Jordan states it correctly. bgrah449, to put it in terms of decisions: I sometimes have to make decisions which trade off the experience at one point in time vs the experience at another. As you noted in your most recent post, money can be discounted in this way, and money is useful because it can be traded for things that improve the experience of any given block of time. By discounting money exponentially, I’m really discounting the value of experience—say eating a pizza—at say 5 years from now vs. now. Now I also need to be alive (I’m taking that to include an uploaded state) to have any experiences. I make choices (including having set up my Alcor membership) that affect the probability of being alive at future times, and I trade these off against goods that enhance my experience of life right now. When I say that I value a year of time N years from now at around .99^N of the value I place on my current year, it means that I would trade the same goods for the same probability change with that difference of weights for those two years. If I, say, skip a pizza to improve my odds of surviving this year (and experiencing all of the events of the year) by 0.001%, I would only be willing to skip half a pizza to improve my odds of surviving from year 72 to year 73 (and having the more distant experiences of that year) by 0.001%.
Is that clearer?
Jordan states it correctly. bgrah449, to put it in terms of decisions: I sometimes have to make decisions which trade off the experience at one point in time vs the experience at another. As you noted in your most recent post, money can be discounted in this way, and money is useful because it can be traded for things that improve the experience of any given block of time. By discounting money exponentially, I’m really discounting the value of experience—say eating a pizza—at say 5 years from now vs. now. Now I also need to be alive (I’m taking that to include an uploaded state) to have any experiences. I make choices (including having set up my Alcor membership) that affect the probability of being alive at future times, and I trade these off against goods that enhance my experience of life right now. When I say that I value a year of time N years from now at around .99^N of the value I place on my current year, it means that I would trade the same goods for the same probability change with that difference of weights for those two years. If I, say, skip a pizza to improve my odds of surviving this year (and experiencing all of the events of the year) by 0.001%, I would only be willing to skip half a pizza to improve my odds of surviving from year 72 to year 73 (and having the more distant experiences of that year) by 0.001%. Is that clearer?
Yes—thanks!