15 ms·

Against longtermism (2021)

96 points by jlpcsl 3y ago

syngrog66 3y ago
The education software I've been building in my free time places a heavy emphasis on thinking in terms of societal consequences and on pursuing the best longterm future for humanity If anyone would like to donate to support further development, let me know. More details, previews and demos available, for backers. groglogic+akhn2023515@gmail.com
ahelwer 3y ago
Every good ideology needs a "Big Other" which subsumes all ordinary moral concerns. How could you think about something so trivial as the atrocity you see before your eyes when wealth formation/history itself/divine will/trillions of future human lives are at stake?
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Big Ideas also inspire hope. Most people seem to be able to engage with them for this purpose without becoming evil. Yes, they also get abused for rationalization, but I'd caution against throwing babies out with the bathwater.
- ETH_start 3y ago
  Just my 2 cents: A philosophy differs from an ideology. Long-termism is a philosophy, meaning an abstract framework that is used an intellectual aid. An ideology, on the otherhand, is an all-encompassing world view, that inserts itself at the top of one's value hierarchy, and allows one to do as you describe: define any wrong as a necessary evil to fulfil the greater good. The reason long-termism is merely a philosophy, and will remain so, is that it doesn't provide a narrative that lends itself to ideological zealotry. Ideological narratives are simplistic models of the world that can be easily digested, and provide a ready litmus test to categorize any person into one of three groups: victims, villains, or saviors.
  - ahelwer 3y ago
    The truest mark of an ideology is that its adherents don't even think they're being ideological, just reasonable.
    - ETH_start 3y ago
      Everyone thinks they're being reasonable.. and just for context: I don't put much stock in long-termism, but not because I see it as a potentially dangerous ideological dogma, but because I don't see it as that useful. In my opinion, the tendency of the optimal action for short-term interests to coincide with the optimal action for long-term interests, and how much easier it is to determine the former over the latter, makes it better to focus primarily on the near future, with a less-well-defined long-term objective being used only to orient one's general direction.
felixakiragreen 3y ago
Ironically this post only reinforced my longtermist leanings. I do value the species over the individual and I tend to think that if we don’t realign our incentives away from maximizing short term profits we may be destroying our future. Longtermism places species above nations, because nations can threaten our very survival. It’s the evolution of tribalism.
- hammock 3y ago
  Curious, do you have children?
- mecsred 3y ago
  Longtermism, like many ideologies, sounds good on paper. The problem comes when you realize our ability to predict the future in a week is terrible, and a decade out is basically unknowable. You can pick out hindsight examples "oh X predicted Y" all day but hindsight is the mother of all survivorship biases. Therefore in the end, it ends up on the long list of ideologies that promise everything with no means to deliver it. "Oh just suffer now for this guaranteed future benefit" "Whoops turns out the future is complicated and the suffering and hate was all for nothing"
  - dmix 3y ago
    I feel the same way about the AI ethicist people. We are mostly just guessing that AI will look and function like the sci-fi books we’ve read and how it will integrate/impact society. Not just in the “will we get real AGI” tech sense but even most so in how humans will learn to adapt and protect ourselves. Especially when it involves crippling our primitive AI R&D today for some indefinite future possibility.
    - drewcoo 3y ago
      One of those things makes claims about the future to justify whatever present actions people prefer. The other warns about future dangers and cautions us not to take certain present actions. Slowing is not crippling, it's just conservative. And our species has a long history of abusing new tech and causing damage, which leads to strict, regressive reforms. And neither the damage nor the reforms are desirable.
hammock 3y ago
>Even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook
- giantg2 3y ago
  "This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook" I think one of us misinterpreted the statement then. My understanding is that the author is labeling the people who believe this as 'dangerous' (close enough to 'kook').
  - hammock 3y ago
    The author themselves believes this statement. They are arguing that the dangerous view is one that looks at the trillion-year timeframe rather than the 100-year one
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - goatlover 3y ago
      The trillion-year timeframe is looking at whether there are existential risks during the 100-year one we should try to avoid.
    - ianburrell 3y ago
      It does if you remove the previous sentences that are quoted in another comment: "Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why?" That makes it obvious that it is not what author believes but what author is saying the longtermers believe.
  - shkkmo 3y ago
    The author doesn't challenge the assertion that climate change is not an existential risk (which I think is a mistake.) The attitude the author takes is that discounting the short term harms from climate change is morally repugnant.
giantg2 3y ago
"One survey even found that more than half of the people asked about humanity’s future ‘rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next 100 years at 50 per cent or greater.’" This is so vague it's not even applicable here. It doesn't even imply an apocalypse. No shit our way of life will be different in the next 100 years. Just look at what life was like 100 years ago - completely different.
- blackoil 3y ago
  Change is rarely termed as a "risk" unless the change is apocalyptic or at least detrimental in nature
  - hammock 3y ago
    Put another way, the center of the distribution of change (which is normal with relatively high kurtosis) is skewed positive
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    We don't know whether the survey participants were given the word risk, or whether the authors of the report introduced it. We don't know how risk was defined to the participants either.
clarge1120 3y ago
The classical longtermist loves everyone in general, but no one in particular.
- jonnycomputer 3y ago
  Meanwhile shortermists think all problems can be solved by greedy algorithms.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    Or government policies if only the correct party was consistently voted into office.
- rcktmrtn 3y ago
  I think it comes down to the definition of "love". There are limits to how far you can redefine what it means to "love" a particular person in your life because we all have a natural intuition of what it is like to live harmoniously with someone in love. People can sense when you're actually acting out of self interest because they can relate to the same temptation. However, there's no way analogous way to call bullshit when you try to redefine "love" for humanity as a whole because it's not even clear what that means. Longtermists have defined loving humanity as a whole as wanting to maximize a metric of how many people exists across the universe, but seeing "loving" humanity that way isn't really a shared experience. There are so many alternate metrics you can come up with about "loving" humanity (spreading democracy and "freedom" or eliminating prejudice get talked about the same way). The problem is in mixing up the metaphor with the real thing. Especially with media technologies it's tempting to hold up loving humanity above loving other people because it seems so much bigger and more universal, but ironically this is exactly backwards. Love of humanity is just a simulacra of loving real people. A relevant quote that came to mind from Brothers Karamazov: I love humanity ... but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams ... I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self‐complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty‐four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. ... Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.
cwoolfe 3y ago
"Why do I think this ideology is so dangerous? The short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years."
- jonnycomputer 3y ago
  Right, so, for example the long-termist says no need to worry about global warming, it'll just be a blip in the history of our species. Meanwhile, the short-termist says, not need to worry about global warming, because it's not that big of a deal right now (they'll figure it later). I mean, it's pretty obvious that either of these extremes is mistaken. When modeling these sorts of decisions (whether its in RL or in cost/reward analysis), choosing the "right" temporal discounting parameter is crucial. But what that parameter's value should be often comes down to values, morality, philosophy and ethics. I think the author's fear of longtermism is misplaced, because longtermism is not really manifest anywhere in actual decision making. If anything, it might be used to mask what are actually short-termist motivations for doing short-sighted things (like continuing to rely on fossil-fuels).
