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>Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. It's not that

>Especially once people start down the path of thinking the needs of today aren't as important as the needs of a hypothetical future population. It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly. We need to be concerned with the future. That is the only reason to maintain roads and bridges, to prevent pollution, or to conserve resources like water in aquifers and helium. But effective altruists are as likely to talk about colonizing Mars as they are to talk about global warming. Effective altruism is supposedly about making evidence-based decisions. We have no idea how likely "existential risks" are. We have no idea what, if anything, can be done about them. We cannot predict a year into the future, let alone millenia. So-called longtermism is nothing more than guesswork.

JohnFen 4y ago
Oh, I agree! I didn't mean to imply that being concerned with the future isn't critically important. It is. I like how you put it better -- it's that they do it so badly.
gruez 4y ago
>It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly. [...] But effective altruists are as likely to talk about colonizing Mars as they are to talk about global warming. Are they doing it badly, or are you not understanding their arguments? AFAIK effective altruists want to colonize mars on x-risk grounds, which would explain why they want to prioritize that over global warming, even though the latter is happening right now. AFAIK they think that global warming is bad, but isn't an existential risk, whereas colonizing mars will mitigate many existential risks.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Why Mars though? Why not colonize the Gebi Desert first?
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    Presumably because the goal is to survive something bad that happens to Earth. If you're on Mars (and self-sustaining...), that's no big deal. If you're in the Gobi Desert, you're going to be the first people to get wiped out by whatever happens to Earth.
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    x-risk is existential risk, as in humans get wiped out. Some big ones are meteor impact, nuclear war and disease. The risk of those things ending all of humanity are greatly reduced with a second planet. They're not reduced with a desert colony.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > The risk of those things ending all of humanity are greatly reduced with a second planet. I can imagine a situation where that's true. But right now, for almost any situation, a series of super-bunkers is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective. A lot of ridiculously destructive things can happen to Earth and it will still be a better place to live than Mars.
      - smegger001 4y ago
        our earth has had impact events that no bunker would save us from. like the one that created the moon or the much smaller impact that created the Borealis Basin on mars would boil the oceans and melt the surface.
        roywiggins 4y ago
        It would be massively cheaper and faster to robotically colonize near-Earth space and get really, really good at killer asteroid detection and redirection.
        imtringued 4y ago
        Ok but redirection capability must be abundant enough that outright sabotage and terrorism can be fixed by another nation or else you will have an increase in extinction risk.
- dfgheaoinbt6t 4y ago
  I understand their arguments just fine. I just don't think they make any sense. Ought implies can. We cannot predict the far future of humanity. We cannot colonize other planets in the foreseeable future. We cannot plan how to handle future technology that we aren't yet sure is even possible. The things we actually can predict and control, like global warming and natural disasters and pandemics, are handled with regular old public policy. Longtermism, almost by definition, refers to things we can neither predict nor control.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I've yet to see an argument for colonizing Mars for this purpose, that wouldn't be a better argument if the goal were instead "build robust, distributed bunkers on earth, and pay families to live in them part-time so there's always someone there". Cheaper, and more effective. Most plausible post-apocalyptic Earths would be far easier to live on than Mars. The remaining threats that wouldn't also be pretty likely to take out Mars at the same time, would be something like a whole-crust-liquifying impact, which we'd have a pretty good chance of spotting well in advance, and we could put some of the savings into getting better at that. I think a bunch of smart people are also just romantics when it comes to space shit, and that's why they won't shut up about Mars, not because it's actually a good idea. Hell, building orbital habs is probably a better idea than colonizing Mars, for those purposes, if we must do space shit.
  - walleeee 4y ago
    > Most plausible post-apocalyptic Earths would be far easier to live on than Mars. thank you how are we supposed to build a second home on a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet until we demonstrate ourselves capable of stabilizing the biosphere and building a sustainable long-term civilization here Earth is easy mode compared to Mars
