Pablo_Stafforini comments on A personal history of involvement with effective altruism - Less Wrong

10 Post author: JonahSinick 11 June 2013 04:49AM

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Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 04 October 2016 11:26:12AM *  0 points [-]

it's much easier to affect the near future than the far future, so let e represent the amount of extra "entropy" that our actions face if they target the far future. For example, e = 10^-6 says there's a factor-of-a-million discount for how likely our actions are to actually make the difference we intend for the far future vs. if we had acted to affect the near-term.

In the past, when I expressed worries about the difficulties associated to far-future meme-spreading, which you favor as an alternative to extinction-risk reduction, you said you thought there was a significant chance of a singleton-dominated future. Such a singleton, you argued, would provide the necessary causal stability for targeted meme-spreading to successfully influence our distant descendants. But now you seem to be implying that, other things equal, far-future meme-spreading is several orders of magnitude less likely to succeed than short-term interventions (including interventions aimed at reducing near-term risk of extinction, which plausibly represents a significant fraction of total extinction risk). I find these two views hard to reconcile.