  - beepbooptheory 3y ago
    One does wonder when all these longtermist people tend to be already pretty successful and rich in their own personal short terms.. Not to mention how all these longterm ethical guidelines seem to validate or forgive their lucrative enterprises. Perhaps even in the best of intentions they aren't epistemologically equipped for this kind of thinking!
    - corinroyal 3y ago
      Right? That's because it's not a philosophy but a fig-leaf of a justification for the status quo.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
The problem is, it is not obvious what the 'correct' decision is today to maximize the future lives. It's all guesses, for longtermist and presentist. Its just that the longtermism people are using this long term argument for things they do want now, but are potentially 'atrocities', but in the view of infinity looks logical. So dress up some logic using the infinite future with trillions of lives, to make my current bad decision seem reasonable. Its tipping the scales when they also do not know which is best decision.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  If there is any technological progress trend, then in the long term people will be vastly, incomprehensibly richer than us and so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are. Ask not what you can do for the future, ask why those b*stards aren't helping us.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >then in the long term people will be vastly, incomprehensibly richer than us Like Rome after the fall was so much richer than before? Or how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so much better with the advent of nuclear fission technology? Since, technology basically just makes us richer and safer and everything! Or like how the average working/middle class US (or European) family is so much more comfortable than in decades before? >so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are. Like how we have the best government and Presidents ever? And the best infrastructure and public policy, and the more capable? A lot of this attitude is from people in the upper class (at least salary wise) who can't fathom anybody else suffering more now, because it's business as usual or better than ever for them...
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      This is a bit silly. Imagine life without even commonplace things such as easy access to food, or corrective glasses, or sun cream, or Paracetamol, or a Polio vaccine, or a car, or a bike? You don't need to be rich to access some of the biggest jumps in quality of life in history.
setgree 3y ago
Note to update the headline to 2021 (its publication date)
stareatgoats 3y ago
It's somewhat dangerous, agree, especially if it was to be a commonly held opinion. But it's likely just another folly that (it seems) mostly the rich and powerful use to fill their minds with delusions of grandeur, but one in a long row of such delusions. I doubt it will be of any real consequence except as an elitist project. That said, the article touches on the type of folly that this is: i.e. mixing the "goals" of the species with that of individuals, as if the trajectory of the species was like getting an education and a career. This leap is more common than we might imagine and I believe it is caused by an underestimated characteristic of the human mind: we take esoteric knowledge that has been presented to us by instruments of science and transpose these concepts onto familiar things: a planet is like an orange, the atomic system is like an apple with electrons like busy bees swirling round it, gravity is like a steel ball in a rubber net and so on. It gives us the impression that we know things when we (at least as amateurs) will likely miss out on essential properties that we have not yet grasped, because these things are so far removed from our everyday reality. It is the same with the concept "species" in this case. It is a largely scientific concept, for the individual it is only really relevant if the other person is possible to mate and get offspring with. That's the concept of species we have had as humans for millions of years, it's likely to continue to be so, and who knows where that will take us. It's really none of my business.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >But it's likely just another folly that (it seems) mostly the rich and powerful use Those are the ones can yield the most damage tho
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > we take esoteric knowledge that has been presented to us by instruments of science and transpose these concepts onto familiar things: a planet is like an orange, the atomic system is like an apple with electrons like busy bees swirling round it, gravity is like a steel ball in a rubber net and so on. It gives us the impression that we know things when we (at least as amateurs) will likely miss out on essential properties that we have not yet grasped, because these things are so far removed from our everyday reality. “Us” is misleading. I highly doubt that those who are thinking seriously about how to extend the species success in time and space (and taking actions that make a difference) think of atoms or earth in the way you describe.
thejackgoode 3y ago
I get the longing for new ideology, but that's not going to be it. Dominating intent to identify, predict and mitigate "existential risks" is simply arrogant.
tptacek 3y ago
The underlying concern isn't complicated, and it's stated succinctly in a single sentence in the middle of the article, quoting Bostrom: "[E]ven if there is ‘a mere 1 per cent chance’ of 10^54 people existing in the future, then ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth 100 billion times as much as a billion human lives[...]" The problem, in other words, is that these people are aspiring Bond villains.
- dmix 3y ago
  That’s what it might mean on paper when you get philosophical but I’m more curious what it means day to day. Is this just a giant opportunity cost risk where a bunch of wealthy people are donating money in X potentially wasteful “charity” instead of more local/timely Y organization? Or is there some more tangible harm?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    What makes it perfectly supervillainous is the idea that resources should be directed away from present, obvious harms towards speculative future charms on the "one billionth of one billionth of one percent" chance of safeguarding an intergalactic expansion of humanity. The bar is so low you can divert money away from malaria and towards establishing Professor Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters, on the billion-billionth chance that mutant superpowers will emerge.
    - shkkmo 3y ago
      Yet, we spending all our resources on malaria prevention is also wrong. We need balance, we need to invest in the future while also taking care of the present.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        The amount we spend on malaria prevention rounds to zero. We are at no risk of spending all our resources on malaria prevention. Like I said, this is Bond villain thinking.
jmyeet 3y ago
The fact that some of the world's most annoying people (eg Musk, Thiel) are throwing money at this should clue you in to the point: it is about maintaining the current economic structure and, in "ideal" world, living forever (eg transhumanism, mentioned in the article) to "enjoy" it for the very few on top. Honestly I draw some comfort from our own mortality because the very worst people ultimately die too. If we ever achieve effective immortality, part of me believes that could be truly catastrophic for society. > We can now begin to see how longtermism might be self-defeating. Karl Marx talked abou tthe contradictions inherent in capitalism and that it was ultimately unsustainable in the 1840s through the over-accumulation or cconcentration of capital. Marx predicted a response to this being a revolution by the proletariat, which has thus far not come to pass, but the tool for squashing uprisings has been and continues to be fascism.
- ConfusedDog 3y ago
  First paragraph - I don't like rich people; second paragraph - I like them to die like I would; third paragraph - rich people are facists. Great. Thank you for your contribution.
  - yadoomerta 3y ago
    not the worst summary just fyi - this is an extremely popular take among the young and non-rich
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- goatlover 3y ago
  Marx also failed to predict that communist governments would try to implement their take on Marxist policies and those ended up being worse than the capitalist ones.
  - jmyeet 3y ago
