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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

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.
  - dvdhnt 9y ago
    This would be impossible. We can't accurately speculate what values will be important to future people any more than we can discern what a cow is thinking.
    - rabidrat 9y ago
      Oh, good point! We should definitely have representatives for other species too.
VeronicaJJ123 9y ago
Thanks for saying that. I do not care about humanity or earth's future 100 years down the line leave alone 1000 years. I think it is incredible arrogant to even assume that we can have any impact on future that distant. Most of our forefathers could not have imagined even a fraction of technological advancement we have achieved and compared to our children 500 years in future we are still pretty much uncivilized cavemans. Cavemen should not bother about the earth, they should bother about themselves first.
- pheldagryph 9y ago
  > I think it is incredible arrogant to even assume that we can have any impact on future that distant. If we're not impacting it... then who is?
kakarot 9y ago
To provide a bit of contrast, I have near-zero interest in the human condition over the next few generations (with the exception of the development of a few technologies) and am only really interested in where humanity could be in another 10,000 years and how I can help to make sure we get there. Everybody's different, it doesn't do well to derive generalizations of society from your own internal conclusions.
hwillis 9y ago
I genuinely feel horrified by that. Like, it legitimately alarms me in the same way I'd be alarmed to find out everyone else in a room with me is a psychopath. I'm not very personally frightened to think that most people would be fine with me being hurt- it's not an imminent threat. I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay with people suffering. Obviously this is more acute with people in other countries than people who do not yet exist, and I have some allowance for laziness. But... people are genuinely fine with the idea that people starve to death? That's horrifying.
- stdbrouw 9y ago
  > I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay with people suffering. But future people don't exist. If a nuclear holocaust wipes us all out, they will never exist, and hence will never suffer. So really it depends on whether you consider "the continued existence of the human race" to be a moral imperative or whether you don't.
- Zhyl 9y ago
  You may be interested in this article [1] by David Wong (author of 'John Dies at the end'). It pretty much sums up the attitude in the parent comment and why, to a greater or lesser extent, we are all subject to it. [1] http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html/ http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html/
- NiklasMort 9y ago
  The state of the world proves to you that basically everybody is a "psychopath". We are all self obsessed and our empathy barely reaches to our next door neighbor. The world is a mad house, is this really news to you?
- mmirate 9y ago
  On the contrary. I can't imagine experiencing the emotions of all the people in 10000AD; at our current population growth rate, 10000AD will witness an unfathomable number of human beings! Being concerned about all those people is far too much emotional stress for any one mind. (Of course, experiencing others' emotions can in general be debilitating. Obviously, then, experiencing trillions of others' emotions would be trillionsfold worse.)
jimmyk 9y ago
Would it change things for you if that kid was your descendant?
- dionidium 9y ago
  That's an interesting question. My gut reaction is that it doesn't make any emotional difference to me.
glenstein 9y ago
You've put your finger on a very important point. It's a point that some of the most important ethicists (Parfit, Singer) in recent history have focused on, namely the deficit in empathy we have for individuals who are distant from us whether it be in space or time. Progressing beyond this is one of the important moral challenges faced by humanity.
- default-kramer 9y ago
  But trying to empathize with someone who is going to live thousands of years from now seems like designing software based on speculative requirements changes. You end up with a custom DSL for a custom rules engine and only 2 rules ever got written with it. Except that predicting what humanity will be like in 1000 years is harder than predicting what your software will be like in 10 years.
  - glenstein 9y ago
    True, we can't make predictions in the form of hyperparticularizations. But we can make predictions in broad strokes about industrialization and ecology and how our current behaviors will serve the welfare of future generations in those respects.
  - HillRat 9y ago
    A rule I would consider would be that any decision should, all else being equal, maximize the degrees of freedom available to other persons relative to other exclusionary options. Obviously, this would require quite a bit of further discussion and fleshing out as to its precise meaning, but I'd take it as a starting point for philosophical analysis.
- dharma1 9y ago
  Empathy, thinking about the near-term future or past, worrying - all products of evolution, traits that have helped us enough in the past to have been selected for. There has been no evolutionary pressure to develop much of a concern beyond one or two generations. And evolution hasn't equipped us with reward pathways or cognitive capacity to solve many of the problems now facing us and our surroundings - because those problems are new
jolmg 9y ago
I guess I can sort of understand the sentiment of not caring much for the individuals of humanity, but there is a difference between that and not caring about humanity as a whole, as the species, as the beings that, as more time and generations go by, understand more about the universe and find ways to do what was previously thought to be impossible. Doesn't it excite you what humanity might accomplish with more time? Doesn't it disappoint you that they might lose everything they've accomplished through millenia of work simply because of carelessness of previous generations? I believe humanity could survive longer if people only cared enough to prepare for disasters they know will come, even if it's multiple generations into the future. This is like humanity is one big human procastinating. Some things can only be accomplished if you prepare for them with time.
stcredzero 9y ago
