11 ms·

Why the long-term future of humanity matters more than anything else

87 points by robertwiblin 9y ago

NiklasMort 9y ago
It should be "Why the long-term future of the global ecosystem matters more than anything else". Not humanity. Humans cause nothing but destruction and suffering on an unprecedented scale. 80000hours and the EA community are not better than any other anthropocentric interest group. Seriously what's with this obsession about humanity? How shortsighted are people?
AtomicOrbital 9y ago
What is paramount is to support the force which brought humanity here, not humanity itself. We are an instantiation of a process, not the process. To best support that force we as a planet of people need to realize we are not the end-all-be-all and our species time will come and go. When our successor supersedes humanity we should celebrate that beautiful expression of a yet more well adapted carrier of the torch ... do not fight progress on this more supra anthropocentric perspective, embrace it, celebrate it
ucontrol 9y ago
God, it annoys me to see so many people spouting Rick & Morty-tier nihilistic verdicts on life and it being "pointless". Seriously, go outside and read some more books, and synthesize your experiences and observations. Even without going into rigorous philosophical discussion, if you still confidently claim that all of it is fatally worthless even after having seen as much of what there is to life, I think you seriously lack perception. It's just shallow pessimism, not a thoughtful outlook on conscious existence.
dogma1138 9y ago
Because otherwise everything up to this point would've been pointless do we really need an article explaining why the survival of our species is important?
- jbreckmckye 9y ago
  Judging by our current political priorities - yes, we do.
- jblow 9y ago
  It was a clickbait headline -- note that it has been revised.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- robertwiblin 9y ago
  I meet people who disagree with this all the time. And clearly even if we think it, as a species we aren't acting on it.
- speakeron 9y ago
  That's the Sunk Cost Fallacy. As a rationalist who seeks to maximize my utility, why should I care about future generations?
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    Because you likely weight the survival of similar genes highly, being decendant from genes that did
    - speakeron 9y ago
      I'm not sure why I would do that, although there are instincts which rely on that (e.g. sex). My immediate concerns are of my somatic existence rather than my genes. If my personal survival depended on the survival of the species (as an example: cryogenics), that would certainly be a factor.
      - bendbro 9y ago
        Because if your genes didn't historically result in an organism with a drive to propagate itself, your genes would have a significantly higher likelihood of dying out in an ancestor generation. If you do not have that drive, then it is natural to cull yourself.
crimsonalucard 9y ago
Nobody cares about humanity 600 generations from now. We're only truly concerned about our immediate family. I'd sacrifice my life for my son, but I could give a shit about my great great great great great great great great great great grandson. I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to stop.
- suzzer99 9y ago
  99-year leases cost about the same as outright purchase. That tells you how much people really care about their grandkids and beyond.
- abpavel 9y ago
  Define "stop". Like VHEMT? On a not more serious note, most people on this planet do not drive cars. 947M registered passenger cars for 7350M people in 2015 is 12.8%.
  - crimsonalucard 9y ago
    Stop driving. Move closer to work. Bike, etc, etc. It can be done, but most of us are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to do it.
- tzs 9y ago
  > I'd sacrifice my life for my son, but I could give a shit about my great great great great great great great great great great grandson. That makes sense from a "maximizing your descendants" point of view--maybe. Assuming a normal sized family losing your son knocks out from 25 to 100% of your living descendants. Assuming that your descendants on average have average sized families then by the time you have a great^10 grandson you should have a large number of living descendants. Losing one barely makes a dent. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine a scenario where you could take an action now that would greatly affect (positively or negatively) a great^10 grandson without similarly affecting hundreds of your other great^10 grandchildren.
- chriswarbo 9y ago
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
There is no long term future if there is no short and medium term future. It's very hard to create a better tomorrow if something is broken today.
- robertwiblin 9y ago
  That's one of the topics we discuss! :)
hartator 9y ago
I have troubled finding exemples in history where we made the "right" decisions for the future of humanity when we wanted too. Think religion oppression, communism, etc. Why today will be different?
- robertwiblin 9y ago
  We discuss a few concrete examples of this around the cold war in the episode! :)
- jbreckmckye 9y ago
