6 ms·

A critique of longtermism: why you shouldn't worry about the far future

34 points by gautamcgoel 5y ago

satellite2 5y ago
So we should discount value of future human life usine the DCF method? This is ridiculous. The DCF makes sense because receiving a dollar tomorrow doesn't have the same value as receiving one today because in the second case I could invest it in the risk free asset and get more than one dollar tomorrow. This doesn't apply to human life. I understand the feeling of the author regarding designing policy aimed at future people but the argument is just plain wrong. I'm sure there is a non fallacious argument supporting this point though. Maybe a risk / black swan based one?
- gautamcgoel 5y ago
  "I don't agree with this argument but have no substantive criticism, so I'll call it ridiculous. Also, I'm sure there is a good argument against longtermism, I just don't know what it is. Maybe something involving <buzzword>?"
  - adamisom 5y ago
    The substantive criticism is clear: discounting is questionable when it comes to human lives.
  - randallsquared 5y ago
    "No substantive criticism" seems to be filling the same role as "ridiculous". Applying DCF doesn't seem ridiculous, but there is still an argument to be made about whether humans that exist now are each more important to our current plans than humans that (may) exist in two hundred, two thousand, or two million years.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > This doesn't apply to human life. Yes it does, as the certainty even for someone healthy and alive today that they will remain alive as time goes can only decrease. Look at how the best plans go to trash for people saving when they're young, with grand plans to retire early and gorge on leisure/travel/etc, when they suddenly find out they have a terminal disease or some other health problem that at best reduce their ability to travel or enjoy their leisure (trekking in the desert on a wheelchair at 70? Or on painkillers? Might be possible, but certainly not as fun as doing that same thing at 20, if only because you'll find fewer people of your same age group willing to join in on the adventure)
  - adamisom 5y ago
    Good point yet the appropriate discount rate has gone over time with better medicine and technology. So it comes down to: do you believe medicine and tech will keep advancing and if so, doesn’t that mean the discount rate will get ever smaller over time? I think it does.
    - csdvrx 5y ago
      While I agree with you that discount rate should decrease, I also believe that eventually we all get sick then die. Nothing short of a few radical breakthroughts can fix a strictly decreasing function.
      - jacobr1 5y ago
        And even if we have some breakthroughs for things like aging in general or cancer, attrition via accidents and other forms of physical destruction will always be a factor.
        csdvrx 5y ago
        Physicial destruction for my software installs is no longer a problem with backups - so even that is not a given with sufficient technological breakthroughs!
  - satellite2 5y ago
    First, it seems you didn't read the article, the comparison is not between various ages of a given person but between a bunch of human life now and a bunch of other life in the future. To make it even simpler, the DCF arises because you can simply show that receiving a dollar now is preferable to a dollar in the future. Can you even claim that about human life? If you cannot even find a good explanation for your theory how can you claim you can come with an equation for it? The DCF is a very precise way to compare mesurable quantities. How would you even define the value of a human life? You cannot randomly pick known equations and apply them to unrelated topics because there is a vague resemblance. This is supermarket philosophy. That's why it's ridiculous.
- notahacker 5y ago
  > The DCF makes sense because receiving a dollar tomorrow doesn't have the same value as receiving one today because in the second case I could invest it in the risk free asset and get more than one dollar tomorrow. This doesn't apply to human life. Sure it does, since it's Effective Altruism we're talking about, so it's (i) literally about socially investing money and (ii) it's choosing between spending it on things anticipated to generate compounding returns like economic growth or carbon control or health and education (all likely to have indirect long term benefits to solving whatever humanity's future challenges are too) versus spending it on stuff which serves no purpose in the foreseeable future but is hypothetically critical to the hypothetical risks faced by hypothetical humans in the hypothesised future. And also because even if cash couldn't be invested [risk free], humans would still apply a discount rate to the future because of uncertainty and time preference the author discusses. Needless to say, there's a lot of uncertainty about the needs of future generations, and just as it's pretty normal to care more about your own child than kids in a faraway land, it's pretty normal to consider hypothetical third millenium transhumans on Alpha Centurai essentially irrelevant to your priorities. (I mean, trying to avoid human extinction is pretty worthwhile for its own sake anyway; invoking billions upon billions of future humans spread across the galaxy because everyone thinks your project has an astronomically small chance of actually saving humanity is just Pascal's Wager in scifi form)
