If it were the case that events in the future mattered less than events now (as is the case with money, because money sooner can earn interest), one could discount far future events almost completely and thereby make the long-term effects of one’s actions more tractable. However I understand time discounting doesn’t apply to ethics (though maybe this is disputed by some).
That said, I suspect discounting the future instead on the grounds of uncertainty (the further out you go the harder it is to predict anything) - using say a discount rate per year (as with money) to model this—may be a useful heuristic. No doubt this is a topic discussed in the field.
Secondly, no doubt there is much to be said about what the natural social and temporal boundaries of people’s moral and other influence & plans are, eg family, friends, work, retirement, death (and contents of their will); and how these can change—eg if you gain or exercise power/influence, say by getting an important job, having children, or doing things with wider influence (eg donating to charity), which can be for better or worse.
Thirdly, a minor observation: chess has an equivalent to the Go thing about a local sequence of moves ending in a stop sign, viz. an exchange of pieces—eg capturing a pawn in exchange for a pawn, or a much longer & more complicated sequence involving multiple pieces, but either way ending in a ‘quiet position’ where not very much is happening. Before Alpha Zero, chess programs considering an exchange would look at all plausible ways it might play out, stopping each move sequence only when a quiet position was reached. And in the absence of an exchange or other instability, would stop a sequence after a ‘horizon’ of say 10 moves (and evaluate the resulting situation on the basis of the board position, eg what pieces there are and their mobility).
The chess thing is cool. I never got strong enough at chess to learn about that and I appreciate the education! Regarding ethics vs finance...
If it were the case that events in the future mattered less than events now (as is the case with money, because money sooner can earn interest), one could discount far future events almost completely and thereby make the long-term effects of one’s actions more tractable. However I understand time discounting doesn’t apply to ethics (though maybe this is disputed by some).
That said, I suspect discounting the future instead on the grounds of uncertainty (the further out you go the harder it is to predict anything) - using say a discount rate per year (as with money) to model this—may be a useful heuristic.
My hunch is that all “experienced life rewards” are essentially “ethical” in the sense that a certain “all else equal hour” in a hottub with my favorite person now, vs a week from now, vs 10 years from now shouldn’t be discounted intrinsically. It might not just be “lives 1000 years from now vs lives this decade” being roughly the same value if they are roughly the same internally… but everything that should actually be cared about looking at its consumption value.
(Remember, you shouldn’t buy something if the price is higher than the value. If there’s no consumer surplus, don’t buy something!)
I think the reason to delay lounging in a hottub is pragmatic… if you invest early, and let compound interest build up, then you can switch to leisure mode faster, and get more total leisure from living on interest.
But investing at Kelly is quite cognitively demanding, and investing in an index is slow and still often painful, (you might die before you get enough to retire if you have a bad market decade or two at random)? If you do a lot of leisure early in life and do NOT make money and put it into a compound interest setup, then you can do less total leisure.
So basically, I think that money isn’t an intrinsic good, it just gives you access to certain ethical/hedonic/humanistic goods, and it is just a fact about this timeline, and this physics, and this humanity, and this historical period in the Dream Time, and these Malthusian Limits not being very binding right now, and this “general situation we found ourselves Thrown into” that makes it even true that “markets go up on average” and “investment beta is generally positive” and “money grows by default” and thus that “money now is way more precious than money in the future”.
Then then money is the unit of caring. So that means that everything we care about that can be bought is something we can have sort of have more of (overall, across the whole timeline, where maybe every happy with a certain character is equally “internally happy” no matter when it happens) by being frugal, and far seeing, and investing well early, and so on… at least until the structural macroeconomic situation changes in our Lightcone to a situation where markets stop growing by default and index funds stop working?
