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I partly agree and disagree with your comment. It is true that the article says > that "Longtermism" is weighing purely hypothetical future things more than pr

I partly agree and disagree with your comment. It is true that the article says > that "Longtermism" is weighing purely hypothetical future things more than present things (please forgive the splicing). That is an accurate representation of longtermism as far as I can tell, because the future is inherently hypothetical (we don't know it yet). But this is not arguing that longtermism is true, or false, or beneficial, or harmful. It's just stating its content, and expecting that the reader becomes disgusted by it. The reason I spliced your comment is that the part > (and basic incalculable) is not necessarily true. The article does not really argue for or against the proposition of whether we can estimate the amount of future lives with any accuracy.

joe_the_user 5y ago
> (and basic incalculable) The article does not really argue for or against the proposition of whether we can estimate the amount of future lives with any accuracy. Yes, the article makes that more or less tacit assumption that making decisions based on far hypotheticals is a mistakes. I think that's reasonable assumption that most people would agree with. I would also note that Bostrom and company never claim that they calculate the odds of their existential dangers. In Bostrome's book Superintelligence, he is clear that he cannot calculate any odds. The only thing they do is (implicitly) assume that it's possible to reason about the purely hypothetical in the fashion that one can reason about the clearly possible. But is something one argue against fairly plausibly; I don't know the odds of me getting sick or my car breaking down but because it's possible, I have to prepare for it. I can't use the same reasoning with chances of aliens landing or the sun exploding or any event where I don't have enough information to demonstrate it's plausibility as possibility, so to speak. And sure, I haven't proved aliens landing isn't a possibility.

joe_the_user 5y ago

> (and basic incalculable) The article does not really argue for or against the proposition of whether we can estimate the amount of future lives with any accuracy. Yes, the article makes that more or less tacit assumption that making decisions based on far hypotheticals is a mistakes. I think that's reasonable assumption that most people would agree with. I would also note that Bostrom and company never claim that they calculate the odds of their existential dangers. In Bostrome's book Superintelligence, he is clear that he cannot calculate any odds. The only thing they do is (implicitly) assume that it's possible to reason about the purely hypothetical in the fashion that one can reason about the clearly possible. But is something one argue against fairly plausibly; I don't know the odds of me getting sick or my car breaking down but because it's possible, I have to prepare for it. I can't use the same reasoning with chances of aliens landing or the sun exploding or any event where I don't have enough information to demonstrate it's plausibility as possibility, so to speak. And sure, I haven't proved aliens landing isn't a possibility.