- 99_00 5y ago
  You're right, the authors argument doesn't make sense. We should put off problems now because they will be cheaper and easier to solve in the future because technology would have improved. Putting resources into technology now instead of solving problems that can be put off will help to ensure that.
SkyMarshal 5y ago
> Longtermists use this reasoning to justify many controversial stances; for example, longtermists rate climate change as a relatively unimportant concern, since it will only have a direct effect on the billions of people who live on the Earth, and not the countless multitudes, who, they believe, will one day live in various star systems across the galaxy. There's longtermism and then there's longtermism. Climate Change is a problem that will affect our kids and grand kids in this century and the next, hence it's a longterm problem. But worrying about the future diaspora of "potentially hundreds of trillions or more" humans across the Milky Way Galaxy is so far off and unforeseeable I'm not even sure "longtermism" is the right word for it. That's more SciFi territory.
- lolsal 5y ago
  I agree with your sentiment - longtermism as a term needs to be tempered with a dose of reality. When does longtermism become another word for "fantasy"?
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Who is he even arguing against, Hari Seldon? It's kinda tiresome all these -isms that people invent to argue against. More often they're strawman positions that few to no people actually hold. We should hold people to counter specific arguments made by specific people, not vague ideas held by nebulous -ists.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Indeed. I want to meet these people who say not to worry about climate change because we will have space travel.
    - vkou 5y ago
      Read the comments on any HN thread about Mars colonization. They generally go along the pattern of: + I am so excited about <potential of this development/timeline/discover>, what an amazing step towards Mars colonization. - Mars colonization is a waste of everyone's time. It's a giant distraction, and a truly gargantuan resource sink, that doesn't get us anything meaningful. We should be focusing on immediate problems, like hunger and climate change and nuclear weapons and toilet paper shortages. + Mars colonization creates redundancy for humanity against extraterrestrial existential threats. It's important to direct our efforts to ensure that <some tiny fraction> of 'humanity' can survive an Earth-killing cataclysm. - Extraterrestrial existential threats are unlikely and hypothetical on any appreciable timeline. We are spectacularly failing to deal with a short-term, man-made existential threat to our civilization. In the <near>/<long> term, I'd rather direct <gargantuan efforts required for building a self-sustaining Mars colony> towards saving <overwhelming majority> of humanity from <impending, obvious catastrophe>, than work to preserve <some tiny fraction> of humanity from <highly unlikely cataclysm that somehow kills off 100% of the people on Earth but 0% of the people on a hypothetical self-sustaining Mars colony>. And so on, and so on.
ALittleLight 5y ago
I recently read The Precipice which advocates for longtermism. I'd recommend this substack author read that book as it deals with the objections raised here. It's true that longtermists view climate change as relatively less of a threat than other existential risks. The reason is that climate change seems unlikely to literally make humanity extinct or to trap us in an unrecoverable and inescapable bad position. Plus, climate change is relatively slow moving compared to other existential risks. The book does better than I will be about to do here in explaining this I could see a grease fire on my kitchen stove and decide to put it out even while acknowledging that a fire is relatively less important than villains abducting me and my family and torturing us to death.
- gautamcgoel 5y ago
  I haven't read it. Can you please summarize the counterarguments presented in the book?
  - Hokusai 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice:_Existential_Ris... I find the logic flawed as it seems to imply that extrem suffering of some is justified if it benefits many others. "You can kill a person to harvest its organs to save many" seems implicit, but I just read the summary. The book may contain much more nuance.
  - jrpt 5y ago
    Have you read Beckstead's dissertation? https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1/play/ https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1...
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    I'd want to spend more time than I have at the moment to do the book justice. From memory, and again, without taking enough time, the objections are something like... "Climate change is relatively unimportant" - Only to existential risks. The likelihood of humanity becoming extinct from climate change is low and it will happen slowly enough that we could probably react to it. "Not able to predict what Coke will do in the future" - True, we can't predict what humanity will be doing in the future, but we can say that either humanity will exist or it won't. If it does exist then that is what we are concerned with. If it doesn't exist then the bad part of existential risk has already been realized. "Discounting future value of human lives" - You can play with numbers in your DCF formula and find highly unintuitive things like it would be better to kill a billion people a billion years in the future than a million people a million years in the future. That doesn't really seem right. It's also true that the future value of humans isn't "ours" exactly in the way that the future earnings of a company might be, we aren't trying to maximize "our" value, but rather value generally - so I'm not sure discounting formulas like this are relevant.