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      > how are we supposed to build a second home on a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet until we demonstrate ourselves capable of stabilizing the biosphere and building a sustainable long-term civilization here Because we can afford to make big mistakes in terraforming a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet.
      - LarryMullins 4y ago
        A few microscopic fungal-like spore things could throw a wrench in that. Now the planet is a nature reserve.
        smegger001 4y ago
- freejazz 4y ago
  >Are they doing it badly, or are you not understanding their arguments? Do YOU not understand their arguments? They are facially stupid. The notion that we should be colonizing mars because of global warming is the stupidest thing I've ever read or heard.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >The notion that we should be colonizing mars because of global warming is the stupidest thing I've ever read or heard. Yeah, because that's a strawman you imagined in your head. I'm not sure what gave you the impression that the two were related (other than that they're competing options) based on my previous comment.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      Someone posted it upthread. You can replace any catastrophic event with global warming and it's just as facially stupid. Literally like the thought process of a child. It's completely divorced from reality.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        While I don't expect extinction from any particular given cause — and definitely not from any of global warming, nuclear war, loss of biodiversity, peak phosphorous, or the ozone layer — humans have a few massive failure modes: 1. We refuse to believe very bad scenarios until much too late. Doesn't need to be apocalyptic: The Titanic isn't sinking; all of Hiroshima must have gone silent because a telegraph cable was damaged and it can't possibly be the entire city destroyed, and even if it was the Americans can't possibly repeat it; the Cultural Revolution cannot fail; the King can't be executed for treason by his own parliament; the general can't cross the Rubicon; Brutus can't betray me. I think many of those things would have been dismissed the way you're doing now. 2. Tech is changing. I don't expect extinction from a natural pandemic, but from an artificial one is plausible; not from a natural impact event, but artificial is… not yet, but no harder than creating a Mars colony; propaganda has already started multiple genocide attempts, what happens when two independent campaigns are started at the same time when both groups want to genocide everyone not in their group? The same risks would still be present on Mars, and the only way I see around the deliberate impact risk is space habitats which have their own different set of problems (given we can't coordinate on greenhouse gases I see no chance of us coordinating on Kesler syndrome either in cis-Luna nor in Dyson swarm scenarios). I don't have any solutions here, though.
- imtringued 4y ago
  A Mars colony that simply puts humans on Mars is decades away. A Mars colony that puts a whole parallel self sufficient society on Mars with their own semiconductor manufacturing and so on is millenia away.
  - kbelder 4y ago
    I would wager that if we get a established research colony on Mars, we're 100 years away from a mostly self-sufficient small city. We're not going to have Mars colonized in a decade or two, but it's not going to take a thousand years, either. Probably. I'd say thriving colonies within a century or two.
mistermann 4y ago
> It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly. I feel the same about Rationalists and rationality. They even had an excellent approach with their motto: "We're only aspiring rationalists", but when you remind them of that motto in the process of them being not actually rational, it has no effect. There's got to be a way to ~solve something that is so in your face, like right there in an argument, the very essence, but it is a very tricky phenomenon, it always finds a way to slip out of any corner you back it into.
coffeefirst 4y ago
Yep. But if you only need to solve problems in what’s effectively your own science fiction novel, you’ll never fail and don’t have to face the very annoying practical problems that keep stuff from getting done in the real world. Which is why everyone has a fantastic zombie apocalypse plan but no realistic ideas to to address their local non-zombie violent crime.
naasking 4y ago
> We have no idea how likely "existential risks" are. We absolutely do. We have quantified the risks of supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts and coronal mass ejections. We continue to quantify the ongoing risk of climate change and nuclear war (how many minutes to midnight?). The real open questions are the likelihood of a biological agent (natural or engineered), and AI. The fact that we don't know the risks should make you more worried about those. Unknown unknowns can bite you in the ass hard with no warning. Maybe we should figure out some warning signs. > We have no idea what, if anything, can be done about them. That's what research is for. Sounds like we maybe we should fund some research into these issues.