    Communism predates Marx (to the 18th century) and differs from socialism. Both seek to have labor own the means of production but communism also concerns itself with consumption (Marx: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"). But really what you're talking about is what's called Marxist-Leninism as crafted by the Bolshevik in Russia in 1917 and beyond. But what Marx is really known for is creating an analytical framework to be able to discuss these things. Abraham Lincoln's views on this pretty closely match Marx's, as an aside. > ... those ended up being worse than the capitalist ones. You really want to start comparing communist outcomes against Western colonialism and imperialism? The slave trade? And you can rightfully say a bunch of bad things about Stalin but he'll always get credit for killing Nazis and defeating Hitler (at an absolutely horrendous cost, as an aside).
trabant00 3y ago
Any prediction more than 50 years in the future is pure guesswork. There are just too many interconnected feedback loops and branching possibilities. This applies to any side of any debate, be it climate, economy, social sciences and so on. This applies to doom-sayers and it_will_be_fine-ers. This applies to the original article as well. That being said humanity evolves having multiple camps, each with their own ideas, fighting, competing, allying with each other. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, rinse and repeat. And we are the definition of adaptability. I would not be worried unless some camp gains absolute power monopoly over a very long period of time. Which is, funny enough, what every camp tries to do with the worse or best intentions.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > Any prediction more than 50 years in the future is pure guesswork. Predictions are a curious thing. They also shape current behavior and thinking, either in alignment with making those predictions becoming more likely to be true eventually, or fires up opponents. Put differently, predictions are also visions.
  - trabant00 3y ago
    Yes, hence my second paragraph.
cornholio 3y ago
> technology is far more likely to cause our extinction before [the Sun goes out] than to save us from it Surely there is some middle ground between this neo-ludditism espoused by the author and the outright fascism of longterminists that can justify any current action if it's somehow even marginally likely to decrease existential risk? For example, we could agree that current lives and suffering are morally superior to possible lives in the future, and that technology can help us solve our quintessential human problems, such as competition for resources, disease and death. We are a technological species since the first rock hit the first bone, and what "humanity is" is first and foremost a question answered by the technology of the era. We have no idea what future humans will want and value because the technology that will define them has not yet been invented. We're just along for the ride.
- FormerBandmate 3y ago
  > we could agree that current lives and suffering are morally superior to possible lives in the future This isn’t even necessarily true, but the thing is that you can’t predict the future with 100% certainty. The influential longtermists pretty much all thought Sam Bankman-Fried would have his tens of billions forever (which even without his scamming wasn’t a certainty, crypto is absurdly volatile and fortunes appear and disappear overnight), I highly doubt their ability to predict much of anything
  - YellOh 3y ago
    This is what usually prevents me from understanding longtermist arguments. I'm not convinced think the average person from even ~100 years ago would be able to do anything about (what I would consider) most of the biggest problems of today, and besides structural changes (governance, suffrage, etc.) I don't know what they could realistically have foreseen as the correct thing to do to solve problems >= 100yrs out. Why would I presume to know the problems of >= 100 yrs from now? It seems like the obvious path is addressing structural issues, supporting effective research, and beating out various fires (all of which are pretty much neartermist concerns). To abuse a thought experiment, I care about the child running through the woods 100 years from now as much as the child today, but I would place way, way higher likelihood of broken glass on the ground hurting the child today.
zeroCalories 3y ago
People can spend their time and money on whatever they want, but a lot of these longtermism organizations seem like a massive waste of time and money. I liked effective altruism when it was about donating mosquito nets, but the AI stuff seems like pure nerd larping. Honestly, with all the research they've done, they don't seem to have anything interesting to say about recent AI trends.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Most EA money is still about mosquito nets.
shkkmo 3y ago
I do believe that future people do have moral value and deserve ethical consideration. The fundamental problem with longtermism, like with utilitarianism, is our limited capacity to understand and predict chaotic systems. Thus justifying horrific acts in the name of some "predicted good" becomes an act of enormous hubris. We are better off striving to act virtously towards utilitarianism towards utilitarian / longtermist goals since that reduces the chances that a misprediction leads to our acts having a net negative result. The underlying valuation is
thundergolfer 3y ago
I considered myself a longtermist, but climate change is the #1 risk to me, not AI, and I thought this prioritization was more common amongst the EA and longtermist communities. But my longtermist views come mainly from Derek Parfit, and it's probably the case that the contemporary longtermists are not of Parfit's kind, and unhealthily intertwined with billionaire weirdos (Theil, SBF). > But longtermists have an answer to this conundrum: the so-called ‘value-neutrality thesis’. This states that technology is a morally neutral object, ie, ‘just a tool’. This is indeed a stupid idea, but the writer's following examples don't show longtermists endorsing this view. What Toby Ord is arguing is about an incompatibility between technological advancement and public ignorance (invoking Sagan, as he should). As Margaret Mead said, you can have advancement in technology, but you "have to move the whole pattern". You have to change the social, political, and educational realms in concert with technological change. The editor of this piece really should have fixed this part of the essay, because it's obviously weak.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  How could climate change lead to an extinction event? Seems impossible to me even if it kills billions. Extremely easy to see how AI leads to an extinction event.
  - 8note 3y ago
    You can look at Venus as an example
  - dublinben 3y ago
    The most dramatic example of climate induced extinction that many of us learned about as children would be the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event 66 million years ago. This was most likely exogenous (caused by an enormous asteroid) but it still resulted in the "sudden mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth." Most notably this included the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
  - 3y ago
jrd79 3y ago
In the third paragraph, the author writes that COVID was probably "cooked up in the kitchen of nature", and links to an article to support that assertion. But the linked-to article does not make that point. In the comments section of the article, a commenter pointed this out, and the author replied to that specific comment with an answer that did not address the issue but expressed the author's personal opinion on the matter, and has not updated the article to be more clear.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  Saying this: """ * However, one agency believes it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory that handled coronaviruses. * But, according to four elements of the Intelligence Community and the National Intelligence Council, natural exposure to an animal with the virus was the most likely cause of the outbreak. """ is the exact opposite of "probably natural origin" (in an article headlined "US intelligence rules out biological weapon origin" even!) is such a tortured reading of the text it has snapped in two: the interpretation is a limp, bloody, stump being dragged along by wild horses of motivated reasoning, while the text just sits there and stares in disbelief at the hole where its actual message used to be.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  > But the linked-to article says the exact opposite, that COVID was probably a lab leak. No, it does not. The article lists the opinions and results of several different organizations, and some of them think a lab-leak is possible OR even likely. But most think it was natural. That article is just very awful and disconnected written. Probably generated by some AI?
- shkkmo 3y ago
  >But the linked-to article says the exact opposite, that COVID was probably a lab leak. Also incorrect. All that article really says is that we're pretty certain that it wasn't a genetically engineered weapon. The majority of the intelligence community believes it was species overspill, but with low confidence. A minority of the intelligence community believes it was lab leak, with a moderate level of confidence. The best you can really take from that is there wasn't conclusive evidence available either way at the end of 2021.