zopa 5y ago
When we think about the time value of money, we're thinking about the value of money to an individual. It isn't fundamentally about market returns, at bottom; it's about the near-universal human preference for something now over something later. Once you have that concept in mind you can do some calculations and get the wealth-weighted aggregate time preferences of everyone in the market. But notice that that's an average: particular people can and do have wildly different time preferences, and there's no abstract Platonic "true" value of money aside from its value to people. Which is all well and good, but not really relevant to effective altruism or utilitarian ethics. Effective altruism starts with the premise that people have inherent worth in some universal sense. If we're just thinking about people's value relative to me, then sure, humanity thousands or millions of years from now isn't worth much. I'll never know or interact with them, and nor will anyone I know or care about. But the whole appeal of utilitarian ethics is that it's not based on who I happen to like.
- gautamcgoel 5y ago
  I see the point you're making, but part of what I was trying to get at is that economic utility and social welfare should be discounted, not necessarily utility. For example, a life saving invention created today is worth more than if it's created a century from now, because it could potentially save many lives during that century.
  - zopa 5y ago
    And that's fine, but now you don't have the right behavior in the limit to defeat longtermism, because with the right assumptions population growth can easily swamp the effects of a delay. Unless I'm missing something you really do need the value of a life to approach zero in the distant future for your argument to work. I actually agree with you that longtermism is problematic; I'm not fond of ethical systems that give wildly shifting directives based on guesses about the shape of the future. But that's why I'm not utilitarian. Grant all the assumptions and the logic seems pretty sound to me.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
It’s hard to reason about care for the future in a nihilistic framework, which seems to be an issue at the present moment, I.e. humanity may have a critical mass of people who say ’meh’. What if ‘meh’ is the great filter?
ouid 5y ago
Wait, people use longtermism to argue that man-made climate change isn't important?
- gautamcgoel 5y ago
  See here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and-existential-risk https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-o...
  - ouid 5y ago
    The premise of directing humanity's resources to avoid existential risk is indeed a very noble pursuit. Which is why I suspect it's been coopted by the climate deniers. It's a form of SEO in which the people who have coopted the title "existential risk avoiders" get to uncorrelate it from the only salient existential risk that humanity faces.
- dotsam 5y ago
  If you have the choice between taking an action that may potentially save billions and billions of future lives, or taking an action that may have an extremely marginal impact on a very bad, and yet not absolutely apocalyptic, climate change disaster, a longtermist would probably encourage you to maximise your impact by focusing at least some of your resources on preventing the more deadly scenarios (though not necessarily to the exclusion of dealing with climate change).
  - ouid 5y ago
    So the argument is that the probability of humanity achieving galactic sustainability is independent of humanity achieving local near term sustainability? This argument needs to take a better statistics class.
    - dotsam 5y ago
      Climate change is likely to result in appalling tragedies of widespread suffering, but it is perhaps less likely to result in the permanent and total collapse of human civilisation. To that extent, it is locally sustainable (but at a grotesque cost). I don't think the argument is to not do anything about climate change. It is to continue to work with urgency to tackle climate change _and_ to do something appropriate about risks that could wipe out civilisation completely, where we have reason to believe our actions could to some degree mitigate the risks.
fleddr 5y ago
A fair warning, but I don't think anybody was worrying about this kind of far future anyway. Just adjusting and staying relevant in our fast-paced world requires an increasingly short term focus, if anything. Paycheck to paycheck and business quarter to business quarter. Further, many people aren't very hopeful for the future as everything seems to be breaking down. We're also absolutely terrible at even "short term" problems. Climate change was warned about since the 70s. We had decades to curb it but did nothing. We can foresee population booms as well as aging decades before they happen but again do absolutely nothing. We're a short term species. And getting even more short term. Instant gratification and all that. Personally, I don't care at all about the prospect of people populating the galaxy. Imagine the mess they make. It wouldn't be long before the sky looked like an ad.
