I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on what you think the forecasting error function would be in this case. My (very immediate and perhaps incorrect) thought is that speeding up progress doesn’t fall prey to a noisier signal over time. Instead I’m thinking it would be constant noisiness, although I’m struggling to articulate why. I guess it’s something along the lines of “progress is predictable, and we’re just bringing it forward in time which makes it no less predictable”.
My intuition is that there’d be increasing noisiness over time (in line with dwebb’s model). I can think of several reasons why this might be the case. (But I wrote this comment quickly, so I have low confidence that what I’m saying makes sense or is explained clearly.)
1) The noisiness could increase because of a speeding-up-progress-related version of the “exogenous nullifying events” described in Tarsney’s paper. (Tarsney’s version focused on nullifying existential catastrophes or their prevention.) To copy and then adapt Tarsney’s descriptions to this situation, we could say:
Negative Progress-Related ENEs are events in the far future (i.e., after t = 0) that—if a “speeding up” action has occurred, -would put the world into back onto a slower progress trajectory (as if the initial “speeding up” action hadn’t occurred). An example could be a war or a progress-slowing pathogen or meme. (If the “speeding up” action hasn’t occurred, the Negative Progress-Related ENE has no effect.)
Positive Progress-Related ENEs are events in the far future that—if a “speeding up” action hasn’t occurred—would put the world onto a faster progress trajectory (as if the initial “speeding up” action had occurred). An example could be someone doing the same “speeding up” action that had been considered or something that achieves similar results, analogous to how the counterfactual impact of you inventing something is probably smaller than the total impact of the invention’s existence. (If the “speeding up” action has occurred, the Positive Progress-Related ENE has no effect.)
As Tarsney writes:
What negative and positive ENEs have in common is that they “nullify” the intended effect of the longtermist intervention. After the first ENE occurs, it no longer matters (at least in expectation) whether the world was in state S at t = 0, since the current state of the world no longer depends on its state at t = 0.
2) The noisiness could also increase because, the further we go into the future, the less we know about what’s happening, and so the more likely it is that speeding up progress (or making any other change) would actually have bad effects.
Analogously, I feel fairly confident that me making myself a sandwich won’t cause major negative ripple effects within 2 minutes, but not within 1000 years.
My intuition is that there’d be increasing noisiness over time (in line with dwebb’s model). I can think of several reasons why this might be the case. (But I wrote this comment quickly, so I have low confidence that what I’m saying makes sense or is explained clearly.)
1) The noisiness could increase because of a speeding-up-progress-related version of the “exogenous nullifying events” described in Tarsney’s paper. (Tarsney’s version focused on nullifying existential catastrophes or their prevention.) To copy and then adapt Tarsney’s descriptions to this situation, we could say:
As Tarsney writes:
2) The noisiness could also increase because, the further we go into the future, the less we know about what’s happening, and so the more likely it is that speeding up progress (or making any other change) would actually have bad effects.
Analogously, I feel fairly confident that me making myself a sandwich won’t cause major negative ripple effects within 2 minutes, but not within 1000 years.
Yeah this all makes sense, thanks.