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The Astronomical Sacrifice Dilemma 2024-03-11T19:58:12.179Z

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Comment by matthew-mcredmond on [deleted post] 2024-09-02T08:01:30.682Z

Thank you! Everything was AI generated (and unfiltered) to see how well Gemini could understand ChatGPT's abstractions in a zero-shot environment. But yes I should have edited and contextualised : ) 

Comment by Matthew McRedmond (matthew-mcredmond) on The Astronomical Sacrifice Dilemma · 2024-03-13T12:39:21.746Z · LW · GW

Hmm, I hadn't thought of the implications of chaining the logic behind the superintelligences policy - thanks for highlighting it!

I guess the main aim of the post was to highlight the existence of an opportunity cost to prioritising contemporary beings and how alignment doesn't solve that issue, but I guess there are also some normative claims that this policy could be justified. 

Nevertheless, I'm not sure that the paradox necessarily applies to the policy in this scenario. Specifically, I think
>as long as we discover ever vaster possible tomorrows
doesn't hold. The fact that the accessible universe is finite and there is a finite amount of time before heat death means that there is some ultimate possible tomorrow? 

Also, I think that sacrifices of the nature described in the post come in discrete steps with potentially large time differences between them allowing you to realise the gains of a particular future before the next sacrifice if that makes sense.