conformist 5y ago
This feels a bit straw man like in that proponents of longtermism appear to be aware of improbable outcomes and of discounting and things like that. One of the problems seems to be that even if you agree that the utility of unlikely but great outcomes for humanity in the far future is something like (very small probability of perfect scenario) x (very small discount factor) x (very large utility), people might disagree fundamentally about the order of magnitude of all three quantities, which will lead to vastly different judgements? I'm curious whether this sort of argument is too naive, too, and whether there are convincing arguments why this ought not to be the case that are prevalent in the longtermist community?
bell-cot 5y ago
I've no idea how legit, or popular, this notion of longtermism is. But it sounds like a great excuse to ignore almost all of the world's current or "in our lifetimes" problems, focus on a few very theoretical problems - of serious interest to only a few SciFi fans and longtermists - and proclaim it a virtue to do that. (While probably doing nothing whatever about any problem, beyond talking big and puffing themselves up.)
- dotsam 5y ago
  A number of credible people think that AI safety may be an 'in our lifetimes' problem, and serious work is being done to get it right. This is the kind of thing a longtermist would support, because getting AI safety wrong could have terrible consequences for the future of life.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 5y ago
    >and serious work is being done to get it right Like what?
    - notahacker 5y ago
      Well nobody can dispute that OpenAI is doing serious work, although whether selling API access to the text output of a neural network is actually using the philanthropic dollars invested to save humanity is another question. Also, the research institute whose most notable output is Harry Potter fanfic did write quite good fanfic!
newbie789 5y ago
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erwald 5y ago
longtermists, having noticed the skulls[1], have addressed these issues. they are most definitely concerned about extinction risks that happen on much shorter timeframes, quite possibly before humans break even 10 billion. second, op is criticising total utilitarianism. total utilitarianism does lead to longtermism, but it's not the only ethics that does, and there are longtermists who are not utilitarians. third, discounting money is not the same as discounting lives -- $1 was worth way more 100 years ago, but 1 life was not worth more then than 1 life is today. about "the future is distant and we can't know anything about it", see e.g. this[2] post on the effective altruism forum. > Possible misconception: “Trying to influence the far future is pointless because it is impossible to forecast that far.” > My response: “Considering far future effects doesn’t necessarily require predicting what will happen in the far future.” > [...] > Nuclear war could feasibly happen tomorrow. Climate change is an ongoing phenomenon and catastrophic climate change could happen within decades. In The Precipice, Toby Ord places the probability of an existential catastrophe occuring within the next 100 years at 1 in 6, which is concerningly high. > Ord is not in the business of forecasting events beyond a 100-year time horizon, nor does he have to be. These existential threats affect the far future on account of the persistence of their effects if they occur, but not on account of the fact that they might happen in the far future. Therefore whilst it is true that a claim has to be made about the far future, namely that we are unlikely to ever properly recover from existential catastrophes, this claim seems less strong than a claim that some particular event will happen in the far future. i recommend op engage with some longer longtermist writings and try to understand the view from the inside. another poster mentioned toby ord's the precipice, but there is also plenty of material online. for example, i recommend this interview with carl shulman about extinction risk.[3] [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-th... [2] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ocmEFL2uDSMzvwL8P/possible-misconceptions-about-strong-longtermism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ocmEFL2uDSMzvwL8P/... [3] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-common-sense-case-existential-risks/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-common-...
somebodythere 5y ago
This philosophy also presumes that the future existence of these trillions of hypothetical humans is an inherent good, when it seems to me that they would not be alive to lament their nonexistence (indeed, they may as well be spared from suffering in a miserable world), and so the ethical calculus falls upon the set of humans currently alive to determine how valuable that scenario is to them. Am I meant to believe that the average human currently alive values an intergalactic future at thousands of times the value derived from their own existence? For the vast majority of people, that factor is probably in the ones and twos at most. I can think of many people I know personally for whom that factor is marginally negative.

