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Cross-posted from my Substack.
Epistemic status: I’ve puzzled over this for a long time but I’m not sure I came to the right answers. I'm sharing this partly because it might help others work on resource allocation, but mostly because some smarter reader might tell me how to do it better.
TL;DR:
* I he...
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With the AI windfall, mental health may be taken increasingly seriously by mainstream EA. There’s increasingly room to explore the cause area and answer some of the biggest uncertainties; at the same time, costs of the most effective interventions are continuing to fall. StrongMinds is now treating for ~$35, about a third of GiveWell’s best guess from a few years ago, and is expected to...
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Skipping time to determine net positivity of experience
[inspired by a conversation with Robi Rahman]
Imagine that it’s possible to skip certain periods of time in your life. All this means is you don’t experience them, but you come out of them having the same memories as if you did experience them.
Now imagine that, after you live whatever life you would have lived, there’s another certain 5000 years of very good life that you’ll live that’s undoubtedly net positive. My claim is that, any moments in your life you’d prefer to “skip” are moments in which your life is net negative.
I wonder how many moments you'd skip?
I've considered this before and I'm not sure I agree. If I'm at a +10 utility for the next 10 years and afterwards will be at +1,000,000 utility for the following 5,000 years, I might just feel like skipping ahead to be feeling +1,000,000 utility, simply from being impatient about getting to feel even better.
I agree, to clarify, my claim assumes infinite patience.