I’m also not sure that I consider astronomical suffering outcome (by how its described in the paper) to be bad by itself.
If you have (absurd amount of people) and they have some amount of suffering (ex: it shakes out that humans prefer some degree of negative-reinforcement as possible outcomes, so it remains) then that can be more suffering in terms of magnitude, but has the benefits of being more diffuse (people aren’t broken by a short-term large amount of suffering) and with less individual extremes of suffering.
Obviously it would be bad to have a world that has astronomical suffering that is then concentrated on a large amount of people, but that’s why I think—a naive application of—astronomical suffering is incorrect because it ignores diffuse experiences, relative experiences (like, if we have 50% of people with notably bad suffering today, then your large future civilization with only 0.01% of people with notably bad suffering can still swamp that number, though the article mentions this I believe), and more minor suffering adding up over long periods of time.
(I think some of this comes from talking about things in terms of suffering versus happiness rather than negative utility versus positive utility? Where zero is defined as ‘universe filled with things we dont care about’. Like, you can have astronomical suffering that isn’t that much negative utility because it is diffuse / lower in a relative sense / less extreme, but ‘everyone is having a terrible time in this dystopia’ has astronomical suffering and high negative utility)
I’m also not sure that I consider astronomical suffering outcome (by how its described in the paper) to be bad by itself.
If you have (absurd amount of people) and they have some amount of suffering (ex: it shakes out that humans prefer some degree of negative-reinforcement as possible outcomes, so it remains) then that can be more suffering in terms of magnitude, but has the benefits of being more diffuse (people aren’t broken by a short-term large amount of suffering) and with less individual extremes of suffering. Obviously it would be bad to have a world that has astronomical suffering that is then concentrated on a large amount of people, but that’s why I think—a naive application of—astronomical suffering is incorrect because it ignores diffuse experiences, relative experiences (like, if we have 50% of people with notably bad suffering today, then your large future civilization with only 0.01% of people with notably bad suffering can still swamp that number, though the article mentions this I believe), and more minor suffering adding up over long periods of time.
(I think some of this comes from talking about things in terms of suffering versus happiness rather than negative utility versus positive utility? Where zero is defined as ‘universe filled with things we dont care about’. Like, you can have astronomical suffering that isn’t that much negative utility because it is diffuse / lower in a relative sense / less extreme, but ‘everyone is having a terrible time in this dystopia’ has astronomical suffering and high negative utility)