andrewducker | (Reply)

From:

In https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste (one of the papers cited in the longtermist article) Nick Bostrom claims:
So long as the evaluation function is aggregative (does not count one person’s welfare for less just because there are many other persons in existence who also enjoy happy lives) and is not relativized to a particular point in time (no time-discounting), the conclusion will hold.

So we aren't allowed to have a discount rate, nor to say that half of all beings now equals half of all beings at some future when there are 10^54 (that would mean that 1 of 10^54 is worth less than one of 10^10).

The Boltzmann Brain theory says that the number of mental beings spontaneously coming into existence (quantum effects?) vastly exceeds the number of mental beings created by the cosmology and biology that we currently "believe". Whilst that doesn't mean that the loss of one in 10^54 does not matter, it might mean that the 10^54 is not significant compared with the number of Boltzmann Brains.

2) Definitely. Stress and diversity are likely to be significant factors in the speed at which we reach "singularity", so longtermism has to worry about being too white.

Bostrom seems to be trying to maximize the number of happy beings, without regard to the number of unhappy beings The ratio matters more to me than the absolute numbers; I'm tempted to say the ratio at each given time not just the ratio over the life of the universe (or all universes).