  As an experiment, I think communism was absolutely worthwhile. Why not? Societies with private property have all sorts of problems, so let's see what happens when we change that variable. The problem is when experiments continue despite failure.
  - nostromo123 9y ago
    As someone who has grown up in a communist Eastern European country, I would have to disagree. This "experiment" cost many people their lives, simply for ideological purposes. By the same token, you could argue that Nazi Germany was an "absolutely worthwhile" experiment. "Hey, societies with mixed race have all sorts of problems, let's see what happends when we change that variable!" Some ideas are simply WRONG when you try to apply them in practice. (I don't know you, so maybe you've also experienced communism and totalitarianism first-hand; but if not, I would respectfully argue that it's easy to judge something as "worthwhile" if you haven't personally been affected by it.)
  - jrs95 9y ago
    > Why not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
    - jbreckmckye 9y ago
      You seem to have missed my second paragraph. Also - you should know there were communities without property before the Soviet Union.
bambax 9y ago
> a sense of wonder about the universe we find ourselves in If we have a sense of wonder about the universe or our planet, then what we should really do is rid it of us, because all we have ever done is ruin it, make it hideous, inflict pain and destruction on it. I have kids. My behavior is not consistent with my beliefs. In that I'm very human.
- blhack 9y ago
  Ruin it and make it hideous by what measure of utility and beauty? Humanity is beautiful, and the things humanity creates are beautiful. In our solar system, or in the local group of stars, as far as I know, it's the humans who are making the things that are the most beautiful. There is a type of beauty in nature, but that beauty was based on a harmony. The mountains don't have an intention behind them. The art that humans make does. They're very different things, and the u universe would be at a loss if humans were not a part of it.
- Jaecen 9y ago
  I don't understand this point of view. My interpretation of it is that there is some idealized, perfect form of earth (and apparently the universe) that doesn't include humans. Everything in it is perfect except for the humans, which ruin and devalue it. What confounds me about this view is that humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it. What is so unique about humanity in the universe that gives us the exclusive agency to tarnish it? Why are the products of humanity somehow excluded from the perfection of the other productions of the universe?
  - bambax 9y ago
    Excellent questions. The issue is speciesism. Humanity wasn't a problem for most of its existence. But it has now started to consume every ressource, spread on every tiny bit of land, and exterminate every other form of life. If, as you say, humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it, what is the justification for speciesism? What gives us the right to take everything for ourselves, kill and decimate other forms of life? The rate of the extinction of species that the earth is going through right now is unprecedented in all of earth's history, to say nothing of the torture we inflict on farm animals. And this is not an accident. We are doing it on purpose and we're proud of it; we call it "development", when the right word should be: destruction.
Swizec 9y ago
"Why the long-term future of humans matters more than anything else" Because humans care about humans more than anything else and that's fully sufficient. Let's not kid ourselves, we care about us, most everybody else is kinda meh. Symbiotic species like us too, I guess.
Havoc 9y ago
In part I think this is why Musk is such a bigger than life figure. His whole spiel about making humanity a multi-planet specie makes for good PR but as far as I can tell it also genuinely matter to him & provides drive.
- dharma1 9y ago
  Once the first colony dies on Mars I think we'll forget about that distraction for a while. Near term future of humanity is on this planet and there won't be any long term future if we fuck things up here
blhack 9y ago
Man this is a sad thread. Humanity is the most incredible thing in what we know of the universe. Stars and gas clouds sure are beautiful too, but unless you are very religious, the those are simple an artifact of statistics, there was no intention there. Without the humans, the universe is empty.
- e40 9y ago
  That assumes we're the only ones in the universe. If there are others, then we are much less consequential (except to ourselves, of course).
  - Retra 9y ago
    It doesn't assume it. It only assumes a value qualification that is necessary from our perspective: without human morality (which determines the value of things), there is no guarantee to exist anything that humans value. It doesn't matter if life exists elsewhere if we're the only ones that ever cared about it. Besides, the only alternative is useless optimism - to assume that life elsewhere does exist and implements our values (perhaps better than we do,) and thus we are totally unnecessary and it makes no difference if we all die. (This is the same nihilism inherent in believing in an afterlife.)
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  > Without the humans, the universe is empty. Max Tegmark adds a twist to that statement: without consciousness (subjective experience), the universe is pointless.
