6 ms·

What do longtermists want?

oneoff786 4y ago
> We find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives [in the present] Good luck parsing that claim on the first try. Reducing the probability of extinction by 1/1000000000^2% is worth 1000000000 human lives? Ok so I guess you’re trying to say 1 human life is worth a billionth of a percent chance of extinction. The author here isn’t exactly praising this perspective but has the audacity to write > Hey, maths doesn’t lie Which is utterly idiotic and such a misleading thing to say. This isn’t math, it’s a thick layer of hand wavey assumptions and tiny sprinkling of math to throw it together. It’s not like we have any way of actually forming any probability distributions of outcomes for the unforseeable future outcomes so the whole thing is moot. In general however, short term prosperity is likely to compound into better outcomes more than anything.
- evilsetg 4y ago
  As I understood it, 'Hey, math doesn't lie' was a sarcastic jab to point out how ridiculous it would be to believe the argument just because it contains a calculation.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    Maybe. The way he counters with > Hey, maths doesn’t lie, so I guess that means okay to sacrifice a billion people or so. Unless possibly you’re one of them. Implies to me he is implying the math is sound but has a different problem. > But I don’t want to be unfair, Bostrom’s magnificent paper also has a figure to support his argument that I don’t want to withhold from you, here we go, I hope that explains it all. This comment seems very demeaning towards the math though so I can’t really tell
    - DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
      yeah it's probably 'she' not 'he' for this particular person but whatever. No the point being made is more like that you can compute something doesn't mean you're right even if your math is correct. That goes for a lot of physics and also for a lot of statistics. Second the conclusion drawn by Bostrom et al is hilarious in a very bad way, and also completely beyond science and mathematics. Third, the argumentation is also ridiculous b/c in history as in weather and a lot of other fields we're dealing with a highly dynamic, basically chaotic system. Fourth, we can't predict what the future will be like in a year or in ten years, but here there's a bunch of rich technocrats who want me to swallow that it's OK to sacrifice hundreds and hundreds of millions of people for the greater good of mankind in a billion years? Bro do you even count? You don't even know how a big a number a billion is, and I can't tell you either. Lastly, these people are throwing around their assumption-laden probabilistic formulas like there's no tomorrow [pun intended]. Fact is we can't be sure of any of the assumptions or their probabilities, nor what they mean. People already get stuck with everyday tasks of risk assessment. > seems very demeaning towards the math Get over it. It's OK to ridicule the math of someone who makes an absurd argument and abuses the math for dangerous, delusional and nefarious purposes, as the longtermers do. This is fascism in every way but name.
KBeyo 4y ago
>”Personally I think it’s good to have longterm strategies. Not just for the next 10 or 20 years. But also for the next 10 thousand or 10 billion years. So I really appreciate the longtermists’ focus on the prevention of existential risks. However, I also think they underestimate just how much technological progress depends on the reliability and sustainability of our current political, economic, and ecological systems.” Agreed. I think if we did a good job on ameliorating the current systems, we would also greatly mitigate future risk. The benefit would not be those future generations only, but for those also experiencing life currently.
smitty1e 4y ago
> Not everyone is a fan of longtermism. I can’t think of a reason why. I mean, the last time a self-declared intellectual elite said it’s okay to sacrifice some million people for the greater good, only thing that happened was a world war, just a "small misstep for mankind." Our culture, in general and implicitly, rejects the idea of objective truth in favor of hedonism. If we're living for pleasures of the moment, then fretting about the unborn seems silly. Look at government borrowing: we're reducing future generations to penury because of whatever folly sounded good for the election. Neither "Effective Altruism" or "Longtermism" seem more than fads, and for the same reason: without an internal renewal based upon some immutable, external truth, these movements shall not outlive their founders.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  `it’s okay to sacrifice some million people for the greater good' So now we will loosel millions of people to climate change for no reason at all. What a relief
  - insanejudge 4y ago
    Seems like for a 'longtermist' something like climate change is such an insignificant blip (and one that will 'inevitably be solved by technology once it becomes a problem ') that it doesn't even bear thinking. I think that's sort of the point though, it makes you sound super duper intellectual and you can do weird stuff on behalf of the 10 million year view while hand waving away responsibility for the near term with futurist fiction.
    - smitty1e 4y ago
      If your predictions are correct, fine. How exactly we test them on the typical human scale is unclear.
  - smitty1e 4y ago
    > for no reason at all Never underestimate the value of making those in charge feel better about themselves.
xnx 4y ago
Longtermists want to be praised and revered for how smart they are.
tibbydudeza 4y ago
The Sun will become a red giant in 5 billion years - we not going to get off this the rock - which is a good thing for the universe I reckon.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  I dont think a universe full of lifeless rocks and deadly radiation has concept of good and evil.
  - tibbydudeza 4y ago
    Indeed - just a pale blue dot.
Cryptonic 4y ago
Well my life, the life time of my children and their's. Also my friends and other family. To preserve living conditions for this would be long term for me. This time span is much more important that quarterly reports or political elections. Of course if we do not fuck up as a species (climate, war, etc.) and fail in this century, more humans will be born over the next few centuries than ever existed. These unborns have no voice. They inherit what we do with this planet and our society. Ethically I would say, to preserve their living conditions is the far long term and should also be considered.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> " Not just for the next 10 or 20 years. But also for the next 10 thousand or 10 billion years" Lets run a mental experiment, shall we? 10 thousand years ago we were cavemen. Imagine a caveman trying to plan what should happen today. How good would his plans be? "To ensure human survival, you should ensure Wooley Mamoth population doesn't collapse?" Okay, cavemen were uneducated you might say, too primitive to plan. Fine. Get Socrates, educated man and on the smartest people in history, could he plan two thousand years ago for what we should be doing today? Could he predicr threats of climate change, nuclear war, AI, what have you? No, he could not and its only two thousand years. Where, the farthest back in time, do we find people who could make any meaningfull plan for today? Probably less than 100 years ago. So there are two possible conclusions: 1 Elon musk is 100 times smarter than socrates, enabling him to think 10,000 years ahead and predict threats we have not yet conceived. Because he is so used to planning in thousands of years, he is struggling to plan when his Tesla Autopilot will finally be ready or his new product will be released. 2 Society and technology has reached a steady state, and withing the next 10,000 years there will be less change than we experienced in the last 100. 3 This is just a pseudo-intellectual excersise by folks who also happen to be arrogant and calous. What I find to be very pretentious is arguing you can predict anything on the timescales of the universe when the laws of physics behind dark matter, dark energy and Gravity on quantum scales are unknown. For all we know universe could reverse expantion and end in a Big Crunch in 1 billion years.
- bm3719 4y ago
  Still learning about the tenets of this philosophy here, nor do I have a position on it yet, so might get this wrong... However, isn't there a more charitable argument you could make that looks something like this: 4. Unlike with cavemen and Socrates' time, we now have decisions to make that could lock us out of continued proliferation of human life in the future. As such, the longtermists are bringing attention to those, and trying to help us to make the right decisions, instead of focusing resources on short-term returns. A good example they might support would be spending more money on space tech and less on food for Africa. Resources aren't limitless, and some aren't renewable at all, so we have to use those wisely to position our heirs such that they could take the next step. They might also make the slightly more tenuous claim that since we know more about the nature of the universe, there could be some invariants that we'll certainly need to see through this vision (e.g., establishing self-sustaining life off the planet). Those will be true in the future, just as the caveman could have assumed we would still need food and shelter of some kind in present day.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]