AlexandrB 3y ago
As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present. "Sure, my actions are causing harm to hundreds of people, but that's outweighed by the good that will be realized millions of years in the future." For me the universal antidote to this kind of thinking is this Stephen Jay Gould quote: > I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Thus actions that put more people into "cotton fields and sweatshops" today instead of lifting them out of poverty are detrimental to the long-term survival of our species.
- goatlover 3y ago
  Why would effective altruists or longtermists be putting more people into cotton fields and sweatshops? Have any of them proposed doing that instead of making life better?
  - surgical_fire 3y ago
    This is actually answered in the article, if one bothers to read it. Quite a long text, but not bad at all. > All that matters is the total net sum. For example, imagine that there are 1 trillion people who have lives of value ‘1’, meaning that they are just barely worth living. This gives a total value of 1 trillion. Now consider an alternative universe in which 1 billion people have lives with a value of ‘999’, meaning that their lives are extremely good. This gives a total value of 999 billion. Since 999 billion is less than 1 trillion, the first world full of lives hardly worth living would be morally better than the second world, and hence, if a utilitarian were forced to choose between these, she would pick the former. (This is called the ‘repugnant conclusion’, which longtermists such as Ord, MacAskill and Greaves recently argued shouldn’t be taken very seriously. For them, the first world really might be better!)
    - _0ffh 3y ago
      That's Utilitarianism of the kind that e.g. Eliezer preaches. Which leads to the question, are all longtermists really utilitarians like that? (The article seems to insist, even while acknowledging that at least some explicitly say they're not.)
throw11may23 3y ago
It seems pretty clear that longtermism and consequentialism in conjunction have the potential to be dangerous; although I endorse both. That said, the author of this piece seems to be a bit of a nutcase. There's a well-evidenced writeup of various dubious behaviors in this blog post: https://markfuentes1.substack.com/i/81210415/tyler-cowen https://markfuentes1.substack.com/i/81210415/tyler-cowen So while some of the high level arguments in this seems plainly right, their overall strength and the integrity of the author seem pretty questionable.
G3rn0ti 3y ago
I skimmed through the article and it kind of reminded me of „Transhumanism: The most dangerous idea“ [1] by Francis Fukuyama. Turns out Nick Bostrom —- the founder of the „Future of Humanity“ institute and who is mentioned several times in this piece — grew out of the fin-du-siècle “Transhumanist” movement (I actually met him in 2000 in London at a European Transhumanist gathering) and I guess many people inside “longtermism” also happen to be “Transhumanists” in the broadest sense. Fukuyama warned about the dystopian and self-destructive potential of Transhumanists accepting (and wanting) to change our human nature through individual technological modifications extending the human life-span and, ultimately, transcending us into post-human almost god-like beings. Now Torres warns us the same ideology (if becoming wide-spread) with its vision of human grandeur will marginalize the concern about present environmental dangers. I think, ultimately, this debate boils down to a conflict of two word views. You either are techno optimistic or techno pessimistic. The former camp will perceive climate change not as a huge threat and present well-founded arguments why humans will most likely overcome the „climate crisis“ with their technology irrespective of the prevailing politics. The latter camp present (also) well-founded arguments why human technology will likely destroy our civilization and propose a life-style that is more aligned with nature. If you take a step back, human technology has indeed improved our living condition massively: Never in the history of mankind so many people have lived so comfortably and also so healthily [2]. This is also proven by the fact that there never have been so many people alive at the same time. Of course, now we might face the consequences of our species thriving so well and multiplying in numbers. That does not need to be the end of the world though if we as human beings stick to the facts, act accordingly and don’t commit to an ideology blatantly telling you either the future is bright or dark. To live a meaningful live and help humanity to survive it is important to stay open-minded and regularly take a reality-check. That’s all I want to say as an old bloke directed at the younger generations. [1] https://www.au.dk/fukuyama/boger/essay https://www.au.dk/fukuyama/boger/essay [2] https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better
- shkkmo 3y ago
  > If you take a step back, human technology has indeed improved our living condition massively: Never in the history of mankind so many people have lived so comfortably and also so healthily True, but we also have the ability to kill more people more quickly. Technology presents both great opportunities and great risks. We are well served to take seriously the short, medium and long term risks of that technology. From nuclear war, to climate change, to becoming a multi-planetary and eventual a multi-solar species. It is both simultaneously true that the potential of technology is not so great as to justify destroying everything we have in it's pursuit and that the potential of technology is great enough to take some risks in it's pursuit. In the end, I think we are best served by empowering people to make their own choices. Whether that choice is to become transhuman or to live in harmony with nature, or some fusion of the two.
bparsons 3y ago
No one ever got poor coming up with elaborate rationalizations and defenses on behalf of people accumulating hundreds of billions of dollars.
stared 3y ago
Fighting against environmental destruction (including global warming) is longtermism. We need to pay some price now, but IMHO, it is worth it. The opposite is myopia - like setting a house on fire in the winter, so it will keep us warm. What's risky is not the long-term thinking but the weights we put on real now vs the virtual future. We run into fanatism if we put all weight on our beliefs against what is here and now. Be it killing nonbelievers and heretics for the promise of eternal happiness (or preventing God from sending a calamity) or sacrificing people for one or the other secular ideology. I like the following quotation: “Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.” ― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Was it hijacked by the rich and powerful? Well, as any ideology. No, they don't believe in that nearly as they say. Compare (not much to contrast) with invading a neighboring country as it is pagan.
jmull 3y ago
This doesn't even remotely make the case that "longtermism" is dangerous. It appears to be just one more of the many, many "philosophies" people talk about while they go ahead and do whatever the hell they want anyway. It does seem particularly transparent about it, but that just makes it relatively dumb, not dangerous.
Connor_Creegan1 3y ago
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baerrie 3y ago
No human or group of humans can have enough certainty about the future to make decisions for it now. Effectively it is such a ludicrous task to predict the future that it is akin to saying god told you so, rendering this belief system just as irrational as any other religion that tries to weigh in on matters on certainty
- imtringued 3y ago
  It also has a moral to self perpetuation as longtermists will have to be around for the next trillion years. It's not a once and done thing. Converting longtermists to something else is like ending the future of humanity.
SThomas256 3y ago
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pdonis 3y ago
To me the money quote is this one: "The underlying reasoning here is based on the idea that people – you and I – are nothing more than means to an end. We don’t matter in ourselves; we have no inherent value of our own. Instead, people are understood as the ‘containers’ of value" This is the central problem with any kind of utilitarianism: it gets things backwards. People are not means to an end; they are ends in themselves. Any kind of "value" (which, as the article notes, utilitarians, including "longtermists", basically equate with hedonistic pleasure) is a means to an end, with people being the end.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
If you take longtermism and reduction of suffering to the extreme, isn't nuking the whole planet the most "ethical" thing to do, because it would prevent thousands of generations of humans from suffering?