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. There is quite a bit of mental variation. One of the rarest qualities I have found in people is the ability to connect abstractions to feelings. I once dated a woman who would sometimes get angry at me because she was mistaken. That is fine, as we are all human, sometimes one makes mistakes. However, she would stay angry at me even when I exonerated myself factually. I should've taken that as an early sign and bailed out of that relationship much sooner! When hiring someone for a startup or choosing a co-founder, I would recommend that one look for this quality. This is related to something I heard on "Fresh Air." The author of this book had a "bad boss" character who kept on calling things a "dog whistle." As far as he was concerned, a phenomenon he couldn't directly perceive might as well not exist. Such an idea strikes me as a degree of idiocy that makes me angry. The physical phenomenon of sound waves at higher than 20 kHz is a physical fact! Denying the truth of an objective fact because of a shortsighted prioritization of one's limited subjective point of view -- this is exactly the kind of thing that can get one in trouble, if one is doing substantive knowledge work!
nkurz 9y ago
Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years. Well, how many years ahead are you willing to worry? 10? 100? It sounds like you might be saying that you don't put much weight on the future of humanity on any timescale, and worry only about things that affect you personally. If so, then yes, I'd say that is the definition of selfish. I'm sure most people don't either. It might look this way, but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people", rather than just some people in some societies? We're all selfish bastards. I don't think this is true.
- grondilu 9y ago
  > Well, how many years ahead are you willing to worry? 10? 100? Let me reverse the question : how many years ahead is enough for you not to worry? A million years? Fifty billions? Do you worry about the ultimate fate of the universe[1]? It's pretty clear to me that, all other things being equal, events tend to matter less and less as they are occurring further and further into the future. That's why, for instance, most young people don't worry much about death, unless they're told it will happen soon. I don't have an accurate way to measure it, but to me, once you start talking about thousands of years, it's such a far future that I don't worry about it. > but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people", People are anxious or obsessed about many things, but I very rarely hear anyone whining about the future of the World in geological time scales. There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pa34orcwwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pa34orcwwA
  - nkurz 9y ago
    Let me reverse the question: how many years ahead is enough for you not to worry? A fair question. I'm not worried by the heat death of the universe, as I'm fairly certain that any action I take during my life will have no effect on it. I can't really picture the difference between a million years and a billion, so they don't really concern me, although I don't have a logical explanation for this. My actual concerns vary between the 100 to 10,000 year time frame. I'm periodically incapacitated by my inability to find a convincing counterargument to the Great Filter theory, whereby the reason we haven't ever ever encountered aliens is because all civilizations collapse before achieving interstellar travel. While I'm doubtful that I can personally do anything to prevent this eventuality, when I do have hope, it's that I can make it slightly less likely or less catastrophic. There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff. Thanks for the link, although I find it more bittersweet than straightforwardly humorous. Having had similar failed conversations with psychological professionals over the years, I sympathize with young Alvy. I can say from experience that trying to explain your concerns about the 1000 year time frame doesn't go over any better.
tr1ck5t3r 9y ago
So if you are a parent you are setting your kids up to fail and their kids and so on. What a great parent, theres nothing like over population to strain finite resources, plus it seems like a logical survival strategy or not, and in a way its a form of child abuse considering the Flynn effect, but Dunbars number is an indicator of intellect. Call me selfish but some people dont worry about ensuring the stupid dont survive. For thousands of years clever people have been manipulating the stupid en masse sometimes called society, simply by putting the fear of god or whatever one's chosen sky fairy happens to be, into them. Reap what you sow.
musage 9y ago
I care about others because I care about the person I am. > A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. And if treated with a modicum of attention and love, it will be much wiser than you before it even enters school. Rationalizing having given up, and pretending everybody has, comes way after that.
- notyourday 9y ago
  > I care about others because I care about the person I am. When someone says that I ask them "Have you donated everything you made this month above the poverty level in your country to some kids who can't afford to eat say in Bangladesh per chance or its equivalent?" They typically respond with a "No" followed by a very convoluted explanation why it is the empathy that matters as in their view situational empathy should stop the moment such actions inconvenience them.
  - musage 9y ago
    > "Have you donated everything you made this month above the poverty level in your country to some kids who can't afford to eat say in Bangladesh per chance or its equivalent?" > the moment such actions inconvenience them That's "not even silly", the threshold for "inconvenience" begins way earlier. And "caring for others" doesn't mean not caring for oneself, I'm also one of those other people, if you will. And your need to somehow disprove the empathy, love and/or generosity of everybody else, with such cheap sophistry to boot, says more about you than about the people you know nothing about. If you're looking for convolution, you might want to also look into that. And why does caring for others only requiring those who get oppressed, and not attacking their oppressors? Give a man a fish, and he has a fish. Denazify the world and he has a place to raise kids in. Everybody has their own views what caring and doing good means, and comforting a bullied person ranks way lower for me than dealing with the bully. I wouldn't answer "no" and squirm, I'd laugh in your face.

