You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Larks comments on Superintelligence 17: Multipolar scenarios - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: KatjaGrace 06 January 2015 06:44AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (38)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Larks 12 January 2015 04:44:24AM 0 points [-]

'option' in the sense of a financial derivative - the right to buy an underlying security for a certain strike price in the future. In this case, it would be the chance to continue humanity if the future was bright, or commit racial-suicide if the future was dim. In general the asymmetrical payoff function means that options become more valuable the more volatile the underlying is. However, it seems that in a bad multipolar future we would not actually be able to (choose not to buy the security because it was below the strike price / choose to destroy the world) so we don't benefit from the option value.