Diego Caleiro · 2014-09-19 · EA Forum
The cause I currently think is most important is what I call "getting the order right". It assumes that for all technological interventions that might drastically reshape the future, there are conditional dependencies on when they are discovered or invented, such that under different contexts and timelines, each would be significantly more or less dangerous, in X-risk terms. So, here is why this may not be the best cause:
To begin with, it seems plausible that the Tricky Expectation View discussed in pg-85 of Beckstead's thesis holds despite his arguments. This would drastically reduce the overall importance of existential risk reduction. One way in which TEV would hold, or an argument for views in that family, comes from considering the set of all possible human minds, and noticing that many considerations, both probabilistic and moral, stop being intuitive when deciding whether to pluck out one of these infinitesimally small entity from non-existence to existence is actually a good deal. No matter what we do, most minds will never exist.
Depending on how we carve the conceptual distinction that determines a mind, we could get even lower orders of probability of existence for any given mind. Furthermore, if being of a different type (in the philosophical 'type' 'token' distinction) than something that has already existed is not a relevant distinction, the argument gets even easier: for each possible token of mind, that token will most likely never live with overwhelming chance.
If there are infinitesimally small differences between minds then there are at least Aleph1 non-existent minds, and Aleph2 non-existent mind tokens.
These infinities seem to point to some sort of asymmetric view, in which there is some form of affiliation with existence that is indeed correlated with being valuable. It may not be as straighforward as "only living minds matter", or even *The Tricky Expectation View" but something in that vicinity. Some sort of discount rate that is fully justified, even in the face of astronomical waste, moral uncertainty etc. This would be one angle of attack.
EA Forum public GraphQL API; recovered by Squid, 12 September 2026