I don’t understand how you would get significant conclusions out of this without big multipliers. Yes, there are some participants in your parliament who care more about worlds other than this one. Those worlds appear to be significantly harder to influence (by means other than trade), so this doesn’t seem to have a huge effect on what you ought to do in this world. (Assuming that we are able to make trades that we obviously would have wanted to make behind the veil of ignorance.)
Wait, you are assuming a baseline/default outcome where acausal trade takes place, and comparing other interventions to that? My baseline for comparison is instead (as stated in the OP) “what can be gained by just creating worthwhile lives in this universe”. My reasons for this are (1) I (and likely others who might read this) don’t think acausal trade is much more likely to work than the other items on my list and (2) the main intended audience for this post is people who have realized the importance of influencing the far future but not aware of (or have seriously considered) the possibility of influencing other universes through things like acausal trade and other items on my list. Even the most sophisticated thinkers in EA seem to fall into this category, e.g., people like Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, and Nick Beckstead, unless they’ve privately considered the possibility and chose not to talk about it in public, in which case it still seems safe to assume that most people in EA think “creating worthwhile lives in this universe” is the most good that can be accomplished.
In particular, if your ratio between the value of big and small universes was only 5x, then that would only have a 5x multiplier on the value of the interventions you list in the OP. Given that many of them look very tiny, I assumed you were imagining a much larger multiplier. (Something that looks very tiny may end up being a huge deal, but once we are already wrong by many orders of magnitude it doesn’t feel like the last 5x has a huge impact.)
I don’t understand where “5x” comes from or why that’s the relevant multiplier instead of 100x.
It would be useful if you could make a clear statement of why you think this problem is important
I’ll think about this, but I think I’d be more motivated to attempt this (and maybe also have a better idea of what I need to do) if other people also spoke up and told me that they couldn’t understand my past attempts to explain this (including what I wrote in the OP and previous comments in this thread).
Wait, you are assuming a baseline/default outcome where acausal trade takes place, and comparing other interventions to that? My baseline for comparison is instead (as stated in the OP) “what can be gained by just creating worthwhile lives in this universe”. My reasons for this are (1) I (and likely others who might read this) don’t think acausal trade is much more likely to work than the other items on my list and (2) the main intended audience for this post is people who have realized the importance of influencing the far future but not aware of (or have seriously considered) the possibility of influencing other universes through things like acausal trade and other items on my list. Even the most sophisticated thinkers in EA seem to fall into this category, e.g., people like Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, and Nick Beckstead, unless they’ve privately considered the possibility and chose not to talk about it in public, in which case it still seems safe to assume that most people in EA think “creating worthwhile lives in this universe” is the most good that can be accomplished.
I don’t understand where “5x” comes from or why that’s the relevant multiplier instead of 100x.
I’ll think about this, but I think I’d be more motivated to attempt this (and maybe also have a better idea of what I need to do) if other people also spoke up and told me that they couldn’t understand my past attempts to explain this (including what I wrote in the OP and previous comments in this thread).