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.
- dvdhnt 9y ago
  This would be impossible. We can't accurately speculate what values will be important to future people any more than we can discern what a cow is thinking.
  - rabidrat 9y ago
    Oh, good point! We should definitely have representatives for other species too.

VeronicaJJ123 9y ago

Thanks for saying that. I do not care about humanity or earth's future 100 years down the line leave alone 1000 years. I think it is incredible arrogant to even assume that we can have any impact on future that distant. Most of our forefathers could not have imagined even a fraction of technological advancement we have achieved and compared to our children 500 years in future we are still pretty much uncivilized cavemans. Cavemen should not bother about the earth, they should bother about themselves first.

pheldagryph 9y ago
> I think it is incredible arrogant to even assume that we can have any impact on future that distant. If we're not impacting it... then who is?

kakarot 9y ago

To provide a bit of contrast, I have near-zero interest in the human condition over the next few generations (with the exception of the development of a few technologies) and am only really interested in where humanity could be in another 10,000 years and how I can help to make sure we get there. Everybody's different, it doesn't do well to derive generalizations of society from your own internal conclusions.

hwillis 9y ago

I genuinely feel horrified by that. Like, it legitimately alarms me in the same way I'd be alarmed to find out everyone else in a room with me is a psychopath. I'm not very personally frightened to think that most people would be fine with me being hurt- it's not an imminent threat. I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay with people suffering. Obviously this is more acute with people in other countries than people who do not yet exist, and I have some allowance for laziness. But... people are genuinely fine with the idea that people starve to death? That's horrifying.

