Thanks for this Michael, I’d be very interested to read this post when you publish it. Especially as my career has taken a (potentially temporary) turn in the general direction of speeding up progress, rather than towards safety. I still feel that Ben Todd and co are probably right, but I want to read more.
Also, relevant part from Greaves and MacAskill’s paper:
Just how much of an improvement [speeding up progress] amounts to depends, however, on the shape of the progress curve. In a discrete-time model, the benefit of advancing progress by one time period (assuming that at the end of history, one thereby gets one additional time period spent in the “end state”) is equal to the duration of that period multiplied by the difference between the amounts of value that are contained in the first and last periods. Therefore, if value per unit time is set to plateau off at a relatively modest level, then the gains from advancing progress are correspondingly modest. Similarly, if value per unit time eventually rises to a level enormously higher than that of today, then the gains from advancing progress are correspondingly enormous.
Thanks for this Michael, I’d be very interested to read this post when you publish it. Especially as my career has taken a (potentially temporary) turn in the general direction of speeding up progress, rather than towards safety. I still feel that Ben Todd and co are probably right, but I want to read more.
Also, relevant part from Greaves and MacAskill’s paper: