William MacAskill: evaluation

Transcript context

…Couldn’t it be this convex returns to time that the simulation might be likely to run for much longer, at least in terms of subjective time? Then, if all we have is the so-called real physical universe, and you should care about the long run much more, but there’s this insuperable epistemic problem — you don’t know what the simulators want or even people in other simulations. There’s quite possibly lots and lots and lots of them, so you’re paralyzed for this other reason, just you don’t know anything. What you want seems to now be smaller than if it’s just us, Mars, and Venus. Yes. I think that’s pretty plausible if you’re in a simulation that is just, like I said, all bets are off and we don’t really know. Maybe that means that no matter how confident you are that you’re in a simulation, you should act as if you’re not, because 99 percent you’re in a simulation — it’s like nihilism. It’s like, “Well, who knows what the impact of any of our actions are?” One percent that you’re not in a simulation, and then you just do the kind of things that seem best. On this issue of, “Oh, maybe it’s convex,” maybe the simulation goes even longer — that’s in this category of things that, again, feel to me like they’re low but also extremely speculative probabilities that feel like crazy town. It’s not just the simulation ones. There are other thoughts you might have. We’ve mentioned infinite ethics as well. Other thoughts you might have that would lead to even more value in the future but seem extremely implausible. Here’s another one, which is, you are in favor of speeding up economic growth because that has many benefits for not just now, but many centuries to come. My response to that would be, well, at some point, economic growth would plateau, maybe not in a few centuries, but certainly by 10,000 years’ time. We can’t just keep growing. The more important thing is to either change the values that guide the future or ensure that we have a future at all because that’s a difference that really persists for all time. Here’s a response you could make, Tyler, which is, we shouldn’t be confident, we shouldn’t be certain, not 100 percent certain that economic growth will plateau. Maybe it just keeps going forever and ever and ever until 100 trillion years, when the last stars burn out. What’s more, that’s where all the value is, because if economic growth can keep going for so long, then that’s huge amounts of value, way more than if we merely get a few thousand years of growth. My response to that is, man, this just seems like super brittle, low probability because it seems so implausible to me that we could get hundreds of trillions of years in technological progress and improving well-being. So, I have to admit — What about the simple response that higher economic growth today gives you better institutions, and that also serves to minimize existential risk. Look at the countries with poor growth records. None of them seem to have the institutions to fight off a real threat to humanity, right?…

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