> We find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives [in the present] Good luck parsing that claim on the first try. Reducing the probability of extinction by 1/1000000000^2% is worth 1000000000 human lives? Ok so I guess you’re trying to say 1 human life is worth a billionth of a percent chance of extinction. The author here isn’t exactly praising this perspective but has the audacity to write > Hey, maths doesn’t lie Which is utterly idiotic and such a misleading thing to say. This isn’t math, it’s a thick layer of hand wavey assumptions and tiny sprinkling of math to throw it together. It’s not like we have any way of actually forming any probability distributions of outcomes for the unforseeable future outcomes so the whole thing is moot. In general however, short term prosperity is likely to compound into better outcomes more than anything.

evilsetg 4y ago
As I understood it, 'Hey, math doesn't lie' was a sarcastic jab to point out how ridiculous it would be to believe the argument just because it contains a calculation.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Maybe. The way he counters with > Hey, maths doesn’t lie, so I guess that means okay to sacrifice a billion people or so. Unless possibly you’re one of them. Implies to me he is implying the math is sound but has a different problem. > But I don’t want to be unfair, Bostrom’s magnificent paper also has a figure to support his argument that I don’t want to withhold from you, here we go, I hope that explains it all. This comment seems very demeaning towards the math though so I can’t really tell
  - DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
    yeah it's probably 'she' not 'he' for this particular person but whatever. No the point being made is more like that you can compute something doesn't mean you're right even if your math is correct. That goes for a lot of physics and also for a lot of statistics. Second the conclusion drawn by Bostrom et al is hilarious in a very bad way, and also completely beyond science and mathematics. Third, the argumentation is also ridiculous b/c in history as in weather and a lot of other fields we're dealing with a highly dynamic, basically chaotic system. Fourth, we can't predict what the future will be like in a year or in ten years, but here there's a bunch of rich technocrats who want me to swallow that it's OK to sacrifice hundreds and hundreds of millions of people for the greater good of mankind in a billion years? Bro do you even count? You don't even know how a big a number a billion is, and I can't tell you either. Lastly, these people are throwing around their assumption-laden probabilistic formulas like there's no tomorrow [pun intended]. Fact is we can't be sure of any of the assumptions or their probabilities, nor what they mean. People already get stuck with everyday tasks of risk assessment. > seems very demeaning towards the math Get over it. It's OK to ridicule the math of someone who makes an absurd argument and abuses the math for dangerous, delusional and nefarious purposes, as the longtermers do. This is fascism in every way but name.

