After reading the first paragraph of your above comment only, I want to note that:
In particular, I assign substantial probability to near-optimal futures (at least 99% of the value of the optimal future), substantial probability to near-zero-value futures (between −1% and 1% of the value of the optimal future), and little probability to anything else.
I assign much lower probability to near-optimal futures than near-zero-value futures.
This is mainly because I imagine a lot of the “extremely good” possible worlds I imagine when reading Bostrom’s Letter from Utopia are <1% of what is optimal.
I also think the amount of probability I assign to 1%-99% futures is (~10x?) larger than the amount I assign to >99% futures.
(I’d like to read the rest of your comment later (but not right now due to time constraints) to see if it changes my view.)
I agree that near-optimal is unlikely. But I would be quite surprised by 1%-99% futures because (in short) I think we do better if we optimize for good and do worse if we don’t. If our final use of our cosmic endowment isn’t near-optimal, I think we failed to optimize for good and would be surprised if it’s >1%.
After reading the first paragraph of your above comment only, I want to note that:
I assign much lower probability to near-optimal futures than near-zero-value futures.
This is mainly because I imagine a lot of the “extremely good” possible worlds I imagine when reading Bostrom’s Letter from Utopia are <1% of what is optimal.
I also think the amount of probability I assign to 1%-99% futures is (~10x?) larger than the amount I assign to >99% futures.
(I’d like to read the rest of your comment later (but not right now due to time constraints) to see if it changes my view.)
I agree that near-optimal is unlikely. But I would be quite surprised by 1%-99% futures because (in short) I think we do better if we optimize for good and do worse if we don’t. If our final use of our cosmic endowment isn’t near-optimal, I think we failed to optimize for good and would be surprised if it’s >1%.
Agreed with this given how many orders of magnitude potential values span.
Rescinding my previous statement:
> I also think the amount of probability I assign to 1%-99% futures is (~10x?) larger than the amount I assign to >99% futures.
I’d now say that probably the probability of 1%-99% optimal futures is <10% of the probability of >99% optimal futures.
This is because 1% optimal is very close to being optimal (only 2 orders of magnitude away out of dozens of orders of magnitude of very good futures).