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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. I

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.

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.