All of djbinder's Comments + Replies

I think this is too bearish on the economic modeling. If you want to argue that climate change could pose some risk of civilization collapse, you have to argue that some pathway exists from climate to a direct impact on society that prevents the society from functioning. When discussing collapse scenarios from climate most people (I think) are envisiging food, water, or energy production becoming so difficult that this causes further societal failures. But the economic models strongly suggest that the perturbations on these fronts are only "small", so that... (read more)

We have decided to extend the deadline to June 5th, if you'd still be to do advertise this in your forceasting newsletter that would be helpful!

I agree with with your first question, the utilitarian needs a measure (they don't need a separate utility function from their measure, but there may be other natural measures to consider in which case you do need a utility function).

With respect to your second question, I think you can either give up on the infinite cases (because you think they are "metaphysically" impossible, perhaps) or you demand that a regularization must exist (because with this the problem is "metaphysically" underspecified). I'm not sure what the correct approach is here, and I th... (read more)

I think you are right about infinite sets (most of the mathematicians I've talked to have had distinctly negative views about set theory, in part due to the infinities, but my guess is that such views are more common amongst those working on physics-adjacent areas of research). I was thinking about infinities in analysis (such as continuous functions, summing infinite series, integration, differentiation, and so on), which bottom out in some sort of limiting process.

On the spatially unbounded universe example, this seems rather analogous to me to the quest... (read more)

As an aside, while neutrality-violations are a necessary consequence of regularization, a weaker form of neutrality is preserved. If we regularize with some discounting factor so that everything remains finite, it is easy to see that "small rearrangments" (where the amount that a person can move in time is finite) do not change the answer, because the difference goes to zero as $\gamma \to 0$. But "big rearrangments" can cause differences that grow with $\gamma$. Such situations do arise in various physical situations, and are interpretted as changes to boundary conditions... (read more)

I think what is true is probably something like "neverending process don't exist, but arbitrarily long ones do", but I'm not confident. My more general claim is that there can be intermediate positions between ultrafinitism ("there is a biggest number"), and any laissez faire "anything goes" attitude, where infinities appear without care or scrunity. I would furthermore claim (but on less solid ground), that the views of practicing mathematicians and physicists falls somewhere in here.

As to the infinite series examples you give, they are mathematically ill... (read more)

I think Section XIII is too dismissive of the view that infinities are not "real", conflating it with ultrafinitism. But the sophisticated version of this view is that infinities should only be treated as "idealized limits" of finite processes. This is, as far as understand, the default view amongst practicing mathematicians and physicists. If you stray from it, and use infinities without specifying the limiting process, it is very easy to produce paradoxes, or at least, indeterminancy in the problem. The sophisticated view, then, is not that infinities do... (read more)

In principal I agree, although in practice there are other mitigating factors which means it doesn't seem to be that relevant.

This is partly because the 10^52 number is not very robust. In particular, once you start postulating such large numbers of future people I think you have to take the simulation hypothesis much more seriously, so that the large size of the far future may in fact be illusory. But even on a more mundane level we should probably worry that achieving 10^52 happy lives might be much harder than it looks.

It is partly also because at a pr... (read more)

Thanks for the reply Rory! I think at this point it is fairly clear where we agree (quantitative methods and ideas from maths and physics can be helpful in other disciplines) and where we disagree (whether complexity science has new insights to offer, and whether there is a need for an interdisciplinary field doing this work separate from the ones that already exist), and don't have any more to offer here past my previous comments. And I appreciate your candidness noting that most complexity scientists don't mention complexity or emergence much in their pu... (read more)

If the OP wants to discuss agent-based modeling, then I think they should discuss agent-based modeling. I don't think there is anything to be gained by calling agent-based models "complex systems", or that taking a complexity science viewpoint adds any value.

Likewise, if you want to study networks, why not study networks? Again, adding the word "complex" doesn't buy you anything.

