A lot of people's reaction to longtermism is hostility and derision and that's often my reaction as well. However, I want to give a coherent explanation for my

A lot of people's reaction to longtermism is hostility and derision and that's often my reaction as well. However, I want to give a coherent explanation for my reaction, since this stuff appears often. Human beings are known for values that are risk-averse and loss-averse relative to the supposed "rational" positions of optimizing an abstract utility function. If someone has, say, a plan to murder X many people to produce Y many future, better people, I have no objection to social sanctions such as prison for them. I'm loss averse, I'm not promiscuously maximizing people-goodness and this is a very natural, human reaction. It's completely reasonable that we will spend far more resources defending the things, the people, the lives and even the pets we have, compared to the resources spent getting hypothetically different versions of these things. Part of it is one never knows if the hypothetical things will be as good and part of it is one never knows if the calculations we make actually will pan out. And the "longtermists" often multiply together numbers together they have no basis for knowing in the first place (people in black wholes, people in galactic civilizations, etc) - they fail to conceive that some things more unknowable than probable or improbable and that in such situation loss aversion is especially reasonable - despite going against their