KBeyo 4y ago

>”Personally I think it’s good to have longterm strategies. Not just for the next 10 or 20 years. But also for the next 10 thousand or 10 billion years. So I really appreciate the longtermists’ focus on the prevention of existential risks. However, I also think they underestimate just how much technological progress depends on the reliability and sustainability of our current political, economic, and ecological systems.” Agreed. I think if we did a good job on ameliorating the current systems, we would also greatly mitigate future risk. The benefit would not be those future generations only, but for those also experiencing life currently.

smitty1e 4y ago

> Not everyone is a fan of longtermism. I can’t think of a reason why. I mean, the last time a self-declared intellectual elite said it’s okay to sacrifice some million people for the greater good, only thing that happened was a world war, just a "small misstep for mankind." Our culture, in general and implicitly, rejects the idea of objective truth in favor of hedonism. If we're living for pleasures of the moment, then fretting about the unborn seems silly. Look at government borrowing: we're reducing future generations to penury because of whatever folly sounded good for the election. Neither "Effective Altruism" or "Longtermism" seem more than fads, and for the same reason: without an internal renewal based upon some immutable, external truth, these movements shall not outlive their founders.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
`it’s okay to sacrifice some million people for the greater good' So now we will loosel millions of people to climate change for no reason at all. What a relief
- insanejudge 4y ago
  Seems like for a 'longtermist' something like climate change is such an insignificant blip (and one that will 'inevitably be solved by technology once it becomes a problem ') that it doesn't even bear thinking. I think that's sort of the point though, it makes you sound super duper intellectual and you can do weird stuff on behalf of the 10 million year view while hand waving away responsibility for the near term with futurist fiction.
  - smitty1e 4y ago
    If your predictions are correct, fine. How exactly we test them on the typical human scale is unclear.
- smitty1e 4y ago
  > for no reason at all Never underestimate the value of making those in charge feel better about themselves.

xnx 4y ago

Longtermists want to be praised and revered for how smart they are.

tibbydudeza 4y ago

The Sun will become a red giant in 5 billion years - we not going to get off this the rock - which is a good thing for the universe I reckon.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
I dont think a universe full of lifeless rocks and deadly radiation has concept of good and evil.
- tibbydudeza 4y ago
  Indeed - just a pale blue dot.

Cryptonic 4y ago

Well my life, the life time of my children and their's. Also my friends and other family. To preserve living conditions for this would be long term for me. This time span is much more important that quarterly reports or political elections. Of course if we do not fuck up as a species (climate, war, etc.) and fail in this century, more humans will be born over the next few centuries than ever existed. These unborns have no voice. They inherit what we do with this planet and our society. Ethically I would say, to preserve their living conditions is the far long term and should also be considered.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> " Not just for the next 10 or 20 years. But also for the next 10 thousand or 10 billion years" Lets run a mental experiment, shall we? 10 thousand years ago we were cavemen. Imagine a caveman trying to plan what should happen today. How good would his plans be? "To ensure human survival, you should ensure Wooley Mamoth population doesn't collapse?" Okay, cavemen were uneducated you might say, too primitive to plan. Fine. Get Socrates, educated man and on the smartest people in history, could he plan two thousand years ago for what we should be doing today? Could he predicr threats of climate change, nuclear war, AI, what have you? No, he could not and its only two thousand years. Where, the farthest back in time, do we find people who could make any meaningfull plan for today? Probably less than 100 years ago. So there are two possible conclusions: 1 Elon musk is 100 times smarter than socrates, enabling him to think 10,000 years ahead and predict threats we have not yet conceived. Because he is so used to planning in thousands of years, he is struggling to plan when his Tesla Autopilot will finally be ready or his new product will be released. 2 Society and technology has reached a steady state, and withing the next 10,000 years there will be less change than we experienced in the last 100. 3 This is just a pseudo-intellectual excersise by folks who also happen to be arrogant and calous. What I find to be very pretentious is arguing you can predict anything on the timescales of the universe when the laws of physics behind dark matter, dark energy and Gravity on quantum scales are unknown. For all we know universe could reverse expantion and end in a Big Crunch in 1 billion years.

bm3719 4y ago
Still learning about the tenets of this philosophy here, nor do I have a position on it yet, so might get this wrong... However, isn't there a more charitable argument you could make that looks something like this: 4. Unlike with cavemen and Socrates' time, we now have decisions to make that could lock us out of continued proliferation of human life in the future. As such, the longtermists are bringing attention to those, and trying to help us to make the right decisions, instead of focusing resources on short-term returns. A good example they might support would be spending more money on space tech and less on food for Africa. Resources aren't limitless, and some aren't renewable at all, so we have to use those wisely to position our heirs such that they could take the next step. They might also make the slightly more tenuous claim that since we know more about the nature of the universe, there could be some invariants that we'll certainly need to see through this vision (e.g., establishing self-sustaining life off the planet). Those will be true in the future, just as the caveman could have assumed we would still need food and shelter of some kind in present day.

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]