welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Thoughts on whether we're living at the most influential time in history, published by Buck on the effective altruism forum.
(thanks to Claire Zabel, Damon Binder, and Carl Shulman for suggesting some of the main arguments here, obviously all flaws are my own; thanks also to Richard Ngo, Greg Lewis, Kevin Liu, and Sidney Hough for helpful conversation and comments.)
Will MacAskill has a post, Are we living at the most influential time in history?, about what he calls the “hinge of history hypothesis” (HoH), which he defines as the claim that “we are living at the most influential time ever.” Whether HoH is true matters a lot for how longtermists should allocate their effort. In his post, Will argues that we should be pretty skeptical of HoH.
EDIT: Will recommends reading this revised article of his instead of his original post.
I appreciate Will’s clear description of HoH and its difference from strong longtermism, but I think his main argument against HoH is deeply flawed. The comment section of Will’s post contains a number of commenters making some of the same criticisms I’m going to make. I’m writing this post because I think the rebuttals can be phrased in some different, potentially clearer ways, and because I think that the weaknesses in Will’s argument should be more widely discussed.
Summary: I think Will’s arguments mostly lead to believing that you aren’t an “early human” (a human who lives on Earth before humanity colonizes the universe and flourishes for a long time) rather than believing that early humans aren’t hugely influential, so you conclude that either humanity doesn’t have a long future or that you probably live in a simulation.
I sometimes elide the distinction between the concepts of “x-risk” and “human extinction”, because it doesn’t matter much here and the abbreviation is nice.
(This post has a lot of very small numbers in it. I might have missed a zero or two somewhere.)
EDIT: Will's new post
Will recommends reading this revised article of his instead of his original post. I believe that his new article doesn't make the assumption about the probability of civilization lasting for a long time, which means that my criticism "This argument implies that the probability of extinction this century is almost certainly negligible" doesn't apply to his new post, though it still applies to the EA Forum post I linked. I think that my other complaints are still right.
The outside-view argument
This is the argument that I have the main disagreement with.
Will describes what he calls the “outside-view argument” as follows:
1. It’s a priori extremely unlikely that we’re at the hinge of history
2. The belief that we’re at the hinge of history is fishy
3. Relative to such an extraordinary claim, the arguments that we’re at the hinge of history are not sufficiently extraordinarily powerful
Given 1, I agree with 2 and 3; my disagreement is with 1, so let’s talk about that. Will phrases his argument as:
The prior probability of us living in the most influential century, conditional on Earth-originating civilization lasting for n centuries, is 1/n.
The unconditional prior probability over whether this is the most influential century would then depend on one's priors over how long Earth-originating civilization will last for. However, for the purpose of this discussion we can focus on just the claim that we are at the most influential century AND that we have an enormous future ahead of us. If the Value Lock-In or Time of Perils views are true, then we should assign a significant probability to that claim. (i.e. they are claiming that, if we act wisely this century, then this conjunctive claim is probably true.) So that's the claim we can focus our discussion on.
I have several disagreements with this argument.
This argument implies that the probability of exti...
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