Our universe is small enough that it seems plausible (maybe even likely) that most of the value or disvalue created by a human-descended civilization comes from its acausal influence on the rest of the multiverse.
Naively, acausal influence should be in proportion to how much others care about what a lightcone controlling civilization does with our resources. So, being a small fraction of the value hits on both sides of the equation (direct value and acausal value equally).
Of course, civilizations elsewhere might care relatively more about what happens in our universe than whoever controls it does. (E.g., their measure puts much higher relative weight on our universe than the measure of whoever controls our universe.) This can imply that acausal trade is extremely important from a value perspective, but this is unrelated to being “small” and seems more well described as large gains from trade due to different preferences over different universes.
(Of course, it does need to be the case that our measure is small relative to the total measure for acausal trade to matter much. But surely this is true?)
Overall, my guess is that it’s reasonably likely that acausal trade is indeed where most of the value/disvalue comes from due to very different preferences of different civilizations. But, being small doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.
Naively, acausal influence should be in proportion to how much others care about what a lightcone controlling civilization does with our resources. So, being a small fraction of the value hits on both sides of the equation (direct value and acausal value equally).
Of course, civilizations elsewhere might care relatively more about what happens in our universe than whoever controls it does. (E.g., their measure puts much higher relative weight on our universe than the measure of whoever controls our universe.) This can imply that acausal trade is extremely important from a value perspective, but this is unrelated to being “small” and seems more well described as large gains from trade due to different preferences over different universes.
(Of course, it does need to be the case that our measure is small relative to the total measure for acausal trade to matter much. But surely this is true?)
Overall, my guess is that it’s reasonably likely that acausal trade is indeed where most of the value/disvalue comes from due to very different preferences of different civilizations. But, being small doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.