“Power Laws of Value” by tylermjohn

14-word summary: What if weird stuff matters a lot but no one cares about weird stuff? In the long term future, how much of a mismatch will there be between what matters most and what agents value? The hypothesis I want to consider is that the mismatch will be enormous, such that a tiny fraction of value is captured, perhaps as little as 10^-20[1] The reason is that moral value seems to be a power law. A few things are extremely valuable and most things are not. More specifically, over all of the different things that humans like and find morally appealing (or would do if that thing were detailed) a very small subset of those things are many orders of magnitude more important than others. Suppose furthermore that it is not likely that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, such that our descendants ultimately [...] ---Outline:(04:55) Is the Moral Power Laws hypothesis true?(12:48) How value might not be power-law distributed part I: Metaethics(19:27) How value might not be power-law distributed part II: Ethics(20:31) A lower bound? How we might still capture most value given MPLThe original text contained 16 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 17th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Kmdg8hnt5whQzfmzK/power-laws-of-value --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.