Roughly speaking, in terms of the actions you take, various timelines should be weighted as P(AGI in year t)*DifferenceYouCanProduceInAGIAlignmentAt(t). This produces a new, non normalized distribution of how much to prioritize each time (you can renormalize it if you wish to make it more like “probability”).
Note that this is just a first approximation and there are additional subtleties.
This assumes you are optimizing for each time and possible world orthogonality but much of the time optimizing for nearby times is very similar to optimizing for a particular time.
The definition of “you” here depends on the nature of the decision maker which can vary between a group, a person, or even a person at a particular moment.
Using different definitions of “you” between decision makers can cause a coordination issue where different people are trying to save different potential worlds (because of their different skills and ability to produce change) and their plans may tangle with each other.
It is difficult to figure out how much of a difference you can produce in different possible worlds and times. You do the best you can but you might suffer a failure of imagination in either finding ways your plans wont work, ways your plans will have larger positive effects, or ways you may in the future improve your plans. For more on the difference one can produce see this and this.
Lastly, there is a risk here psychologically and socially of fudging the calculations above to make things more comfortable.
(Meta: I may make a full post on this someday and use this reasoning often)
Roughly speaking, in terms of the actions you take, various timelines should be weighted as P(AGI in year t)*DifferenceYouCanProduceInAGIAlignmentAt(t). This produces a new, non normalized distribution of how much to prioritize each time (you can renormalize it if you wish to make it more like “probability”).
Note that this is just a first approximation and there are additional subtleties.
This assumes you are optimizing for each time and possible world orthogonality but much of the time optimizing for nearby times is very similar to optimizing for a particular time.
The definition of “you” here depends on the nature of the decision maker which can vary between a group, a person, or even a person at a particular moment.
Using different definitions of “you” between decision makers can cause a coordination issue where different people are trying to save different potential worlds (because of their different skills and ability to produce change) and their plans may tangle with each other.
It is difficult to figure out how much of a difference you can produce in different possible worlds and times. You do the best you can but you might suffer a failure of imagination in either finding ways your plans wont work, ways your plans will have larger positive effects, or ways you may in the future improve your plans. For more on the difference one can produce see this and this.
Lastly, there is a risk here psychologically and socially of fudging the calculations above to make things more comfortable.
(Meta: I may make a full post on this someday and use this reasoning often)