stdbrouw 9y ago
> I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay with people suffering. But future people don't exist. If a nuclear holocaust wipes us all out, they will never exist, and hence will never suffer. So really it depends on whether you consider "the continued existence of the human race" to be a moral imperative or whether you don't.
Zhyl 9y ago
You may be interested in this article [1] by David Wong (author of 'John Dies at the end'). It pretty much sums up the attitude in the parent comment and why, to a greater or lesser extent, we are all subject to it. [1] http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html/ http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html/
NiklasMort 9y ago
The state of the world proves to you that basically everybody is a "psychopath". We are all self obsessed and our empathy barely reaches to our next door neighbor. The world is a mad house, is this really news to you?
mmirate 9y ago
On the contrary. I can't imagine experiencing the emotions of all the people in 10000AD; at our current population growth rate, 10000AD will witness an unfathomable number of human beings! Being concerned about all those people is far too much emotional stress for any one mind. (Of course, experiencing others' emotions can in general be debilitating. Obviously, then, experiencing trillions of others' emotions would be trillionsfold worse.)

jimmyk 9y ago

Would it change things for you if that kid was your descendant?

dionidium 9y ago
That's an interesting question. My gut reaction is that it doesn't make any emotional difference to me.

glenstein 9y ago

You've put your finger on a very important point. It's a point that some of the most important ethicists (Parfit, Singer) in recent history have focused on, namely the deficit in empathy we have for individuals who are distant from us whether it be in space or time. Progressing beyond this is one of the important moral challenges faced by humanity.

default-kramer 9y ago
But trying to empathize with someone who is going to live thousands of years from now seems like designing software based on speculative requirements changes. You end up with a custom DSL for a custom rules engine and only 2 rules ever got written with it. Except that predicting what humanity will be like in 1000 years is harder than predicting what your software will be like in 10 years.
- glenstein 9y ago
  True, we can't make predictions in the form of hyperparticularizations. But we can make predictions in broad strokes about industrialization and ecology and how our current behaviors will serve the welfare of future generations in those respects.
- HillRat 9y ago
  A rule I would consider would be that any decision should, all else being equal, maximize the degrees of freedom available to other persons relative to other exclusionary options. Obviously, this would require quite a bit of further discussion and fleshing out as to its precise meaning, but I'd take it as a starting point for philosophical analysis.
dharma1 9y ago
Empathy, thinking about the near-term future or past, worrying - all products of evolution, traits that have helped us enough in the past to have been selected for. There has been no evolutionary pressure to develop much of a concern beyond one or two generations. And evolution hasn't equipped us with reward pathways or cognitive capacity to solve many of the problems now facing us and our surroundings - because those problems are new

jolmg 9y ago

I guess I can sort of understand the sentiment of not caring much for the individuals of humanity, but there is a difference between that and not caring about humanity as a whole, as the species, as the beings that, as more time and generations go by, understand more about the universe and find ways to do what was previously thought to be impossible. Doesn't it excite you what humanity might accomplish with more time? Doesn't it disappoint you that they might lose everything they've accomplished through millenia of work simply because of carelessness of previous generations? I believe humanity could survive longer if people only cared enough to prepare for disasters they know will come, even if it's multiple generations into the future. This is like humanity is one big human procastinating. Some things can only be accomplished if you prepare for them with time.

stcredzero 9y ago

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. There is quite a bit of mental variation. One of the rarest qualities I have found in people is the ability to connect abstractions to feelings. I once dated a woman who would sometimes get angry at me because she was mistaken. That is fine, as we are all human, sometimes one makes mistakes. However, she would stay angry at me even when I exonerated myself factually. I should've taken that as an early sign and bailed out of that relationship much sooner! When hiring someone for a startup or choosing a co-founder, I would recommend that one look for this quality. This is related to something I heard on "Fresh Air." The author of this book had a "bad boss" character who kept on calling things a "dog whistle." As far as he was concerned, a phenomenon he couldn't directly perceive might as well not exist. Such an idea strikes me as a degree of idiocy that makes me angry. The physical phenomenon of sound waves at higher than 20 kHz is a physical fact! Denying the truth of an objective fact because of a shortsighted prioritization of one's limited subjective point of view -- this is exactly the kind of thing that can get one in trouble, if one is doing substantive knowledge work!