  - jelll 9y ago
    Would you mind expanding?
    - Neeek 9y ago
      Not familiar with the source from the parent, but the "point" to anything depends on a form of consciousness assigning that definition. There is no point to a water logged ball of rock, orbiting a giant ball of hot gas unless there is someone on that rock to say "the point of this rock is so I may exist.". Ignoring some cosmic creators with some purpose for us to exist (which would just be another form of consciousness), the whole point is decided by us. So without us, there would be no point.
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
It matters... but not more than anything else. What matters even more is that we retain our humanity. Notice that this idea is only one step removed from "the long-term future of the race matters more than anything else". Think about what horrors have been done in the service of that idea. Let us be very careful, then, that we commit no horrors in the service of this idea. ("Nothing matters more than X" easily becomes "therefore it's OK - even good - to trample on people in the service of X".)
grondilu 9y ago
In the long term, we're all dead. Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years. I'm sure most people don't either. A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards.
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  I welcome your honesty. Its also one of the reasons, why i like family fathers and mothers so much- even though most of them vote conservative. There is something selfish, that wants to see that the selfishness last forever. Thats why those future persons need a spokesman, a long term selfish bastard/algorithm, who is able to veto on short-term behavior that is ultimative self-destructive. The problem here is, that with such a control mechanism, its easy to go idealistic and try to "patch" humanity up while your at it- ending up with something, somialhinn, socialism. So the patching up process, known as government, needs a reality check to prevent a run-a-way - and balances, to prevent a lock-out of the living from base resources and short term solutions on the way to long term solutions. Some flaws might be unfixable, and only work arounds will prevent them from flaring up again and again. For example i can not get this generation to worry about the earth of tomorrows temperature. The obvious solution would be to have a Future-Gen-House-of-Parliament veto on all usage of coal and oil. Leading to a total standstill. Thus the future-gen, could be bargained with- give us oil for another generation, and we will trade you in Carbon-Emission-Taxes and the development of fusion. I dont claim to have a answer here, but it would be nice if there was some modeling software on how to build a better government here- including a simulation on how to reign in corroding elements like financially well endowed industries and tax-strained voters.
  - rabidrat 9y ago
    I love this idea. We have representatives for space, so why shouldn't we have representatives for time as well? A representative for the past would be welcome as well. Maybe preservationists try to hold on to the past, and conservatives hold down the present, while progressivists spend on the future.
yters 9y ago
If there is no standard of value outside this world, then nothing inside this world ultimately matters either.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
simonsarris 9y ago
> Robert Wiblin: Are there some approaches that you think are just obviously too broad? > Toby Ord: Good question. I think just saying, “Okay, what about improving science?” my guess is that because this begets technology, which begets some of the risk, it’s unlikely that just pushing on that is a plausible thing to particularly help. > ... They probably wouldn’t even know about asteroid risk, or super volcano risk, or various other natural risks. I think talking about these kind of risks is a mistake. They're not the biggest thing on our plate and people will always be able to foresee them as too distant and too small. ~~~~~ > Robert Wiblin: We’ve talked a lot about reducing risks to the future. What about thinking about the opposite of that, which is extremely large upsides? Are there any practical ways that people might go about not so much preventing extinction or something horrible, but also trying to create something that’s much more positive than what we have reason to hope for? > Toby Ord: It’s a good question. I’m not sure. If you want a specific technology, work on electric transportation. Fossil fuel transportation in agriculture allowed us to scale up humanity to 7.5+ billion people, but it created a time-bomb because as soon as its too pricey to move food around, we can no longer create it as scale, and there's no going back to agrarian pastoral society without killing almost all the humans. Over the long term, we have a moral imperative to advance ourselves beyond fossil fuels for transportation. This is what I believe to be the most moral technology we could work on.[1] "Humanity has a bug. We think of the future too little, and too often we think technology propels itself, that the future will simply unfold automatically. Or worse, many seem to have suffered a loss of faith in any real vision of the future. I wish this was not so." [1] https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-technology-6413ca8449c9 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-technology-6413ca...