34 points by gautamcgoel 5y ago

So we should discount value of future human life usine the DCF method? This is ridiculous. The DCF makes sense because receiving a dollar tomorrow doesn't have the same value as receiving one today because in the second case I could invest it in the risk free asset and get more than one dollar tomorrow. This doesn't apply to human life. I understand the feeling of the author regarding designing policy aimed at future people but the argument is just plain wrong. I'm sure there is a non fallacious argument supporting this point though. Maybe a risk / black swan based one?

gautamcgoel 5y ago
"I don't agree with this argument but have no substantive criticism, so I'll call it ridiculous. Also, I'm sure there is a good argument against longtermism, I just don't know what it is. Maybe something involving <buzzword>?"
- adamisom 5y ago
  The substantive criticism is clear: discounting is questionable when it comes to human lives.
- randallsquared 5y ago
  "No substantive criticism" seems to be filling the same role as "ridiculous". Applying DCF doesn't seem ridiculous, but there is still an argument to be made about whether humans that exist now are each more important to our current plans than humans that (may) exist in two hundred, two thousand, or two million years.
csdvrx 5y ago
> This doesn't apply to human life. Yes it does, as the certainty even for someone healthy and alive today that they will remain alive as time goes can only decrease. Look at how the best plans go to trash for people saving when they're young, with grand plans to retire early and gorge on leisure/travel/etc, when they suddenly find out they have a terminal disease or some other health problem that at best reduce their ability to travel or enjoy their leisure (trekking in the desert on a wheelchair at 70? Or on painkillers? Might be possible, but certainly not as fun as doing that same thing at 20, if only because you'll find fewer people of your same age group willing to join in on the adventure)
- adamisom 5y ago
  Good point yet the appropriate discount rate has gone over time with better medicine and technology. So it comes down to: do you believe medicine and tech will keep advancing and if so, doesn’t that mean the discount rate will get ever smaller over time? I think it does.
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    While I agree with you that discount rate should decrease, I also believe that eventually we all get sick then die. Nothing short of a few radical breakthroughts can fix a strictly decreasing function.
    - jacobr1 5y ago
      And even if we have some breakthroughs for things like aging in general or cancer, attrition via accidents and other forms of physical destruction will always be a factor.
      - csdvrx 5y ago
        Physicial destruction for my software installs is no longer a problem with backups - so even that is not a given with sufficient technological breakthroughs!
- satellite2 5y ago
  First, it seems you didn't read the article, the comparison is not between various ages of a given person but between a bunch of human life now and a bunch of other life in the future. To make it even simpler, the DCF arises because you can simply show that receiving a dollar now is preferable to a dollar in the future. Can you even claim that about human life? If you cannot even find a good explanation for your theory how can you claim you can come with an equation for it? The DCF is a very precise way to compare mesurable quantities. How would you even define the value of a human life? You cannot randomly pick known equations and apply them to unrelated topics because there is a vague resemblance. This is supermarket philosophy. That's why it's ridiculous.
notahacker 5y ago
> The DCF makes sense because receiving a dollar tomorrow doesn't have the same value as receiving one today because in the second case I could invest it in the risk free asset and get more than one dollar tomorrow. This doesn't apply to human life. Sure it does, since it's Effective Altruism we're talking about, so it's (i) literally about socially investing money and (ii) it's choosing between spending it on things anticipated to generate compounding returns like economic growth or carbon control or health and education (all likely to have indirect long term benefits to solving whatever humanity's future challenges are too) versus spending it on stuff which serves no purpose in the foreseeable future but is hypothetically critical to the hypothetical risks faced by hypothetical humans in the hypothesised future. And also because even if cash couldn't be invested [risk free], humans would still apply a discount rate to the future because of uncertainty and time preference the author discusses. Needless to say, there's a lot of uncertainty about the needs of future generations, and just as it's pretty normal to care more about your own child than kids in a faraway land, it's pretty normal to consider hypothetical third millenium transhumans on Alpha Centurai essentially irrelevant to your priorities. (I mean, trying to avoid human extinction is pretty worthwhile for its own sake anyway; invoking billions upon billions of future humans spread across the galaxy because everyone thinks your project has an astronomically small chance of actually saving humanity is just Pascal's Wager in scifi form)
99_00 5y ago
You're right, the authors argument doesn't make sense. We should put off problems now because they will be cheaper and easier to solve in the future because technology would have improved. Putting resources into technology now instead of solving problems that can be put off will help to ensure that.