Death and aging, of course, change all this. And children change it again. Once transhumanism succeeds and involuntary death stops being a thing A LOT of “axiological anthropology” will change as people adapt to the possibility of being 1000 years old and feeling and looking like you’re 21, yet somehow also being incredibly wise, and the inheritor of 950 years of financial and emotional and ethical prudence, and also this being very normal, so society is run by and for people similar to you <3
Great post. Three comments:
If it were the case that events in the future mattered less than events now (as is the case with money, because money sooner can earn interest), one could discount far future events almost completely and thereby make the long-term effects of one’s actions more tractable. However I understand time discounting doesn’t apply to ethics (though maybe this is disputed by some).
That said, I suspect discounting the future instead on the grounds of uncertainty (the further out you go the harder it is to predict anything) - using say a discount rate per year (as with money) to model this—may be a useful heuristic. No doubt this is a topic discussed in the field.
Secondly, no doubt there is much to be said about what the natural social and temporal boundaries of people’s moral and other influence & plans are, eg family, friends, work, retirement, death (and contents of their will); and how these can change—eg if you gain or exercise power/influence, say by getting an important job, having children, or doing things with wider influence (eg donating to charity), which can be for better or worse.
Thirdly, a minor observation: chess has an equivalent to the Go thing about a local sequence of moves ending in a stop sign, viz. an exchange of pieces—eg capturing a pawn in exchange for a pawn, or a much longer & more complicated sequence involving multiple pieces, but either way ending in a ‘quiet position’ where not very much is happening. Before Alpha Zero, chess programs considering an exchange would look at all plausible ways it might play out, stopping each move sequence only when a quiet position was reached. And in the absence of an exchange or other instability, would stop a sequence after a ‘horizon’ of say 10 moves (and evaluate the resulting situation on the basis of the board position, eg what pieces there are and their mobility).
The chess thing is cool. I never got strong enough at chess to learn about that and I appreciate the education! Regarding ethics vs finance...
My hunch is that all “experienced life rewards” are essentially “ethical” in the sense that a certain “all else equal hour” in a hottub with my favorite person now, vs a week from now, vs 10 years from now shouldn’t be discounted intrinsically. It might not just be “lives 1000 years from now vs lives this decade” being roughly the same value if they are roughly the same internally… but everything that should actually be cared about looking at its consumption value.
(Remember, you shouldn’t buy something if the price is higher than the value. If there’s no consumer surplus, don’t buy something!)
I think the reason to delay lounging in a hottub is pragmatic… if you invest early, and let compound interest build up, then you can switch to leisure mode faster, and get more total leisure from living on interest.
But investing at Kelly is quite cognitively demanding, and investing in an index is slow and still often painful, (you might die before you get enough to retire if you have a bad market decade or two at random)? If you do a lot of leisure early in life and do NOT make money and put it into a compound interest setup, then you can do less total leisure.
So basically, I think that money isn’t an intrinsic good, it just gives you access to certain ethical/hedonic/humanistic goods, and it is just a fact about this timeline, and this physics, and this humanity, and this historical period in the Dream Time, and these Malthusian Limits not being very binding right now, and this “general situation we found ourselves Thrown into” that makes it even true that “markets go up on average” and “investment beta is generally positive” and “money grows by default” and thus that “money now is way more precious than money in the future”.
Then then money is the unit of caring. So that means that everything we care about that can be bought is something we can have sort of have more of (overall, across the whole timeline, where maybe every happy with a certain character is equally “internally happy” no matter when it happens) by being frugal, and far seeing, and investing well early, and so on… at least until the structural macroeconomic situation changes in our Lightcone to a situation where markets stop growing by default and index funds stop working?
Death and aging, of course, change all this. And children change it again. Once transhumanism succeeds and involuntary death stops being a thing A LOT of “axiological anthropology” will change as people adapt to the possibility of being 1000 years old and feeling and looking like you’re 21, yet somehow also being incredibly wise, and the inheritor of 950 years of financial and emotional and ethical prudence, and also this being very normal, so society is run by and for people similar to you <3