conjectures 9y ago
Baffled by Ord's defence of discount rates. The transcript reads like a primer on the pure theory of discounting. In practice it's a cargo cult ritual that leads to the conclusion that we should give within epsilon of zero fucks about anything that happens N years from now for sufficiently large N (which you get to choose as the author of an analysis). That's partly because there's no mathematical difference in exponential discounting for the role played by 'pure rate of time preference' and the 'good' discount rate. It's always just 3.5% for no particular reason other than that's what in the back of the Treasury handbook written before 2008 during the Great Moderation. Oh, and is 3.5% a reasonable number? Sounds kinda like inflation/mortgage rates, right? But if you look at CPI $100 dollars in 1817 is, equivalent to roughly $2k dollars in 2017. But would I rather spend this 'same' amount of money in 1817 or 2017? It's a no-brainer as long as I prefer penicillin and smart phones to legal opiods and vintage mustache waxing. This is really hard stuff to model, which is a clue that it doesn't get done. If Ord and Wiblin could pick one easy fight to change about government policy making and promote longtermism it would be savaging the use of discounting in long term policy decisions rather than beating around the bush.
- robertwiblin 9y ago
  We're pretty negative about discount rates in the scheme of things. We have a paper on this which outlines why we think discount rates are worth using in some kinds of situations: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/attachments/discounting-health2.pdf https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/fi...
  - conjectures 9y ago
    Apologies if I missed the nuance but in the paper's conclusions: > Instead we will try to: > 1. discount money in the normal way to take account of inflation and opportunity costs. This is one of the problems with discounting though. Inflation is measured very badly over time due to technological change. If you go back to a policy maker in 1817 would have no idea that 2017 dollars could treat schistosomiasis, or any number of other medical conditions, so they would undervalue a 2017 dollar. I think it's fair to assume this process will continue to some extent over the next few hundred years. This suggests that money is the wrong way to weigh up long term decisions. While problematic in their own way, something like QALYs and functions of QALYs could serve much better as a unit of account because their meaning is not relative with time. But you'd have to model how many you get in the future explicitly.
purplezooey 9y ago
This sounds like the musings of the idle rich, who can spend their days worrying about such things. No thanks.
taurath 9y ago
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
xenadu02 9y ago
This is my philosophy on the future. Feel free to adopt or reject it as you see fit. Trying to reason about the future on cosmic scales is beyond our current and any foreseeable capabilities so let's discount that right away; we don't quite know if the universe will end in heat death (though we have some hints). We don't know if it is possible to create or move to other universes or even whether such a concept makes sense. As long as such things haven't been ruled out we can assume they're true: if life survives to the end of this universe it will have accumulated enough knowledge and technology to create or move to a new one. Back in the present every species on earth is doomed. Whether an asteroid strike or the sun turning into a red giant eventually this planet will become uninhabitable. It is not known whether intelligent life is a common result of evolution or we're a fluke. We do know it takes a very long time if it happens at all. It is possible we are the only highly intelligent species that will ever appear on this planet. The primary responsibility of humanity then is to balance resource consumption with the creation of an interplanetary society first, then eventually an interstellar one. We must protect the earth's resources and preserve as many species as we can reasonably preserve... but we must also preserve modern technology and pursue the establishment of permanent self-sufficient colonies on other worlds in the solar system. Once we do so we must take and spread as many species from earth as we can. In the medium term (next million years) this isn't so important but once we can achieve some form of interstellar movement spreading life to other systems is key to ensuring it isn't wiped out (or reset back to single-cell organisms). We are the only natural process capable of preserving life and so far as we are aware ours may be the only instance of life (or intelligent life) in the universe. What future iterations of life will make of such an opportunity we can only guess, but if we don't do it in all likelihood no one else ever will. If no intelligent life survives then our existence is pointless and will be erased when the sun's red-giant phase scours every last trace that any living thing has ever existed from the face of the earth.

