How much should we spread out across future scenarios?

Robin Hanson mentions that some people take him to task for working on one scenario (WBE) that might not be the most likely future scenario (“standard AI”); he responds by noting that there are perhaps 100 times more people working on standard AI than WBE scenarios, yet the probability of AI is likely not a hundred times higher than WBE. He also notes that there is a tendency for thinkers to clump onto a few popular scenarios or issues. However:

In addition, due to diminishing returns, intellectual attention to future scenarios should probably be spread out more evenly than are probabilities. The first efforts to study each scenario can pick the low hanging fruit to make faster progress. In contrast, after many have worked on a scenario for a while there is less value to be gained from the next marginal effort on that scenario.

This is very similar to my own thinking about research effort. Should we focus on things that are likely to pan out, or explore a lot of possibilities just in case one of the less obvious cases happens? Given that early progress is quick and easy, we can often get a noticeable fraction of whatever utility the topic has by just a quick dip. The effective altruist heuristic of looking at neglected fields also is based on this intuition.

A model

But under what conditions does this actually work? Here is a simple model:

There are N possible scenarios, one of which (j) will come about. They have probability P_i. We allocate a unit budget of effort to the scenarios: \sum a_i = 1. For the scenario that comes about, we get utility \sqrt{a_j} (diminishing returns).

Here is what happens if we allocate proportional to a power of the scenarios, a_i \propto P_i^\alpha. \alpha=0 corresponds to even allocation, 1 proportional to the likelihood, >1 to favoring the most likely scenarios. In the following I will run Monte Carlo simulations where the probabilities are randomly generated each instantiation. The outer bluish envelope represents the 95% of the outcomes, the inner ranges from the lower to the upper quartile of the utility gained, and the red line is the expected utility.

Utility of allocating effort as a power of the probability of scenarios. Red line is expected utility, deeper blue envelope is lower and upper quartiles, lighter blue 95% interval.

This is the N=2 case: we have two possible scenarios with probability p and 1-p (where p is uniformly distributed in [0,1]). Just allocating evenly gives us 1/\sqrt{2} utility on average, but if we put in more effort on the more likely case we will get up to 0.8 utility. As we focus more and more on the likely case there is a corresponding increase in variance, since we may guess wrong and lose out. But 75% of the time we will do better than if we just allocated evenly. Still, allocating nearly everything to the most likely case means that one does lose out on a bit of hedging, so the expected utility declines slowly for large \alpha.

Utility of allocating effort as a power of the probability of scenarios. Red line is expected utility, deeper blue envelope is lower and upper quartiles, lighter blue 95% interval. 100 possible scenarios, with uniform probability on the simplex.
Utility of allocating effort as a power of the probability of scenarios. Red line is expected utility, deeper blue envelope is lower and upper quartiles, lighter blue 95% interval. 100 possible scenarios, with uniform probability on the simplex.

The  N=100 case (where the probabilities are allocated based on a flat Dirichlet distribution) behaves similarly, but the expected utility is smaller since it is less likely that we will hit the right scenario.

What is going on?

This doesn’t seem to fit Robin’s or my intuitions at all! The best we can say about uniform allocation is that it doesn’t produce much regret: whatever happens, we will have made some allocation to the possibility. For large N this actually works out better than the directed allocation for a sizable fraction of realizations, but on average we get less utility than betting on the likely choices.

The problem with the model is of course that we actually know the probabilities before making the allocation. In reality, we do not know the likelihood of AI, WBE or alien invasions. We have some information, and we do have priors (like Robin’s view that P_{AI} < 100 P_{WBE}), but we are not able to allocate perfectly.  A more plausible model would give us probability estimates instead of the actual probabilities.

We know nothing

Let us start by looking at the worst possible case: we do not know what the true probabilities are at all. We can draw estimates from the same distribution – it is just that they are uncorrelated with the true situation, so they are just noise.

Utility of allocating effort as a power of the probability of scenarios, but the probabilities are just random guesses. Red line is expected utility, deeper blue envelope is lower and upper quartiles, lighter blue 95% interval. 100 possible scenarios, with uniform probability on the simplex.
Utility of allocating effort as a power of the probability of scenarios, but the probabilities are just random guesses. Red line is expected utility, deeper blue envelope is lower and upper quartiles, lighter blue 95% interval. 100 possible scenarios, with uniform probability on the simplex.

In this case uniform distribution of effort is optimal. Not only does it avoid regret, it has a higher expected utility than trying to focus on a few scenarios (\alpha>0). The larger N is, the less likely it is that we focus on the right scenario since we know nothing. The rationality of ignoring irrelevant information is pretty obvious.