96 points by jlpcsl 3y ago

The education software I've been building in my free time places a heavy emphasis on thinking in terms of societal consequences and on pursuing the best longterm future for humanity If anyone would like to donate to support further development, let me know. More details, previews and demos available, for backers. groglogic+akhn2023515@gmail.com

ahelwer 3y ago

Every good ideology needs a "Big Other" which subsumes all ordinary moral concerns. How could you think about something so trivial as the atrocity you see before your eyes when wealth formation/history itself/divine will/trillions of future human lives are at stake?

jjoonathan 3y ago
Big Ideas also inspire hope. Most people seem to be able to engage with them for this purpose without becoming evil. Yes, they also get abused for rationalization, but I'd caution against throwing babies out with the bathwater.
ETH_start 3y ago
Just my 2 cents: A philosophy differs from an ideology. Long-termism is a philosophy, meaning an abstract framework that is used an intellectual aid. An ideology, on the otherhand, is an all-encompassing world view, that inserts itself at the top of one's value hierarchy, and allows one to do as you describe: define any wrong as a necessary evil to fulfil the greater good. The reason long-termism is merely a philosophy, and will remain so, is that it doesn't provide a narrative that lends itself to ideological zealotry. Ideological narratives are simplistic models of the world that can be easily digested, and provide a ready litmus test to categorize any person into one of three groups: victims, villains, or saviors.
- ahelwer 3y ago
  The truest mark of an ideology is that its adherents don't even think they're being ideological, just reasonable.
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    Everyone thinks they're being reasonable.. and just for context: I don't put much stock in long-termism, but not because I see it as a potentially dangerous ideological dogma, but because I don't see it as that useful. In my opinion, the tendency of the optimal action for short-term interests to coincide with the optimal action for long-term interests, and how much easier it is to determine the former over the latter, makes it better to focus primarily on the near future, with a less-well-defined long-term objective being used only to orient one's general direction.

felixakiragreen 3y ago

Ironically this post only reinforced my longtermist leanings. I do value the species over the individual and I tend to think that if we don’t realign our incentives away from maximizing short term profits we may be destroying our future. Longtermism places species above nations, because nations can threaten our very survival. It’s the evolution of tribalism.

hammock 3y ago
Curious, do you have children?
mecsred 3y ago
Longtermism, like many ideologies, sounds good on paper. The problem comes when you realize our ability to predict the future in a week is terrible, and a decade out is basically unknowable. You can pick out hindsight examples "oh X predicted Y" all day but hindsight is the mother of all survivorship biases. Therefore in the end, it ends up on the long list of ideologies that promise everything with no means to deliver it. "Oh just suffer now for this guaranteed future benefit" "Whoops turns out the future is complicated and the suffering and hate was all for nothing"
- dmix 3y ago
  I feel the same way about the AI ethicist people. We are mostly just guessing that AI will look and function like the sci-fi books we’ve read and how it will integrate/impact society. Not just in the “will we get real AGI” tech sense but even most so in how humans will learn to adapt and protect ourselves. Especially when it involves crippling our primitive AI R&D today for some indefinite future possibility.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    One of those things makes claims about the future to justify whatever present actions people prefer. The other warns about future dangers and cautions us not to take certain present actions. Slowing is not crippling, it's just conservative. And our species has a long history of abusing new tech and causing damage, which leads to strict, regressive reforms. And neither the damage nor the reforms are desirable.

hammock 3y ago

>Even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook

giantg2 3y ago
"This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook" I think one of us misinterpreted the statement then. My understanding is that the author is labeling the people who believe this as 'dangerous' (close enough to 'kook').
- hammock 3y ago
  The author themselves believes this statement. They are arguing that the dangerous view is one that looks at the trillion-year timeframe rather than the 100-year one
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - goatlover 3y ago
    The trillion-year timeframe is looking at whether there are existential risks during the 100-year one we should try to avoid.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    It does if you remove the previous sentences that are quoted in another comment: "Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why?" That makes it obvious that it is not what author believes but what author is saying the longtermers believe.
- shkkmo 3y ago
  The author doesn't challenge the assertion that climate change is not an existential risk (which I think is a mistake.) The attitude the author takes is that discounting the short term harms from climate change is morally repugnant.

giantg2 3y ago

"One survey even found that more than half of the people asked about humanity’s future ‘rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next 100 years at 50 per cent or greater.’" This is so vague it's not even applicable here. It doesn't even imply an apocalypse. No shit our way of life will be different in the next 100 years. Just look at what life was like 100 years ago - completely different.

blackoil 3y ago
Change is rarely termed as a "risk" unless the change is apocalyptic or at least detrimental in nature
- hammock 3y ago
  Put another way, the center of the distribution of change (which is normal with relatively high kurtosis) is skewed positive
- karaterobot 3y ago
  We don't know whether the survey participants were given the word risk, or whether the authors of the report introduced it. We don't know how risk was defined to the participants either.

clarge1120 3y ago

The classical longtermist loves everyone in general, but no one in particular.

jonnycomputer 3y ago
Meanwhile shortermists think all problems can be solved by greedy algorithms.
- goatlover 3y ago
  Or government policies if only the correct party was consistently voted into office.
rcktmrtn 3y ago
I think it comes down to the definition of "love". There are limits to how far you can redefine what it means to "love" a particular person in your life because we all have a natural intuition of what it is like to live harmoniously with someone in love. People can sense when you're actually acting out of self interest because they can relate to the same temptation. However, there's no way analogous way to call bullshit when you try to redefine "love" for humanity as a whole because it's not even clear what that means. Longtermists have defined loving humanity as a whole as wanting to maximize a metric of how many people exists across the universe, but seeing "loving" humanity that way isn't really a shared experience. There are so many alternate metrics you can come up with about "loving" humanity (spreading democracy and "freedom" or eliminating prejudice get talked about the same way). The problem is in mixing up the metaphor with the real thing. Especially with media technologies it's tempting to hold up loving humanity above loving other people because it seems so much bigger and more universal, but ironically this is exactly backwards. Love of humanity is just a simulacra of loving real people. A relevant quote that came to mind from Brothers Karamazov: I love humanity ... but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams ... I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self‐complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty‐four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. ... Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.