87 points by robertwiblin 9y ago

It should be "Why the long-term future of the global ecosystem matters more than anything else". Not humanity. Humans cause nothing but destruction and suffering on an unprecedented scale. 80000hours and the EA community are not better than any other anthropocentric interest group. Seriously what's with this obsession about humanity? How shortsighted are people?

AtomicOrbital 9y ago

What is paramount is to support the force which brought humanity here, not humanity itself. We are an instantiation of a process, not the process. To best support that force we as a planet of people need to realize we are not the end-all-be-all and our species time will come and go. When our successor supersedes humanity we should celebrate that beautiful expression of a yet more well adapted carrier of the torch ... do not fight progress on this more supra anthropocentric perspective, embrace it, celebrate it

ucontrol 9y ago

God, it annoys me to see so many people spouting Rick & Morty-tier nihilistic verdicts on life and it being "pointless". Seriously, go outside and read some more books, and synthesize your experiences and observations. Even without going into rigorous philosophical discussion, if you still confidently claim that all of it is fatally worthless even after having seen as much of what there is to life, I think you seriously lack perception. It's just shallow pessimism, not a thoughtful outlook on conscious existence.

dogma1138 9y ago

Because otherwise everything up to this point would've been pointless do we really need an article explaining why the survival of our species is important?

jbreckmckye 9y ago
Judging by our current political priorities - yes, we do.
jblow 9y ago
It was a clickbait headline -- note that it has been revised.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
robertwiblin 9y ago
I meet people who disagree with this all the time. And clearly even if we think it, as a species we aren't acting on it.
speakeron 9y ago
That's the Sunk Cost Fallacy. As a rationalist who seeks to maximize my utility, why should I care about future generations?
- mattnewton 9y ago
  Because you likely weight the survival of similar genes highly, being decendant from genes that did
  - speakeron 9y ago
    I'm not sure why I would do that, although there are instincts which rely on that (e.g. sex). My immediate concerns are of my somatic existence rather than my genes. If my personal survival depended on the survival of the species (as an example: cryogenics), that would certainly be a factor.
    - bendbro 9y ago
      Because if your genes didn't historically result in an organism with a drive to propagate itself, your genes would have a significantly higher likelihood of dying out in an ancestor generation. If you do not have that drive, then it is natural to cull yourself.

crimsonalucard 9y ago

Nobody cares about humanity 600 generations from now. We're only truly concerned about our immediate family. I'd sacrifice my life for my son, but I could give a shit about my great great great great great great great great great great grandson. I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to stop.

suzzer99 9y ago
99-year leases cost about the same as outright purchase. That tells you how much people really care about their grandkids and beyond.
abpavel 9y ago
Define "stop". Like VHEMT? On a not more serious note, most people on this planet do not drive cars. 947M registered passenger cars for 7350M people in 2015 is 12.8%.
- crimsonalucard 9y ago
  Stop driving. Move closer to work. Bike, etc, etc. It can be done, but most of us are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to do it.
tzs 9y ago
> I'd sacrifice my life for my son, but I could give a shit about my great great great great great great great great great great grandson. That makes sense from a "maximizing your descendants" point of view--maybe. Assuming a normal sized family losing your son knocks out from 25 to 100% of your living descendants. Assuming that your descendants on average have average sized families then by the time you have a great^10 grandson you should have a large number of living descendants. Losing one barely makes a dent. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine a scenario where you could take an action now that would greatly affect (positively or negatively) a great^10 grandson without similarly affecting hundreds of your other great^10 grandchildren.
chriswarbo 9y ago

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

There is no long term future if there is no short and medium term future. It's very hard to create a better tomorrow if something is broken today.

robertwiblin 9y ago
That's one of the topics we discuss! :)

hartator 9y ago

I have troubled finding exemples in history where we made the "right" decisions for the future of humanity when we wanted too. Think religion oppression, communism, etc. Why today will be different?

