William MacAskill: belief

Transcript context

…Let me ask you the question I asked Sam Bankman-Fried. Let’s say we take the known world of living beings, however large that may be, and the demon offers us a bet. We can double that world with probability 51 percent, but with 49 percent, it all goes away and disappears, and everything’s gone. Now, in expected value terms, that’s a good bet, right? Should we do that? Sam said yes. He’s like, “I’m going to bite that bullet. I want to bite this bullet,” he said. What’s your view? One first thing is, we’ve got to carefully state the question. If you’re just giving me a doubling of the world as it is, well, I think, again, almost all value is in the future. It’s to come. Instead, the thought experiment should perhaps be — Well, that doubles too, right? The future is going to double, everything.…

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