This is making a lot of assumptions such that your principle only holds in specific cases rather than generally. E.g:
There’s no time discounting
Utility is linear in amount of Factorio played (the agent is not risk averse).
The way to maximize the chance of playing Factorio for a million years is to save the world.
The first two points should be obvious. To illustrate the 3rd point. Assume that the chance the world survived for millions of years is 1%, but the chance Factorio survives a million years conditional on that is 0.1%. Then your best use of your money is to invest it in making sure Factorio survives, not humanity survives.
More practically, if I was a completely selfish person: the chance of me solving antiaging is very slim. But if somebody else does solve it, I want to make sure I can get hold of it. So the best use of my money is to save it, so that I’ll be able to afford antiaging treatment once it exists.
This is making a lot of assumptions such that your principle only holds in specific cases rather than generally. E.g:
There’s no time discounting
Utility is linear in amount of Factorio played (the agent is not risk averse).
The way to maximize the chance of playing Factorio for a million years is to save the world.
The first two points should be obvious. To illustrate the 3rd point. Assume that the chance the world survived for millions of years is 1%, but the chance Factorio survives a million years conditional on that is 0.1%. Then your best use of your money is to invest it in making sure Factorio survives, not humanity survives.
More practically, if I was a completely selfish person: the chance of me solving antiaging is very slim. But if somebody else does solve it, I want to make sure I can get hold of it. So the best use of my money is to save it, so that I’ll be able to afford antiaging treatment once it exists.
Ooh, good points. Gonna go retract it