notes-misc-modelOfHelpingTheWorld

one weird thing is that things that seem to help can hurt.

You can donate all your money to some political cause that turns out (long after your death) to, in the opinion of the vast majority of people, to have hurt more than it helped.

You can invent some new technology that you think will help people but it could turn out to have its biggest use in something you didn't intend, that hurts people.

If you believe that overpopulation is bad, you can cure disease or help people have kids, and this could conceivably lead to more overpopulation (although apparently some studies show that curing disease leads, paradoxically, to less overpopulation).

Some people believe that the switch to an agricultural lifestyle rather than a hunter-gatherer one diminished quality of life.

Now what would be the measure of whether you "actually" helped? Maybe some action of yours solved some problem and appeared (to the vast majority of people) to help during the first 50 years after your death. But then maybe it "helped" so much that it caused an overabundance of some other thing, and the consequences of this turned out to be even worse than the initial problem. So maybe around 50 years after your death the world changes it's mind, and for the next 200 years people think you hurt (but at least he meant well..). But maybe around 200 years afterwards it turns out that that other problem, although it was pernicious, got people ready to face yet a bigger problem. So for the next 10,000 years you will have seemed to help.. but then... etc.

You might want to take the integral over possible worlds, weighted by probability, of the integral over time of the value of the experiences that people have because you did your thing, compared to what would have happend if you hadn't.

Does the sum converge over time?

If you say it does, what is the mathematical model you have for how the variance of the utility you have provided changes over time?