree ahead of you regardless. You then want to say that having two of these trees ahead of you (or a faster split rate) is better. Indeed, on this line you’re going to say that something that splits twice as fast is so much more valuable as to drive the first tree to~nothing. Our world very much looks not-optimized for that, but it could be, for instance, a simulation or byproduct of such a tree, with a constant relationship of such simulations to the faster-expanding tree (and any action we take is replicated across the endless identical copies of us therein).
Or you can say we’re part of a set of parallel universes that don’t split but which is as ‘large’ as the infinite limit of the fastest splitting process.
I suppose your point might be something like, absurdist research is promising, and that is precisely why we need humanity to spread throughout the stars. Just think of how many zany long-shot possibilities we’ll get to pursue! If so, that sounds fair to me. Maybe that is what the fanatic would want. It’s not obvious that we should focus on saving humanity for now and leave the absurd research for later. Asymmetries in time might make us much more powerful now than later, but I can see why you might think that. I find it a rather odd motivation though.
Personally, I think we should have a bounded social welfare function (and can’t actually have an unbounded one), but place finite utility on doing a good job picking low-hanging fruit on these infinite scope possibilities. But that’s separate from the questions of what an efficient resource expenditures on those possibilities looks like.
Here’s one application. You posit a divergent ‘exponentially splitting’ path for a universe. There are better versions of this story with baby universes (which work better on their own terms than counting branches equally irrespective of measure, which assigns ~0 probability to our observations).
But in any case you get some kind of infinite exponentially growing branching tree ahead of you regardless. You then want to say that having two of these trees ahead of you (or a faster split rate) is better. Indeed, on this line you’re going to say that something that splits twice as fast is so much more valuable as to drive the first tree to~nothing. Our world very much looks not-optimized for that, but it could be, for instance, a simulation or byproduct of such a tree, with a constant relationship of such simulations to the faster-expanding tree (and any action we take is replicated across the endless identical copies of us therein).
Or you can say we’re part of a set of parallel universes that don’t split but which is as ‘large’ as the infinite limit of the fastest splitting process.
Personally, I think we should have a bounded social welfare function (and can’t actually have an unbounded one), but place finite utility on doing a good job picking low-hanging fruit on these infinite scope possibilities. But that’s separate from the questions of what an efficient resource expenditures on those possibilities looks like.