EA - Paper summary: Are we living at the hinge of history? (William MacAskill) by Global Priorities Institute

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Paper summary: Are we living at the hinge of history? (William MacAskill), published by Global Priorities Institute on March 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a summary of the GPI Working Paper “Are we living at the hinge of history?” by William MacAskill. (also published in the 2022 edited volume “Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit”). The summary was written by Riley Harris.Longtermist altruists – who care about how much impact they have, but not about when that impact occurs – have a strong reason to invest resources before using them directly. Invested resources could grow much larger and be used to do much more good in the future. For example, a $1 investment that grows 5% per year would become $17,000 in 200 years. However, some people argue that we are living in an unusual time, during which our best opportunities to improve the world are much better than they ever will be in the future. If so, perhaps we should spend our resources as soon as possible.In “Are we living at the hinge of history?”, William MacAskill investigates whether actions in our current time are likely to be much more influential than other times in the future. (‘Influential’ here refers specifically to how much good we expect to do via direct monetary expenditure – the consideration most relevant to our altruistic decision to spend now or later.) After making this ‘hinge of history’ claim more precise, MacAskill gives two main arguments against the claim: the base rate and inductive arguments. He then discusses some reasons why our time might be unusual, but ultimately concludes that he does not think that the ‘hinge of history’ claim holds true.The base rate argumentWhen we think about the entire future of humanity, we expect there to be a lot of people, and so we should initially be very sceptical that anyone alive today will be amongst the most influential human beings. Indeed, if humanity doesn’t go extinct in the near future, there could be a vast number of future people – settling near just 0.1% of stars in the Milky Way with the same population as Earth would mean there were 1024 (a trillion trillion) people to come. Suppose that, before inspecting further evidence, we believe that we are about as likely as anyone else to be particularly influential. Then, our initial belief that anyone alive today is amongst the million most influential people would be 1 in 1018 (1 in a million trillion).From such a sceptical starting point, we would need extremely strong evidence to become convinced that we are presently in the most influential time era. Even if there were only 108 (one hundred trillion) people to come, then in order to move from this extremely sceptical position (1 in 108) to a more moderate position (1 in 10), we would need evidence about 3 million times as strong as a randomised control trial with a p-value of 0.05. MacAskill thinks that, although we do have some evidence that indicates we may be at the most influential time, this evidence is not nearly strong enough.The inductive argumentThere is another strong reason to think our time is not the most influential, MacAskill argues:Premise 1: Influentialness has been increasing over time.Premise 2: We should expect this trend to continue.Conclusion: We should expect the influentialness of people in the future to be greater than our own influentialness.Premise 1 can be best illustrated with an example: a well-educated and wealthy altruist living in Europe in 1600 would not have been in a position to know about the best opportunities to shape the long-run future. In particular, most of the existential risks they faced (e.g. an asteroid collision or supervolcano) were not known, nor would they have been in a good position to do anything about them even if they were known. Even if they had th...