While the future is very hard to predict, it would be very surprising if there was no possible action which benefitted the long-term future in expectation. And if there are actions like that, then they swamp the expected value of other actions. It is an error to infer from the fact that the future is very unpredictable that we’re totally in the dark about which actions can make it better.
I think this needs additional assumptions to make it go through in realistic situations. There is a bit of an errors-in-variables problem. I think as stated, the argument only works if we assume actual knowledge of expected values, but in realistic situations these would need to be estimated. For reasons similar to what is discussed here and here, I think you can have a situation where there are actions that have positive EV on the future, but your estimation + intervention selection process can’t reliably identify them, and integrating out this estimation/selection based uncertainty can change the overall dynamic. Basically, your expected outcome isn’t the population expected value of a given action, the expected value you realize needs to take into account estimation/selection.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t positive EV estimation/selection procedures, just that the existence of positive EV actions isn’t sufficient for the arugment to go through.
I think this needs additional assumptions to make it go through in realistic situations. There is a bit of an errors-in-variables problem. I think as stated, the argument only works if we assume actual knowledge of expected values, but in realistic situations these would need to be estimated. For reasons similar to what is discussed here and here, I think you can have a situation where there are actions that have positive EV on the future, but your estimation + intervention selection process can’t reliably identify them, and integrating out this estimation/selection based uncertainty can change the overall dynamic. Basically, your expected outcome isn’t the population expected value of a given action, the expected value you realize needs to take into account estimation/selection.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t positive EV estimation/selection procedures, just that the existence of positive EV actions isn’t sufficient for the arugment to go through.