SkyMarshal 5y ago

> Longtermists use this reasoning to justify many controversial stances; for example, longtermists rate climate change as a relatively unimportant concern, since it will only have a direct effect on the billions of people who live on the Earth, and not the countless multitudes, who, they believe, will one day live in various star systems across the galaxy. There's longtermism and then there's longtermism. Climate Change is a problem that will affect our kids and grand kids in this century and the next, hence it's a longterm problem. But worrying about the future diaspora of "potentially hundreds of trillions or more" humans across the Milky Way Galaxy is so far off and unforeseeable I'm not even sure "longtermism" is the right word for it. That's more SciFi territory.

lolsal 5y ago
I agree with your sentiment - longtermism as a term needs to be tempered with a dose of reality. When does longtermism become another word for "fantasy"?
marginalia_nu 5y ago
Who is he even arguing against, Hari Seldon? It's kinda tiresome all these -isms that people invent to argue against. More often they're strawman positions that few to no people actually hold. We should hold people to counter specific arguments made by specific people, not vague ideas held by nebulous -ists.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Indeed. I want to meet these people who say not to worry about climate change because we will have space travel.
  - vkou 5y ago
    Read the comments on any HN thread about Mars colonization. They generally go along the pattern of: + I am so excited about <potential of this development/timeline/discover>, what an amazing step towards Mars colonization. - Mars colonization is a waste of everyone's time. It's a giant distraction, and a truly gargantuan resource sink, that doesn't get us anything meaningful. We should be focusing on immediate problems, like hunger and climate change and nuclear weapons and toilet paper shortages. + Mars colonization creates redundancy for humanity against extraterrestrial existential threats. It's important to direct our efforts to ensure that <some tiny fraction> of 'humanity' can survive an Earth-killing cataclysm. - Extraterrestrial existential threats are unlikely and hypothetical on any appreciable timeline. We are spectacularly failing to deal with a short-term, man-made existential threat to our civilization. In the <near>/<long> term, I'd rather direct <gargantuan efforts required for building a self-sustaining Mars colony> towards saving <overwhelming majority> of humanity from <impending, obvious catastrophe>, than work to preserve <some tiny fraction> of humanity from <highly unlikely cataclysm that somehow kills off 100% of the people on Earth but 0% of the people on a hypothetical self-sustaining Mars colony>. And so on, and so on.

ALittleLight 5y ago

I recently read The Precipice which advocates for longtermism. I'd recommend this substack author read that book as it deals with the objections raised here. It's true that longtermists view climate change as relatively less of a threat than other existential risks. The reason is that climate change seems unlikely to literally make humanity extinct or to trap us in an unrecoverable and inescapable bad position. Plus, climate change is relatively slow moving compared to other existential risks. The book does better than I will be about to do here in explaining this I could see a grease fire on my kitchen stove and decide to put it out even while acknowledging that a fire is relatively less important than villains abducting me and my family and torturing us to death.

gautamcgoel 5y ago
I haven't read it. Can you please summarize the counterarguments presented in the book?
- Hokusai 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice:_Existential_Risk_and_the_Future_of_Humanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Precipice:_Existential_Ris... I find the logic flawed as it seems to imply that extrem suffering of some is justified if it benefits many others. "You can kill a person to harvest its organs to save many" seems implicit, but I just read the summary. The book may contain much more nuance.
- jrpt 5y ago
  Have you read Beckstead's dissertation? https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1/play/ https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/40469/PDF/1...
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I'd want to spend more time than I have at the moment to do the book justice. From memory, and again, without taking enough time, the objections are something like... "Climate change is relatively unimportant" - Only to existential risks. The likelihood of humanity becoming extinct from climate change is low and it will happen slowly enough that we could probably react to it. "Not able to predict what Coke will do in the future" - True, we can't predict what humanity will be doing in the future, but we can say that either humanity will exist or it won't. If it does exist then that is what we are concerned with. If it doesn't exist then the bad part of existential risk has already been realized. "Discounting future value of human lives" - You can play with numbers in your DCF formula and find highly unintuitive things like it would be better to kill a billion people a billion years in the future than a million people a million years in the future. That doesn't really seem right. It's also true that the future value of humans isn't "ours" exactly in the way that the future earnings of a company might be, we aren't trying to maximize "our" value, but rather value generally - so I'm not sure discounting formulas like this are relevant.