cwoolfe 3y ago

"Why do I think this ideology is so dangerous? The short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years."

jonnycomputer 3y ago
Right, so, for example the long-termist says no need to worry about global warming, it'll just be a blip in the history of our species. Meanwhile, the short-termist says, not need to worry about global warming, because it's not that big of a deal right now (they'll figure it later). I mean, it's pretty obvious that either of these extremes is mistaken. When modeling these sorts of decisions (whether its in RL or in cost/reward analysis), choosing the "right" temporal discounting parameter is crucial. But what that parameter's value should be often comes down to values, morality, philosophy and ethics. I think the author's fear of longtermism is misplaced, because longtermism is not really manifest anywhere in actual decision making. If anything, it might be used to mask what are actually short-termist motivations for doing short-sighted things (like continuing to rely on fossil-fuels).
- beepbooptheory 3y ago
  One does wonder when all these longtermist people tend to be already pretty successful and rich in their own personal short terms.. Not to mention how all these longterm ethical guidelines seem to validate or forgive their lucrative enterprises. Perhaps even in the best of intentions they aren't epistemologically equipped for this kind of thinking!
  - corinroyal 3y ago
    Right? That's because it's not a philosophy but a fig-leaf of a justification for the status quo.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

The problem is, it is not obvious what the 'correct' decision is today to maximize the future lives. It's all guesses, for longtermist and presentist. Its just that the longtermism people are using this long term argument for things they do want now, but are potentially 'atrocities', but in the view of infinity looks logical. So dress up some logic using the infinite future with trillions of lives, to make my current bad decision seem reasonable. Its tipping the scales when they also do not know which is best decision.

tuatoru 3y ago
If there is any technological progress trend, then in the long term people will be vastly, incomprehensibly richer than us and so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are. Ask not what you can do for the future, ask why those b*stards aren't helping us.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >then in the long term people will be vastly, incomprehensibly richer than us Like Rome after the fall was so much richer than before? Or how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so much better with the advent of nuclear fission technology? Since, technology basically just makes us richer and safer and everything! Or like how the average working/middle class US (or European) family is so much more comfortable than in decades before? >so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are. Like how we have the best government and Presidents ever? And the best infrastructure and public policy, and the more capable? A lot of this attitude is from people in the upper class (at least salary wise) who can't fathom anybody else suffering more now, because it's business as usual or better than ever for them...
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    This is a bit silly. Imagine life without even commonplace things such as easy access to food, or corrective glasses, or sun cream, or Paracetamol, or a Polio vaccine, or a car, or a bike? You don't need to be rich to access some of the biggest jumps in quality of life in history.

setgree 3y ago

Note to update the headline to 2021 (its publication date)

stareatgoats 3y ago

It's somewhat dangerous, agree, especially if it was to be a commonly held opinion. But it's likely just another folly that (it seems) mostly the rich and powerful use to fill their minds with delusions of grandeur, but one in a long row of such delusions. I doubt it will be of any real consequence except as an elitist project. That said, the article touches on the type of folly that this is: i.e. mixing the "goals" of the species with that of individuals, as if the trajectory of the species was like getting an education and a career. This leap is more common than we might imagine and I believe it is caused by an underestimated characteristic of the human mind: we take esoteric knowledge that has been presented to us by instruments of science and transpose these concepts onto familiar things: a planet is like an orange, the atomic system is like an apple with electrons like busy bees swirling round it, gravity is like a steel ball in a rubber net and so on. It gives us the impression that we know things when we (at least as amateurs) will likely miss out on essential properties that we have not yet grasped, because these things are so far removed from our everyday reality. It is the same with the concept "species" in this case. It is a largely scientific concept, for the individual it is only really relevant if the other person is possible to mate and get offspring with. That's the concept of species we have had as humans for millions of years, it's likely to continue to be so, and who knows where that will take us. It's really none of my business.

coldtea 3y ago
>But it's likely just another folly that (it seems) mostly the rich and powerful use Those are the ones can yield the most damage tho
andsoitis 3y ago
> we take esoteric knowledge that has been presented to us by instruments of science and transpose these concepts onto familiar things: a planet is like an orange, the atomic system is like an apple with electrons like busy bees swirling round it, gravity is like a steel ball in a rubber net and so on. It gives us the impression that we know things when we (at least as amateurs) will likely miss out on essential properties that we have not yet grasped, because these things are so far removed from our everyday reality. “Us” is misleading. I highly doubt that those who are thinking seriously about how to extend the species success in time and space (and taking actions that make a difference) think of atoms or earth in the way you describe.

thejackgoode 3y ago

I get the longing for new ideology, but that's not going to be it. Dominating intent to identify, predict and mitigate "existential risks" is simply arrogant.

tptacek 3y ago

The underlying concern isn't complicated, and it's stated succinctly in a single sentence in the middle of the article, quoting Bostrom: "[E]ven if there is ‘a mere 1 per cent chance’ of 10^54 people existing in the future, then ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth 100 billion times as much as a billion human lives[...]" The problem, in other words, is that these people are aspiring Bond villains.

dmix 3y ago
That’s what it might mean on paper when you get philosophical but I’m more curious what it means day to day. Is this just a giant opportunity cost risk where a bunch of wealthy people are donating money in X potentially wasteful “charity” instead of more local/timely Y organization? Or is there some more tangible harm?
- tptacek 3y ago
  What makes it perfectly supervillainous is the idea that resources should be directed away from present, obvious harms towards speculative future charms on the "one billionth of one billionth of one percent" chance of safeguarding an intergalactic expansion of humanity. The bar is so low you can divert money away from malaria and towards establishing Professor Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters, on the billion-billionth chance that mutant superpowers will emerge.
  - shkkmo 3y ago
    Yet, we spending all our resources on malaria prevention is also wrong. We need balance, we need to invest in the future while also taking care of the present.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      The amount we spend on malaria prevention rounds to zero. We are at no risk of spending all our resources on malaria prevention. Like I said, this is Bond villain thinking.

jmyeet 3y ago

The fact that some of the world's most annoying people (eg Musk, Thiel) are throwing money at this should clue you in to the point: it is about maintaining the current economic structure and, in "ideal" world, living forever (eg transhumanism, mentioned in the article) to "enjoy" it for the very few on top. Honestly I draw some comfort from our own mortality because the very worst people ultimately die too. If we ever achieve effective immortality, part of me believes that could be truly catastrophic for society. > We can now begin to see how longtermism might be self-defeating. Karl Marx talked abou tthe contradictions inherent in capitalism and that it was ultimately unsustainable in the 1840s through the over-accumulation or cconcentration of capital. Marx predicted a response to this being a revolution by the proletariat, which has thus far not come to pass, but the tool for squashing uprisings has been and continues to be fascism.

