Suppose that curing aging gives you an extra million* years of Factorio playing. Then to be worth it, spending the next 50 years curing aging has to increase the odds of curing aging by 1⁄20,000. That might be possible, but that’s a pretty large fraction to assess for one person’s contributions. I’d expect that the estimated Factorio-years gained from a year of working on curing aging is less than one. In that case, the rational thing to do would be to play Factorio for now.
One way around this though would be with game theory and coordination. Perhaps you could create a pact that if all of the other Factorio-obsessed people out there also signed it, you would all immediately switch to curing aging instead of playing Factorio. Getting a large number of people all working on it might increase the chance of curing aging to be worth it.
* I said a million years as an arbitrary number. At some point unknown or unavoidable risks dominate, and most people would engage in time discounting as well. You could probably go up a order of magnitude and still have the argument hold.
Suppose that curing aging gives you an extra million* years of Factorio playing. Then to be worth it, spending the next 50 years curing aging has to increase the odds of curing aging by 1⁄20,000. That might be possible, but that’s a pretty large fraction to assess for one person’s contributions. I’d expect that the estimated Factorio-years gained from a year of working on curing aging is less than one. In that case, the rational thing to do would be to play Factorio for now.
One way around this though would be with game theory and coordination. Perhaps you could create a pact that if all of the other Factorio-obsessed people out there also signed it, you would all immediately switch to curing aging instead of playing Factorio. Getting a large number of people all working on it might increase the chance of curing aging to be worth it.
* I said a million years as an arbitrary number. At some point unknown or unavoidable risks dominate, and most people would engage in time discounting as well. You could probably go up a order of magnitude and still have the argument hold.