As I said in my original comment, part of complexity science is good: this is the idea we can use maths and physics to modeling other systems. But this is hardly a new insight. Eco... (read more)

As someone with a background in theoretical physics, I am very skeptical of the claims made by complexity science. At a meta-level I dislike being overly negative, and I don't want to discourage people posting things that they think might be interesting or relevant on the forum. But I have seen complexity science discussed now by quite a few EAs rather credulously, and I think it is important to set the record straight.

On to the issues with complexity science. Broadly speaking, the problem with "complexity science" is that it is trying to study "complex sy... (read more)

I don't think so. The "immeasurability" of the future that Vaden has highlighted has nothing to do with the literal finiteness of the timeline of the universe. It has to do, rather, with the set of all possible futures (which is provably infinite). This set is immeasurable in the mathematical sense of lacking sufficient structure to be operated upon with a well-defined probability measure. Let me turn the question around on you: Suppose we knew that the time-horizon of the universe was finite, can you write out the sample space, $\sigma$-algebra, and measu

I agree with your criticism of my second argument. What I should have instead said is a bit different. There are actions whose value decreases over time. For instance, all else being equal it is better to implement a policy which reduces existential risk sooner rather than later. Patient philanthropy makes sense only if either (a) you expect the growth of your resources to outpace the value lost by failing to act now, or (b) you expect cheaper opportunities to arise in the future. I don't think there are great reasons to believe either of these is true (or... (read more)

I can't speak for why other people down-voted the comment but I down-voted it because the arguments you make are overly simplistic.

The model you have of philanthropy is that on an agent in each time period has the choice to either (1) invest or (2) spend their resources, and then getting a payoff depending on how influential'' the time is. You argue that the agent should then save until they reach the most influential'' time, before spending all of their resources at this most influential time.

I think this model is misleading for a couple of reasons. First... (read more)

I should also point out that, if I've understood your position correctly Carl, I agree with you. Given my second argument, that a prior we have something like 1 in a trillion odds of being the most influential, I don't think we should end up concluding much about this.  

Most importantly, this is because whether or not I am the most influential person is not actually relevant decision making question.

But even aside from this I have a lot more information about the world than just a prior odds. For instance, any long-termist has information about their ... (read more)

In his first comment Will says he prefers to frame it as "influential people" rather than "influential times". In particular if you read his article (rather than the blog post), then in the end of section 5 he says he thinks it is plausible that the most influential people may live within the next few thousand years, so I don't his odds that this century is the most influential can be very low (at a guess, one in a thousand?).  I might be wrong though; I'd be very curious to know what Will's prior is that the most influential person will be alive this century.

I'm confused as to what your core outside-view argument is Will. My initial understanding of it was the following:
(A1) We are in a potentially large future with many trillions of trillions of humans
(A2) Our prior should be that we are randomly chosen amongst all living humans
then we conclude that  
(C)  We should have extremely low a prior odds of being amongst the most influential
To be very crudely quantitative about this, multiplying the number of humans on earth by the number of stars in the visible universe and the lifetime of the Earth, we qu... (read more)

I'm curious what numbers you are using for Europe's growth between 1000-1700; I didn't think European growth over that period was particularly unusual. It is worth remembering that Europe in 1000 (particularly northern Europe) was a backwater and so benefitted from catchup growth relative to (say) China. I also don't know how much of European growth was driven by extensive growth in eastern Europe, which doesn't seem to be relevant that to the great divergence.

Arguments against the idea that Europe c1700 was technologically ahead o... (read more)

There seems to be a major disconnect between the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis and the great divergence literature. If we take the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis seriously, it seems that there is really little to explain about the industrial revolution. It is just an inevitable consequence of hyperbolic growth and is not qualitatively distinct from what occured before. Although I'm not an economic historian, I have read a number of books on the great divergence and none of them seem to agree with that analysis. They may be disagreement about the causes a... (read more)