robertwiblin 9y ago
We discuss a few concrete examples of this around the cold war in the episode! :)
jbreckmckye 9y ago
As an experiment, I think communism was absolutely worthwhile. Why not? Societies with private property have all sorts of problems, so let's see what happens when we change that variable. The problem is when experiments continue despite failure.
- nostromo123 9y ago
  As someone who has grown up in a communist Eastern European country, I would have to disagree. This "experiment" cost many people their lives, simply for ideological purposes. By the same token, you could argue that Nazi Germany was an "absolutely worthwhile" experiment. "Hey, societies with mixed race have all sorts of problems, let's see what happends when we change that variable!" Some ideas are simply WRONG when you try to apply them in practice. (I don't know you, so maybe you've also experienced communism and totalitarianism first-hand; but if not, I would respectfully argue that it's easy to judge something as "worthwhile" if you haven't personally been affected by it.)
- jrs95 9y ago
  > Why not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
  - jbreckmckye 9y ago
    You seem to have missed my second paragraph. Also - you should know there were communities without property before the Soviet Union.

bambax 9y ago

> a sense of wonder about the universe we find ourselves in If we have a sense of wonder about the universe or our planet, then what we should really do is rid it of us, because all we have ever done is ruin it, make it hideous, inflict pain and destruction on it. I have kids. My behavior is not consistent with my beliefs. In that I'm very human.

blhack 9y ago
Ruin it and make it hideous by what measure of utility and beauty? Humanity is beautiful, and the things humanity creates are beautiful. In our solar system, or in the local group of stars, as far as I know, it's the humans who are making the things that are the most beautiful. There is a type of beauty in nature, but that beauty was based on a harmony. The mountains don't have an intention behind them. The art that humans make does. They're very different things, and the u universe would be at a loss if humans were not a part of it.
Jaecen 9y ago
I don't understand this point of view. My interpretation of it is that there is some idealized, perfect form of earth (and apparently the universe) that doesn't include humans. Everything in it is perfect except for the humans, which ruin and devalue it. What confounds me about this view is that humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it. What is so unique about humanity in the universe that gives us the exclusive agency to tarnish it? Why are the products of humanity somehow excluded from the perfection of the other productions of the universe?
- bambax 9y ago
  Excellent questions. The issue is speciesism. Humanity wasn't a problem for most of its existence. But it has now started to consume every ressource, spread on every tiny bit of land, and exterminate every other form of life. If, as you say, humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it, what is the justification for speciesism? What gives us the right to take everything for ourselves, kill and decimate other forms of life? The rate of the extinction of species that the earth is going through right now is unprecedented in all of earth's history, to say nothing of the torture we inflict on farm animals. And this is not an accident. We are doing it on purpose and we're proud of it; we call it "development", when the right word should be: destruction.

Swizec 9y ago

"Why the long-term future of humans matters more than anything else" Because humans care about humans more than anything else and that's fully sufficient. Let's not kid ourselves, we care about us, most everybody else is kinda meh. Symbiotic species like us too, I guess.

Havoc 9y ago

In part I think this is why Musk is such a bigger than life figure. His whole spiel about making humanity a multi-planet specie makes for good PR but as far as I can tell it also genuinely matter to him & provides drive.

dharma1 9y ago
Once the first colony dies on Mars I think we'll forget about that distraction for a while. Near term future of humanity is on this planet and there won't be any long term future if we fuck things up here

blhack 9y ago

Man this is a sad thread. Humanity is the most incredible thing in what we know of the universe. Stars and gas clouds sure are beautiful too, but unless you are very religious, the those are simple an artifact of statistics, there was no intention there. Without the humans, the universe is empty.

