[Epistemic status: I have just read the summary of the post by the author and by Zoe Williams]
Doesn’t it make more sense to just set the discount rate dynamically accounting for the current (at the present) estimations?
If/when we reach a point where the long-term existential catastrophe rate approaches zero, then it will be the moment to set the discount rate to zero. Now it is not, so the discount rate should be higher as the author proposes.
Is there a reason for not using in a dynamic discount rate?
If you think the annual rate of catastrophic risk is X this century but only 0.5X next century, 0.25X the century afterwards etc, then you’d vastly underestimate expected value of the future if you use current x-risk levels to set the long-term discount rate.
Whether this is practically relevant or not is of course significantly more debatable.
[Epistemic status: I have just read the summary of the post by the author and by Zoe Williams]
Doesn’t it make more sense to just set the discount rate dynamically accounting for the current (at the present) estimations?
If/when we reach a point where the long-term existential catastrophe rate approaches zero, then it will be the moment to set the discount rate to zero. Now it is not, so the discount rate should be higher as the author proposes.
Is there a reason for not using in a dynamic discount rate?
If you think the annual rate of catastrophic risk is X this century but only 0.5X next century, 0.25X the century afterwards etc, then you’d vastly underestimate expected value of the future if you use current x-risk levels to set the long-term discount rate.
Whether this is practically relevant or not is of course significantly more debatable.
But the underestimation would be temporal.
I’m also not clear on whether this is practically relevant or not.