Note that if we have to allocate a minimum effort to each investigated scenario we will be forced to effectively increase our \alpha above 0. The above result gives the somewhat optimistic conclusion that the loss of utility compared to an even spread is rather mild: in the uniform case we have a pretty low amount of effort allocated to the winning scenario, so the low chance of being right in the nonuniform case is being balanced by having a slightly higher effort allocation on the selected scenarios. For high \alpha there is a tail of rare big “wins” when we hit the right scenario that drags the expected utility upwards, even though in most realizations we bet on the wrong case. This is very much the hedgehog predictor story: ocasionally they have analysed the scenario that comes about in great detail and get intensely lauded, despite looking at the wrong things most of the time.

We know a bit

We can imagine that knowing more should allow us to gradually interpolate between the different results: the more you know, the more you should focus on the likely scenarios.

Optimal alpha as a function of how much information we have about the true probabilities. N=2.
Optimal alpha as a function of how much information we have about the true probabilities (noise due to Monte Carlo and discrete steps of alpha). N=2 (N=100 looks similar).

If we take the mean of the true probabilities with some randomly drawn probabilities (the “half random” case) the curve looks quite similar to the case where we actually know the probabilities: we get a maximum for \alpha\approx 2. In fact, we can mix in just a bit (\beta) of the true probability and get a fairly good guess where to allocate effort (i.e. we allocate effort as a_i \propto (\beta P_i + (1-\beta)Q_i)^\alpha where Q_i is uncorrelated noise probabilities). The optimal alpha grows roughly linearly with \beta, \alpha_{opt} \approx 4\beta in this case.

We learn

Adding a bit of realism, we can consider a learning process: after allocating some effort \gamma to the different scenarios we get better information about the probabilities, and can now reallocate. A simple model may be that the standard deviation of noise behaves as 1/\sqrt{\tilde{a}_i} where \tilde{a}_i is the effort placed in exploring the probability of scenario i. So if we begin by allocating uniformly we will have noise at reallocation of the order of 1/\sqrt{\gamma/N}. We can set \beta(\gamma)=\sqrt{\gamma/N}/C, where C is some constant denoting how tough it is to get information. Putting this together with the above result we get \alpha_{opt}(\gamma)=\sqrt{2\gamma/NC^2}. After this exploration, now we use the remaining 1-\gamma effort to work on the actual scenarios.

Expected utility as a function of amount of probability-estimating effort (gamma) for C=1 (hard to update probabilities), C=0.1 and C=0.01 (easy to update). N=100.
Expected utility as a function of amount of probability-estimating effort (gamma) for C=1 (hard to update probabilities), C=0.1 and C=0.01 (easy to update). N=100.

This is surprisingly inefficient. The reason is that the expected utility declines as \sqrt{1-\gamma} and the gain is just the utility difference between the uniform case \alpha=0 and optimal \alpha_{opt}, which we know is pretty small. If C is small (i.e. a small amount of effort is enough to figure out the scenario probabilities) there is an optimal nonzero  \gamma. This optimum \gamma decreases as C becomes smaller. If C is large, then the best approach is just to spread efforts evenly.

Conclusions

So, how should we focus? These results suggest that the key issue is knowing how little we know compared to what can be known, and how much effort it would take to know significantly more.

If there is little more that can be discovered about what scenarios are likely, because our state of knowledge is pretty good, the world is very random,  or improving knowledge about what will happen will be costly, then we should roll with it and distribute effort either among likely scenarios (when we know them) or spread efforts widely (when we are in ignorance).

If we can acquire significant information about the probabilities of scenarios, then we should do it – but not overdo it. If it is very easy to get information we need to just expend some modest effort and then use the rest to flesh out our scenarios. If it is doable but costly, then we may spend a fair bit of our budget on it. But if it is hard, it is better to go directly on the object level scenario analysis as above. We should not expect the improvement to be enormous.

Here I have used a square root diminishing return model. That drives some of the flatness of the optima: had I used a logarithm function things would have been even flatter, while if the returns diminish more mildly the gains of optimal effort allocation would have been more noticeable. Clearly, understanding the diminishing returns, number of alternatives, and cost of learning probabilities better matters for setting your strategy.

In the case of future studies we know the number of scenarios are very large. We know that the returns to forecasting efforts are strongly diminishing for most kinds of forecasts. We know that extra efforts in reducing uncertainty about scenario probabilities in e.g. climate models also have strongly diminishing returns. Together this suggests that Robin is right, and it is rational to stop clustering too hard on favorite scenarios. Insofar we learn something useful from considering scenarios we should explore as many as feasible.

4 thoughts on “How much should we spread out across future scenarios?

  1. > “(like Robin’s view that P_{WBE} > 100 P_{AI})”

    I think you mean “P_{AI} < 100 P_{WBE}"?

    (Assuming the above corresponds to the claim you quote in the opening paragraph – "the probability of AI is not a hundred times higher than WBE" – and not a different estimate of his about WBE's superior likelihood.)

  2. Would be really great to get some sort of dataset on just how fast insight diminishes with effort into scenarios. Probably are already some results on this for games like Chess or Go.

    1. Agreed. I think there are a few done in forecasting studies; I think Scott Armstrong has a few stylized facts here. Will look into it.

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