e40 9y ago
That assumes we're the only ones in the universe. If there are others, then we are much less consequential (except to ourselves, of course).
- Retra 9y ago
  It doesn't assume it. It only assumes a value qualification that is necessary from our perspective: without human morality (which determines the value of things), there is no guarantee to exist anything that humans value. It doesn't matter if life exists elsewhere if we're the only ones that ever cared about it. Besides, the only alternative is useless optimism - to assume that life elsewhere does exist and implements our values (perhaps better than we do,) and thus we are totally unnecessary and it makes no difference if we all die. (This is the same nihilism inherent in believing in an afterlife.)
Florin_Andrei 9y ago
> Without the humans, the universe is empty. Max Tegmark adds a twist to that statement: without consciousness (subjective experience), the universe is pointless.
- jelll 9y ago
  Would you mind expanding?
  - Neeek 9y ago
    Not familiar with the source from the parent, but the "point" to anything depends on a form of consciousness assigning that definition. There is no point to a water logged ball of rock, orbiting a giant ball of hot gas unless there is someone on that rock to say "the point of this rock is so I may exist.". Ignoring some cosmic creators with some purpose for us to exist (which would just be another form of consciousness), the whole point is decided by us. So without us, there would be no point.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago

It matters... but not more than anything else. What matters even more is that we retain our humanity. Notice that this idea is only one step removed from "the long-term future of the race matters more than anything else". Think about what horrors have been done in the service of that idea. Let us be very careful, then, that we commit no horrors in the service of this idea. ("Nothing matters more than X" easily becomes "therefore it's OK - even good - to trample on people in the service of X".)

grondilu 9y ago

In the long term, we're all dead. Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years. I'm sure most people don't either. A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards.

Pica_soO 9y ago
I welcome your honesty. Its also one of the reasons, why i like family fathers and mothers so much- even though most of them vote conservative. There is something selfish, that wants to see that the selfishness last forever. Thats why those future persons need a spokesman, a long term selfish bastard/algorithm, who is able to veto on short-term behavior that is ultimative self-destructive. The problem here is, that with such a control mechanism, its easy to go idealistic and try to "patch" humanity up while your at it- ending up with something, somialhinn, socialism. So the patching up process, known as government, needs a reality check to prevent a run-a-way - and balances, to prevent a lock-out of the living from base resources and short term solutions on the way to long term solutions. Some flaws might be unfixable, and only work arounds will prevent them from flaring up again and again. For example i can not get this generation to worry about the earth of tomorrows temperature. The obvious solution would be to have a Future-Gen-House-of-Parliament veto on all usage of coal and oil. Leading to a total standstill. Thus the future-gen, could be bargained with- give us oil for another generation, and we will trade you in Carbon-Emission-Taxes and the development of fusion. I dont claim to have a answer here, but it would be nice if there was some modeling software on how to build a better government here- including a simulation on how to reign in corroding elements like financially well endowed industries and tax-strained voters.
- rabidrat 9y ago
  I love this idea. We have representatives for space, so why shouldn't we have representatives for time as well? A representative for the past would be welcome as well. Maybe preservationists try to hold on to the past, and conservatives hold down the present, while progressivists spend on the future.

yters 9y ago

If there is no standard of value outside this world, then nothing inside this world ultimately matters either.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

simonsarris 9y ago

> Robert Wiblin: Are there some approaches that you think are just obviously too broad? > Toby Ord: Good question. I think just saying, “Okay, what about improving science?” my guess is that because this begets technology, which begets some of the risk, it’s unlikely that just pushing on that is a plausible thing to particularly help. > ... They probably wouldn’t even know about asteroid risk, or super volcano risk, or various other natural risks. I think talking about these kind of risks is a mistake. They're not the biggest thing on our plate and people will always be able to foresee them as too distant and too small. ~~~~~ > Robert Wiblin: We’ve talked a lot about reducing risks to the future. What about thinking about the opposite of that, which is extremely large upsides? Are there any practical ways that people might go about not so much preventing extinction or something horrible, but also trying to create something that’s much more positive than what we have reason to hope for? > Toby Ord: It’s a good question. I’m not sure. If you want a specific technology, work on electric transportation. Fossil fuel transportation in agriculture allowed us to scale up humanity to 7.5+ billion people, but it created a time-bomb because as soon as its too pricey to move food around, we can no longer create it as scale, and there's no going back to agrarian pastoral society without killing almost all the humans. Over the long term, we have a moral imperative to advance ourselves beyond fossil fuels for transportation. This is what I believe to be the most moral technology we could work on.[1] "Humanity has a bug. We think of the future too little, and too often we think technology propels itself, that the future will simply unfold automatically. Or worse, many seem to have suffered a loss of faith in any real vision of the future. I wish this was not so." [1] https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-technology-6413ca8449c9 https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-technology-6413ca...

