Because you have a pretty significant data point (That spans millions of years) on Earth, and nothing else is going on (to the best of our knowledge), now the question is, how much weight do you want to give to this data point? Reserving judgment means almost ignoring it. For me, it seems more reasonable to update towards a net-negative universe.
Then I think that’s the crux for me. I’d say the right amount of weight is almost none, for the same reason that I don’t update about the expected sum of someone’s life based on what they do in the first weeks after they’re born. We agree the universe did not come into being with the capacity for aiming itself toward being good. It remains to be seen whether we (or other lifeforms elsewhere) do have enough of that capability to make use of it at large scale, which we didn’t even have the capacity to envision until very, very recently.
Given the trajectory and speed of change on Earth in the past few centuries, I think the next few centuries will provide far more data about our future light cone than the entirety of the past millions of years do.
Because you have a pretty significant data point (That spans millions of years) on Earth, and nothing else is going on (to the best of our knowledge), now the question is, how much weight do you want to give to this data point? Reserving judgment means almost ignoring it. For me, it seems more reasonable to update towards a net-negative universe.
Then I think that’s the crux for me. I’d say the right amount of weight is almost none, for the same reason that I don’t update about the expected sum of someone’s life based on what they do in the first weeks after they’re born. We agree the universe did not come into being with the capacity for aiming itself toward being good. It remains to be seen whether we (or other lifeforms elsewhere) do have enough of that capability to make use of it at large scale, which we didn’t even have the capacity to envision until very, very recently.
Given the trajectory and speed of change on Earth in the past few centuries, I think the next few centuries will provide far more data about our future light cone than the entirety of the past millions of years do.