JohnFen 4y ago

Oh, I agree! I didn't mean to imply that being concerned with the future isn't critically important. It is. I like how you put it better -- it's that they do it so badly.

gruez 4y ago

>It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly. [...] But effective altruists are as likely to talk about colonizing Mars as they are to talk about global warming. Are they doing it badly, or are you not understanding their arguments? AFAIK effective altruists want to colonize mars on x-risk grounds, which would explain why they want to prioritize that over global warming, even though the latter is happening right now. AFAIK they think that global warming is bad, but isn't an existential risk, whereas colonizing mars will mitigate many existential risks.

zozbot234 4y ago
Why Mars though? Why not colonize the Gebi Desert first?
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  Presumably because the goal is to survive something bad that happens to Earth. If you're on Mars (and self-sustaining...), that's no big deal. If you're in the Gobi Desert, you're going to be the first people to get wiped out by whatever happens to Earth.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  x-risk is existential risk, as in humans get wiped out. Some big ones are meteor impact, nuclear war and disease. The risk of those things ending all of humanity are greatly reduced with a second planet. They're not reduced with a desert colony.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > The risk of those things ending all of humanity are greatly reduced with a second planet. I can imagine a situation where that's true. But right now, for almost any situation, a series of super-bunkers is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective. A lot of ridiculously destructive things can happen to Earth and it will still be a better place to live than Mars.
    - smegger001 4y ago
      our earth has had impact events that no bunker would save us from. like the one that created the moon or the much smaller impact that created the Borealis Basin on mars would boil the oceans and melt the surface.
      - roywiggins 4y ago
        It would be massively cheaper and faster to robotically colonize near-Earth space and get really, really good at killer asteroid detection and redirection.
        imtringued 4y ago
        Ok but redirection capability must be abundant enough that outright sabotage and terrorism can be fixed by another nation or else you will have an increase in extinction risk.
dfgheaoinbt6t 4y ago
I understand their arguments just fine. I just don't think they make any sense. Ought implies can. We cannot predict the far future of humanity. We cannot colonize other planets in the foreseeable future. We cannot plan how to handle future technology that we aren't yet sure is even possible. The things we actually can predict and control, like global warming and natural disasters and pandemics, are handled with regular old public policy. Longtermism, almost by definition, refers to things we can neither predict nor control.
yamtaddle 4y ago
I've yet to see an argument for colonizing Mars for this purpose, that wouldn't be a better argument if the goal were instead "build robust, distributed bunkers on earth, and pay families to live in them part-time so there's always someone there". Cheaper, and more effective. Most plausible post-apocalyptic Earths would be far easier to live on than Mars. The remaining threats that wouldn't also be pretty likely to take out Mars at the same time, would be something like a whole-crust-liquifying impact, which we'd have a pretty good chance of spotting well in advance, and we could put some of the savings into getting better at that. I think a bunch of smart people are also just romantics when it comes to space shit, and that's why they won't shut up about Mars, not because it's actually a good idea. Hell, building orbital habs is probably a better idea than colonizing Mars, for those purposes, if we must do space shit.
- walleeee 4y ago
  > Most plausible post-apocalyptic Earths would be far easier to live on than Mars. thank you how are we supposed to build a second home on a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet until we demonstrate ourselves capable of stabilizing the biosphere and building a sustainable long-term civilization here Earth is easy mode compared to Mars
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    > how are we supposed to build a second home on a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet until we demonstrate ourselves capable of stabilizing the biosphere and building a sustainable long-term civilization here Because we can afford to make big mistakes in terraforming a dead, ruthlessly hostile planet.
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      A few microscopic fungal-like spore things could throw a wrench in that. Now the planet is a nature reserve.
      - smegger001 4y ago
freejazz 4y ago
>Are they doing it badly, or are you not understanding their arguments? Do YOU not understand their arguments? They are facially stupid. The notion that we should be colonizing mars because of global warming is the stupidest thing I've ever read or heard.
- gruez 4y ago
  >The notion that we should be colonizing mars because of global warming is the stupidest thing I've ever read or heard. Yeah, because that's a strawman you imagined in your head. I'm not sure what gave you the impression that the two were related (other than that they're competing options) based on my previous comment.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    Someone posted it upthread. You can replace any catastrophic event with global warming and it's just as facially stupid. Literally like the thought process of a child. It's completely divorced from reality.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      While I don't expect extinction from any particular given cause — and definitely not from any of global warming, nuclear war, loss of biodiversity, peak phosphorous, or the ozone layer — humans have a few massive failure modes: 1. We refuse to believe very bad scenarios until much too late. Doesn't need to be apocalyptic: The Titanic isn't sinking; all of Hiroshima must have gone silent because a telegraph cable was damaged and it can't possibly be the entire city destroyed, and even if it was the Americans can't possibly repeat it; the Cultural Revolution cannot fail; the King can't be executed for treason by his own parliament; the general can't cross the Rubicon; Brutus can't betray me. I think many of those things would have been dismissed the way you're doing now. 2. Tech is changing. I don't expect extinction from a natural pandemic, but from an artificial one is plausible; not from a natural impact event, but artificial is… not yet, but no harder than creating a Mars colony; propaganda has already started multiple genocide attempts, what happens when two independent campaigns are started at the same time when both groups want to genocide everyone not in their group? The same risks would still be present on Mars, and the only way I see around the deliberate impact risk is space habitats which have their own different set of problems (given we can't coordinate on greenhouse gases I see no chance of us coordinating on Kesler syndrome either in cis-Luna nor in Dyson swarm scenarios). I don't have any solutions here, though.
imtringued 4y ago
A Mars colony that simply puts humans on Mars is decades away. A Mars colony that puts a whole parallel self sufficient society on Mars with their own semiconductor manufacturing and so on is millenia away.
- kbelder 4y ago
  I would wager that if we get a established research colony on Mars, we're 100 years away from a mostly self-sufficient small city. We're not going to have Mars colonized in a decade or two, but it's not going to take a thousand years, either. Probably. I'd say thriving colonies within a century or two.

mistermann 4y ago

> It's not that that bothers me so much as the fact that many effective altruists do it so badly. I feel the same about Rationalists and rationality. They even had an excellent approach with their motto: "We're only aspiring rationalists", but when you remind them of that motto in the process of them being not actually rational, it has no effect. There's got to be a way to ~solve something that is so in your face, like right there in an argument, the very essence, but it is a very tricky phenomenon, it always finds a way to slip out of any corner you back it into.

coffeefirst 4y ago

Yep. But if you only need to solve problems in what’s effectively your own science fiction novel, you’ll never fail and don’t have to face the very annoying practical problems that keep stuff from getting done in the real world. Which is why everyone has a fantastic zombie apocalypse plan but no realistic ideas to to address their local non-zombie violent crime.

naasking 4y ago

> We have no idea how likely "existential risks" are. We absolutely do. We have quantified the risks of supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts and coronal mass ejections. We continue to quantify the ongoing risk of climate change and nuclear war (how many minutes to midnight?). The real open questions are the likelihood of a biological agent (natural or engineered), and AI. The fact that we don't know the risks should make you more worried about those. Unknown unknowns can bite you in the ass hard with no warning. Maybe we should figure out some warning signs. > We have no idea what, if anything, can be done about them. That's what research is for. Sounds like we maybe we should fund some research into these issues.