Cheers for the response; I’m still a bit puzzled as to how this reasoning would lead to the ratio being as extreme as 1:a million/bajillion/quadrillion, which he mentions as something he puts some non-negligible credence on (which confuses me as even a small probability of this being the case would surely dominate & make the future net-negative.)
Anirandis
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Yep, for me that feels like a natural place to put the bar for an s-risk.
Hi, just saw this thread. I’m curious what type of mechanisms could lead to a net-negative world in your opinion?
(X-posting from LW open thread)
I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but does anyone know what point Paul’s trying to make in the following part of this podcast? (Relevant section starts around 1:44:00)
It seems like an important topic but I’m a bit confused by what he’s saying here. Is the perspective he’s discussing (and puts non-negligible probability on) one that states that the worst possible suffering is a bajillion times worse than the best possible pleasure, and wouldn’t that suggest every human’s life is net-negative (even if your credence on this being the case is ~.1%)? Or is this just discussing the energy-efficiency of ‘hedonium’ and ‘dolorium’, which could potentially be dealt with by some sort of limitation on compute?
Also, I’m not really sure if this set of views is more “a broken bone/waterboarding is a million times as morally pressing as making a happy person”, or along the more empirical lines of “most suffering (e.g. waterboarding) is extremely light, humans can experience far far far far far^99 times worse; and pleasure doesn’t scale to the same degree.” Even a tiny chance of the second one being true is awful to contemplate.
Specifically:
I’m not really sure what’s meant by “the reality” here, nor what’s meant by biased. Is the assertion that humans’ intuitive preferences are driven by the range of possible things that could happen in the ancestral environment & that this isn’t likely to match the maximum possible pleasure vs. suffering ratio in the future? If so, how does this lead one to end up concluding it’s worse (rather than better)? I’m not really sure how these arguments connect in a way that could lead one to conclude that the worst possible suffering is a quadrillion times as bad as the best bliss is good.