ConfusedDog 3y ago
First paragraph - I don't like rich people; second paragraph - I like them to die like I would; third paragraph - rich people are facists. Great. Thank you for your contribution.
- yadoomerta 3y ago
  not the worst summary just fyi - this is an extremely popular take among the young and non-rich
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
goatlover 3y ago
Marx also failed to predict that communist governments would try to implement their take on Marxist policies and those ended up being worse than the capitalist ones.
- jmyeet 3y ago
  Communism predates Marx (to the 18th century) and differs from socialism. Both seek to have labor own the means of production but communism also concerns itself with consumption (Marx: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"). But really what you're talking about is what's called Marxist-Leninism as crafted by the Bolshevik in Russia in 1917 and beyond. But what Marx is really known for is creating an analytical framework to be able to discuss these things. Abraham Lincoln's views on this pretty closely match Marx's, as an aside. > ... those ended up being worse than the capitalist ones. You really want to start comparing communist outcomes against Western colonialism and imperialism? The slave trade? And you can rightfully say a bunch of bad things about Stalin but he'll always get credit for killing Nazis and defeating Hitler (at an absolutely horrendous cost, as an aside).

trabant00 3y ago

Any prediction more than 50 years in the future is pure guesswork. There are just too many interconnected feedback loops and branching possibilities. This applies to any side of any debate, be it climate, economy, social sciences and so on. This applies to doom-sayers and it_will_be_fine-ers. This applies to the original article as well. That being said humanity evolves having multiple camps, each with their own ideas, fighting, competing, allying with each other. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, rinse and repeat. And we are the definition of adaptability. I would not be worried unless some camp gains absolute power monopoly over a very long period of time. Which is, funny enough, what every camp tries to do with the worse or best intentions.

andsoitis 3y ago
> Any prediction more than 50 years in the future is pure guesswork. Predictions are a curious thing. They also shape current behavior and thinking, either in alignment with making those predictions becoming more likely to be true eventually, or fires up opponents. Put differently, predictions are also visions.
- trabant00 3y ago
  Yes, hence my second paragraph.

cornholio 3y ago

> technology is far more likely to cause our extinction before [the Sun goes out] than to save us from it Surely there is some middle ground between this neo-ludditism espoused by the author and the outright fascism of longterminists that can justify any current action if it's somehow even marginally likely to decrease existential risk? For example, we could agree that current lives and suffering are morally superior to possible lives in the future, and that technology can help us solve our quintessential human problems, such as competition for resources, disease and death. We are a technological species since the first rock hit the first bone, and what "humanity is" is first and foremost a question answered by the technology of the era. We have no idea what future humans will want and value because the technology that will define them has not yet been invented. We're just along for the ride.

FormerBandmate 3y ago
> we could agree that current lives and suffering are morally superior to possible lives in the future This isn’t even necessarily true, but the thing is that you can’t predict the future with 100% certainty. The influential longtermists pretty much all thought Sam Bankman-Fried would have his tens of billions forever (which even without his scamming wasn’t a certainty, crypto is absurdly volatile and fortunes appear and disappear overnight), I highly doubt their ability to predict much of anything
- YellOh 3y ago
  This is what usually prevents me from understanding longtermist arguments. I'm not convinced think the average person from even ~100 years ago would be able to do anything about (what I would consider) most of the biggest problems of today, and besides structural changes (governance, suffrage, etc.) I don't know what they could realistically have foreseen as the correct thing to do to solve problems >= 100yrs out. Why would I presume to know the problems of >= 100 yrs from now? It seems like the obvious path is addressing structural issues, supporting effective research, and beating out various fires (all of which are pretty much neartermist concerns). To abuse a thought experiment, I care about the child running through the woods 100 years from now as much as the child today, but I would place way, way higher likelihood of broken glass on the ground hurting the child today.

zeroCalories 3y ago

People can spend their time and money on whatever they want, but a lot of these longtermism organizations seem like a massive waste of time and money. I liked effective altruism when it was about donating mosquito nets, but the AI stuff seems like pure nerd larping. Honestly, with all the research they've done, they don't seem to have anything interesting to say about recent AI trends.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Most EA money is still about mosquito nets.

shkkmo 3y ago

I do believe that future people do have moral value and deserve ethical consideration. The fundamental problem with longtermism, like with utilitarianism, is our limited capacity to understand and predict chaotic systems. Thus justifying horrific acts in the name of some "predicted good" becomes an act of enormous hubris. We are better off striving to act virtously towards utilitarianism towards utilitarian / longtermist goals since that reduces the chances that a misprediction leads to our acts having a net negative result. The underlying valuation is

thundergolfer 3y ago

I considered myself a longtermist, but climate change is the #1 risk to me, not AI, and I thought this prioritization was more common amongst the EA and longtermist communities. But my longtermist views come mainly from Derek Parfit, and it's probably the case that the contemporary longtermists are not of Parfit's kind, and unhealthily intertwined with billionaire weirdos (Theil, SBF). > But longtermists have an answer to this conundrum: the so-called ‘value-neutrality thesis’. This states that technology is a morally neutral object, ie, ‘just a tool’. This is indeed a stupid idea, but the writer's following examples don't show longtermists endorsing this view. What Toby Ord is arguing is about an incompatibility between technological advancement and public ignorance (invoking Sagan, as he should). As Margaret Mead said, you can have advancement in technology, but you "have to move the whole pattern". You have to change the social, political, and educational realms in concert with technological change. The editor of this piece really should have fixed this part of the essay, because it's obviously weak.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
How could climate change lead to an extinction event? Seems impossible to me even if it kills billions. Extremely easy to see how AI leads to an extinction event.
- 8note 3y ago
  You can look at Venus as an example
- dublinben 3y ago
  The most dramatic example of climate induced extinction that many of us learned about as children would be the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event 66 million years ago. This was most likely exogenous (caused by an enormous asteroid) but it still resulted in the "sudden mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth." Most notably this included the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
- 3y ago

jrd79 3y ago

In the third paragraph, the author writes that COVID was probably "cooked up in the kitchen of nature", and links to an article to support that assertion. But the linked-to article does not make that point. In the comments section of the article, a commenter pointed this out, and the author replied to that specific comment with an answer that did not address the issue but expressed the author's personal opinion on the matter, and has not updated the article to be more clear.

