It’s likely that anything around today has a huge impact on the state of the future universe. As I understood the article, the leverage penalty requires considering how unique your opportunity to have the impact would be too, so Archimedes had a massive impact, but there have also been a massive number of people through history who would have had the chance to come up with the same theories had they not already been discovered, so you have to offset Archimedes leverage penalty by the fact that he wasn’t uniquely capable of having that leverage.
so you have to offset Archimedes leverage penalty by the fact that he wasn’t uniquely capable of having that leverage.
Neither was any other scientist in history ever, including the the one in the Eliezer’s dark energy example. Personally, I take a very dim view of applying anthropics to calculating probabilities of future events, and this is what Eliezer is doing.
It’s likely that anything around today has a huge impact on the state of the future universe. As I understood the article, the leverage penalty requires considering how unique your opportunity to have the impact would be too, so Archimedes had a massive impact, but there have also been a massive number of people through history who would have had the chance to come up with the same theories had they not already been discovered, so you have to offset Archimedes leverage penalty by the fact that he wasn’t uniquely capable of having that leverage.
Neither was any other scientist in history ever, including the the one in the Eliezer’s dark energy example. Personally, I take a very dim view of applying anthropics to calculating probabilities of future events, and this is what Eliezer is doing.