Huh, I don’t think that change of view undermines the main point.
In my view the main insight is that the value of the future is bimodally distributed (perhaps there is a small third mode for very negative value futures, but I think it’s much smaller than the ~zero mode and the ~very postive mode so we can basically ignore it).
Whether the very positive mode probability mass is distributed over 90%-100% optimal futures or over 0.1%-100% optimal futures (or even wider) doesn’t really matter. The key thing is that the ~zero mode is distributed over +/-10^-10% optimal futures or even +/-10^-20% optimal futures, and the space inbetween from 10^-10% to 0.1% optimal futures has lower cumulative probability mass than either mode. So the EV of the future is basically equal to the probability of getting a future in the high value mode times the average value of a future in that mode.
Perhaps you think acausal trade considerations make ~zero value futures unlikely (does most of the value of the future come from value outside of our lightcone that we acausally make happen due to what we do in our lightcone? I’m not really sure how to value the multiverse—assuming it exists it seems that our lightcone could at most only have a small (acausal) influence on it, and so the absolute value of the multiverse will be basically the same regardless of what happens in our lightcone), but at least ignoring acausal trade considerations and only looking at the reachable universe within our lightcone the above value-is-bimodally-distributed view still seems right to me.
It just seems to fall out of the fact that the potential value of the future spans dozens of OOMs. There are two main factors -- (1) How much of the reachable universe’s resources we use (including for how long) and (2) How hard we optimize the resources we use on average—each of which spans many OOMs, but I don’t think the fact that there are two factors rather than just one (or three rather than just one if we separate out the time factor) changes the bimodal nature of our forecast of how valuable the future is.
I’ll check out MacAskill’s article later.
Agreed that there is significant value in moving us between different high-value futures.
Intuitively though, I still think “weak bimodality” combined with my view that low-value futures are much more likely than high-value futures means that the main thing we should be aiming to do now is get to a high-value future. In other words, I still think maxipok is the right policy, where an “okay outcome” is defined as any high-value future.
Do you agree with this, or do you think some of our collective portfolio of actions should be focused on trying to raise the probability of very-high-value futures relative to somewhat-high-value-futures even while (or if) it is still the case that high-value futures are much less likely than low-value (near-zero-value) futures?