nkurz 9y ago

Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years. Well, how many years ahead are you willing to worry? 10? 100? It sounds like you might be saying that you don't put much weight on the future of humanity on any timescale, and worry only about things that affect you personally. If so, then yes, I'd say that is the definition of selfish. I'm sure most people don't either. It might look this way, but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people", rather than just some people in some societies? We're all selfish bastards. I don't think this is true.

grondilu 9y ago
> Well, how many years ahead are you willing to worry? 10? 100? Let me reverse the question : how many years ahead is enough for you not to worry? A million years? Fifty billions? Do you worry about the ultimate fate of the universe[1]? It's pretty clear to me that, all other things being equal, events tend to matter less and less as they are occurring further and further into the future. That's why, for instance, most young people don't worry much about death, unless they're told it will happen soon. I don't have an accurate way to measure it, but to me, once you start talking about thousands of years, it's such a far future that I don't worry about it. > but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people", People are anxious or obsessed about many things, but I very rarely hear anyone whining about the future of the World in geological time scales. There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pa34orcwwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pa34orcwwA
- nkurz 9y ago
  Let me reverse the question: how many years ahead is enough for you not to worry? A fair question. I'm not worried by the heat death of the universe, as I'm fairly certain that any action I take during my life will have no effect on it. I can't really picture the difference between a million years and a billion, so they don't really concern me, although I don't have a logical explanation for this. My actual concerns vary between the 100 to 10,000 year time frame. I'm periodically incapacitated by my inability to find a convincing counterargument to the Great Filter theory, whereby the reason we haven't ever ever encountered aliens is because all civilizations collapse before achieving interstellar travel. While I'm doubtful that I can personally do anything to prevent this eventuality, when I do have hope, it's that I can make it slightly less likely or less catastrophic. There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff. Thanks for the link, although I find it more bittersweet than straightforwardly humorous. Having had similar failed conversations with psychological professionals over the years, I sympathize with young Alvy. I can say from experience that trying to explain your concerns about the 1000 year time frame doesn't go over any better.

tr1ck5t3r 9y ago

So if you are a parent you are setting your kids up to fail and their kids and so on. What a great parent, theres nothing like over population to strain finite resources, plus it seems like a logical survival strategy or not, and in a way its a form of child abuse considering the Flynn effect, but Dunbars number is an indicator of intellect. Call me selfish but some people dont worry about ensuring the stupid dont survive. For thousands of years clever people have been manipulating the stupid en masse sometimes called society, simply by putting the fear of god or whatever one's chosen sky fairy happens to be, into them. Reap what you sow.

musage 9y ago

I care about others because I care about the person I am. > A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. And if treated with a modicum of attention and love, it will be much wiser than you before it even enters school. Rationalizing having given up, and pretending everybody has, comes way after that.

notyourday 9y ago
> I care about others because I care about the person I am. When someone says that I ask them "Have you donated everything you made this month above the poverty level in your country to some kids who can't afford to eat say in Bangladesh per chance or its equivalent?" They typically respond with a "No" followed by a very convoluted explanation why it is the empathy that matters as in their view situational empathy should stop the moment such actions inconvenience them.
- musage 9y ago
  > "Have you donated everything you made this month above the poverty level in your country to some kids who can't afford to eat say in Bangladesh per chance or its equivalent?" > the moment such actions inconvenience them That's "not even silly", the threshold for "inconvenience" begins way earlier. And "caring for others" doesn't mean not caring for oneself, I'm also one of those other people, if you will. And your need to somehow disprove the empathy, love and/or generosity of everybody else, with such cheap sophistry to boot, says more about you than about the people you know nothing about. If you're looking for convolution, you might want to also look into that. And why does caring for others only requiring those who get oppressed, and not attacking their oppressors? Give a man a fish, and he has a fish. Denazify the world and he has a place to raise kids in. Everybody has their own views what caring and doing good means, and comforting a bullied person ranks way lower for me than dealing with the bully. I wouldn't answer "no" and squirm, I'd laugh in your face.