zopa 5y ago

When we think about the time value of money, we're thinking about the value of money to an individual. It isn't fundamentally about market returns, at bottom; it's about the near-universal human preference for something now over something later. Once you have that concept in mind you can do some calculations and get the wealth-weighted aggregate time preferences of everyone in the market. But notice that that's an average: particular people can and do have wildly different time preferences, and there's no abstract Platonic "true" value of money aside from its value to people. Which is all well and good, but not really relevant to effective altruism or utilitarian ethics. Effective altruism starts with the premise that people have inherent worth in some universal sense. If we're just thinking about people's value relative to me, then sure, humanity thousands or millions of years from now isn't worth much. I'll never know or interact with them, and nor will anyone I know or care about. But the whole appeal of utilitarian ethics is that it's not based on who I happen to like.

gautamcgoel 5y ago
I see the point you're making, but part of what I was trying to get at is that economic utility and social welfare should be discounted, not necessarily utility. For example, a life saving invention created today is worth more than if it's created a century from now, because it could potentially save many lives during that century.
- zopa 5y ago
  And that's fine, but now you don't have the right behavior in the limit to defeat longtermism, because with the right assumptions population growth can easily swamp the effects of a delay. Unless I'm missing something you really do need the value of a life to approach zero in the distant future for your argument to work. I actually agree with you that longtermism is problematic; I'm not fond of ethical systems that give wildly shifting directives based on guesses about the shape of the future. But that's why I'm not utilitarian. Grant all the assumptions and the logic seems pretty sound to me.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

It’s hard to reason about care for the future in a nihilistic framework, which seems to be an issue at the present moment, I.e. humanity may have a critical mass of people who say ’meh’. What if ‘meh’ is the great filter?

ouid 5y ago

Wait, people use longtermism to argue that man-made climate change isn't important?

gautamcgoel 5y ago
See here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-of-longtermism-and-existential-risk https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-o...
- ouid 5y ago
  The premise of directing humanity's resources to avoid existential risk is indeed a very noble pursuit. Which is why I suspect it's been coopted by the climate deniers. It's a form of SEO in which the people who have coopted the title "existential risk avoiders" get to uncorrelate it from the only salient existential risk that humanity faces.
dotsam 5y ago
If you have the choice between taking an action that may potentially save billions and billions of future lives, or taking an action that may have an extremely marginal impact on a very bad, and yet not absolutely apocalyptic, climate change disaster, a longtermist would probably encourage you to maximise your impact by focusing at least some of your resources on preventing the more deadly scenarios (though not necessarily to the exclusion of dealing with climate change).
- ouid 5y ago
  So the argument is that the probability of humanity achieving galactic sustainability is independent of humanity achieving local near term sustainability? This argument needs to take a better statistics class.
  - dotsam 5y ago
    Climate change is likely to result in appalling tragedies of widespread suffering, but it is perhaps less likely to result in the permanent and total collapse of human civilisation. To that extent, it is locally sustainable (but at a grotesque cost). I don't think the argument is to not do anything about climate change. It is to continue to work with urgency to tackle climate change _and_ to do something appropriate about risks that could wipe out civilisation completely, where we have reason to believe our actions could to some degree mitigate the risks.

fleddr 5y ago

A fair warning, but I don't think anybody was worrying about this kind of far future anyway. Just adjusting and staying relevant in our fast-paced world requires an increasingly short term focus, if anything. Paycheck to paycheck and business quarter to business quarter. Further, many people aren't very hopeful for the future as everything seems to be breaking down. We're also absolutely terrible at even "short term" problems. Climate change was warned about since the 70s. We had decades to curb it but did nothing. We can foresee population booms as well as aging decades before they happen but again do absolutely nothing. We're a short term species. And getting even more short term. Instant gratification and all that. Personally, I don't care at all about the prospect of people populating the galaxy. Imagine the mess they make. It wouldn't be long before the sky looked like an ad.