conjectures 9y ago

Baffled by Ord's defence of discount rates. The transcript reads like a primer on the pure theory of discounting. In practice it's a cargo cult ritual that leads to the conclusion that we should give within epsilon of zero fucks about anything that happens N years from now for sufficiently large N (which you get to choose as the author of an analysis). That's partly because there's no mathematical difference in exponential discounting for the role played by 'pure rate of time preference' and the 'good' discount rate. It's always just 3.5% for no particular reason other than that's what in the back of the Treasury handbook written before 2008 during the Great Moderation. Oh, and is 3.5% a reasonable number? Sounds kinda like inflation/mortgage rates, right? But if you look at CPI $100 dollars in 1817 is, equivalent to roughly $2k dollars in 2017. But would I rather spend this 'same' amount of money in 1817 or 2017? It's a no-brainer as long as I prefer penicillin and smart phones to legal opiods and vintage mustache waxing. This is really hard stuff to model, which is a clue that it doesn't get done. If Ord and Wiblin could pick one easy fight to change about government policy making and promote longtermism it would be savaging the use of discounting in long term policy decisions rather than beating around the bush.

robertwiblin 9y ago
We're pretty negative about discount rates in the scheme of things. We have a paper on this which outlines why we think discount rates are worth using in some kinds of situations: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/attachments/discounting-health2.pdf https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/fi...
- conjectures 9y ago
  Apologies if I missed the nuance but in the paper's conclusions: > Instead we will try to: > 1. discount money in the normal way to take account of inflation and opportunity costs. This is one of the problems with discounting though. Inflation is measured very badly over time due to technological change. If you go back to a policy maker in 1817 would have no idea that 2017 dollars could treat schistosomiasis, or any number of other medical conditions, so they would undervalue a 2017 dollar. I think it's fair to assume this process will continue to some extent over the next few hundred years. This suggests that money is the wrong way to weigh up long term decisions. While problematic in their own way, something like QALYs and functions of QALYs could serve much better as a unit of account because their meaning is not relative with time. But you'd have to model how many you get in the future explicitly.

purplezooey 9y ago

This sounds like the musings of the idle rich, who can spend their days worrying about such things. No thanks.

taurath 9y ago

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

xenadu02 9y ago

This is my philosophy on the future. Feel free to adopt or reject it as you see fit. Trying to reason about the future on cosmic scales is beyond our current and any foreseeable capabilities so let's discount that right away; we don't quite know if the universe will end in heat death (though we have some hints). We don't know if it is possible to create or move to other universes or even whether such a concept makes sense. As long as such things haven't been ruled out we can assume they're true: if life survives to the end of this universe it will have accumulated enough knowledge and technology to create or move to a new one. Back in the present every species on earth is doomed. Whether an asteroid strike or the sun turning into a red giant eventually this planet will become uninhabitable. It is not known whether intelligent life is a common result of evolution or we're a fluke. We do know it takes a very long time if it happens at all. It is possible we are the only highly intelligent species that will ever appear on this planet. The primary responsibility of humanity then is to balance resource consumption with the creation of an interplanetary society first, then eventually an interstellar one. We must protect the earth's resources and preserve as many species as we can reasonably preserve... but we must also preserve modern technology and pursue the establishment of permanent self-sufficient colonies on other worlds in the solar system. Once we do so we must take and spread as many species from earth as we can. In the medium term (next million years) this isn't so important but once we can achieve some form of interstellar movement spreading life to other systems is key to ensuring it isn't wiped out (or reset back to single-cell organisms). We are the only natural process capable of preserving life and so far as we are aware ours may be the only instance of life (or intelligent life) in the universe. What future iterations of life will make of such an opportunity we can only guess, but if we don't do it in all likelihood no one else ever will. If no intelligent life survives then our existence is pointless and will be erased when the sun's red-giant phase scours every last trace that any living thing has ever existed from the face of the earth.