conformist 5y ago

This feels a bit straw man like in that proponents of longtermism appear to be aware of improbable outcomes and of discounting and things like that. One of the problems seems to be that even if you agree that the utility of unlikely but great outcomes for humanity in the far future is something like (very small probability of perfect scenario) x (very small discount factor) x (very large utility), people might disagree fundamentally about the order of magnitude of all three quantities, which will lead to vastly different judgements? I'm curious whether this sort of argument is too naive, too, and whether there are convincing arguments why this ought not to be the case that are prevalent in the longtermist community?

bell-cot 5y ago

I've no idea how legit, or popular, this notion of longtermism is. But it sounds like a great excuse to ignore almost all of the world's current or "in our lifetimes" problems, focus on a few very theoretical problems - of serious interest to only a few SciFi fans and longtermists - and proclaim it a virtue to do that. (While probably doing nothing whatever about any problem, beyond talking big and puffing themselves up.)

dotsam 5y ago
A number of credible people think that AI safety may be an 'in our lifetimes' problem, and serious work is being done to get it right. This is the kind of thing a longtermist would support, because getting AI safety wrong could have terrible consequences for the future of life.
- frgtpsswrdlame 5y ago
  >and serious work is being done to get it right Like what?
  - notahacker 5y ago
    Well nobody can dispute that OpenAI is doing serious work, although whether selling API access to the text output of a neural network is actually using the philanthropic dollars invested to save humanity is another question. Also, the research institute whose most notable output is Harry Potter fanfic did write quite good fanfic!

newbie789 5y ago

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erwald 5y ago

longtermists, having noticed the skulls[1], have addressed these issues. they are most definitely concerned about extinction risks that happen on much shorter timeframes, quite possibly before humans break even 10 billion. second, op is criticising total utilitarianism. total utilitarianism does lead to longtermism, but it's not the only ethics that does, and there are longtermists who are not utilitarians. third, discounting money is not the same as discounting lives -- $1 was worth way more 100 years ago, but 1 life was not worth more then than 1 life is today. about "the future is distant and we can't know anything about it", see e.g. this[2] post on the effective altruism forum. > Possible misconception: “Trying to influence the far future is pointless because it is impossible to forecast that far.” > My response: “Considering far future effects doesn’t necessarily require predicting what will happen in the far future.” > [...] > Nuclear war could feasibly happen tomorrow. Climate change is an ongoing phenomenon and catastrophic climate change could happen within decades. In The Precipice, Toby Ord places the probability of an existential catastrophe occuring within the next 100 years at 1 in 6, which is concerningly high. > Ord is not in the business of forecasting events beyond a 100-year time horizon, nor does he have to be. These existential threats affect the far future on account of the persistence of their effects if they occur, but not on account of the fact that they might happen in the far future. Therefore whilst it is true that a claim has to be made about the far future, namely that we are unlikely to ever properly recover from existential catastrophes, this claim seems less strong than a claim that some particular event will happen in the far future. i recommend op engage with some longer longtermist writings and try to understand the view from the inside. another poster mentioned toby ord's the precipice, but there is also plenty of material online. for example, i recommend this interview with carl shulman about extinction risk.[3] [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-th... [2] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ocmEFL2uDSMzvwL8P/possible-misconceptions-about-strong-longtermism https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ocmEFL2uDSMzvwL8P/... [3] https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-common-sense-case-existential-risks/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/carl-shulman-common-...

somebodythere 5y ago

This philosophy also presumes that the future existence of these trillions of hypothetical humans is an inherent good, when it seems to me that they would not be alive to lament their nonexistence (indeed, they may as well be spared from suffering in a miserable world), and so the ethical calculus falls upon the set of humans currently alive to determine how valuable that scenario is to them. Am I meant to believe that the average human currently alive values an intergalactic future at thousands of times the value derived from their own existence? For the vast majority of people, that factor is probably in the ones and twos at most. I can think of many people I know personally for whom that factor is marginally negative.