SiempreViernes 3y ago
Saying this: """ * However, one agency believes it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory that handled coronaviruses. * But, according to four elements of the Intelligence Community and the National Intelligence Council, natural exposure to an animal with the virus was the most likely cause of the outbreak. """ is the exact opposite of "probably natural origin" (in an article headlined "US intelligence rules out biological weapon origin" even!) is such a tortured reading of the text it has snapped in two: the interpretation is a limp, bloody, stump being dragged along by wild horses of motivated reasoning, while the text just sits there and stares in disbelief at the hole where its actual message used to be.
PurpleRamen 3y ago
> But the linked-to article says the exact opposite, that COVID was probably a lab leak. No, it does not. The article lists the opinions and results of several different organizations, and some of them think a lab-leak is possible OR even likely. But most think it was natural. That article is just very awful and disconnected written. Probably generated by some AI?
shkkmo 3y ago
>But the linked-to article says the exact opposite, that COVID was probably a lab leak. Also incorrect. All that article really says is that we're pretty certain that it wasn't a genetically engineered weapon. The majority of the intelligence community believes it was species overspill, but with low confidence. A minority of the intelligence community believes it was lab leak, with a moderate level of confidence. The best you can really take from that is there wasn't conclusive evidence available either way at the end of 2021.

AlexandrB 3y ago

As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present. "Sure, my actions are causing harm to hundreds of people, but that's outweighed by the good that will be realized millions of years in the future." For me the universal antidote to this kind of thinking is this Stephen Jay Gould quote: > I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Thus actions that put more people into "cotton fields and sweatshops" today instead of lifting them out of poverty are detrimental to the long-term survival of our species.

goatlover 3y ago
Why would effective altruists or longtermists be putting more people into cotton fields and sweatshops? Have any of them proposed doing that instead of making life better?
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  This is actually answered in the article, if one bothers to read it. Quite a long text, but not bad at all. > All that matters is the total net sum. For example, imagine that there are 1 trillion people who have lives of value ‘1’, meaning that they are just barely worth living. This gives a total value of 1 trillion. Now consider an alternative universe in which 1 billion people have lives with a value of ‘999’, meaning that their lives are extremely good. This gives a total value of 999 billion. Since 999 billion is less than 1 trillion, the first world full of lives hardly worth living would be morally better than the second world, and hence, if a utilitarian were forced to choose between these, she would pick the former. (This is called the ‘repugnant conclusion’, which longtermists such as Ord, MacAskill and Greaves recently argued shouldn’t be taken very seriously. For them, the first world really might be better!)
  - _0ffh 3y ago
    That's Utilitarianism of the kind that e.g. Eliezer preaches. Which leads to the question, are all longtermists really utilitarians like that? (The article seems to insist, even while acknowledging that at least some explicitly say they're not.)

throw11may23 3y ago

It seems pretty clear that longtermism and consequentialism in conjunction have the potential to be dangerous; although I endorse both. That said, the author of this piece seems to be a bit of a nutcase. There's a well-evidenced writeup of various dubious behaviors in this blog post: https://markfuentes1.substack.com/i/81210415/tyler-cowen https://markfuentes1.substack.com/i/81210415/tyler-cowen So while some of the high level arguments in this seems plainly right, their overall strength and the integrity of the author seem pretty questionable.

G3rn0ti 3y ago

I skimmed through the article and it kind of reminded me of „Transhumanism: The most dangerous idea“ [1] by Francis Fukuyama. Turns out Nick Bostrom —- the founder of the „Future of Humanity“ institute and who is mentioned several times in this piece — grew out of the fin-du-siècle “Transhumanist” movement (I actually met him in 2000 in London at a European Transhumanist gathering) and I guess many people inside “longtermism” also happen to be “Transhumanists” in the broadest sense. Fukuyama warned about the dystopian and self-destructive potential of Transhumanists accepting (and wanting) to change our human nature through individual technological modifications extending the human life-span and, ultimately, transcending us into post-human almost god-like beings. Now Torres warns us the same ideology (if becoming wide-spread) with its vision of human grandeur will marginalize the concern about present environmental dangers. I think, ultimately, this debate boils down to a conflict of two word views. You either are techno optimistic or techno pessimistic. The former camp will perceive climate change not as a huge threat and present well-founded arguments why humans will most likely overcome the „climate crisis“ with their technology irrespective of the prevailing politics. The latter camp present (also) well-founded arguments why human technology will likely destroy our civilization and propose a life-style that is more aligned with nature. If you take a step back, human technology has indeed improved our living condition massively: Never in the history of mankind so many people have lived so comfortably and also so healthily [2]. This is also proven by the fact that there never have been so many people alive at the same time. Of course, now we might face the consequences of our species thriving so well and multiplying in numbers. That does not need to be the end of the world though if we as human beings stick to the facts, act accordingly and don’t commit to an ideology blatantly telling you either the future is bright or dark. To live a meaningful live and help humanity to survive it is important to stay open-minded and regularly take a reality-check. That’s all I want to say as an old bloke directed at the younger generations. [1] https://www.au.dk/fukuyama/boger/essay https://www.au.dk/fukuyama/boger/essay [2] https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

shkkmo 3y ago
> If you take a step back, human technology has indeed improved our living condition massively: Never in the history of mankind so many people have lived so comfortably and also so healthily True, but we also have the ability to kill more people more quickly. Technology presents both great opportunities and great risks. We are well served to take seriously the short, medium and long term risks of that technology. From nuclear war, to climate change, to becoming a multi-planetary and eventual a multi-solar species. It is both simultaneously true that the potential of technology is not so great as to justify destroying everything we have in it's pursuit and that the potential of technology is great enough to take some risks in it's pursuit. In the end, I think we are best served by empowering people to make their own choices. Whether that choice is to become transhuman or to live in harmony with nature, or some fusion of the two.

bparsons 3y ago

No one ever got poor coming up with elaborate rationalizations and defenses on behalf of people accumulating hundreds of billions of dollars.

stared 3y ago

Fighting against environmental destruction (including global warming) is longtermism. We need to pay some price now, but IMHO, it is worth it. The opposite is myopia - like setting a house on fire in the winter, so it will keep us warm. What's risky is not the long-term thinking but the weights we put on real now vs the virtual future. We run into fanatism if we put all weight on our beliefs against what is here and now. Be it killing nonbelievers and heretics for the promise of eternal happiness (or preventing God from sending a calamity) or sacrificing people for one or the other secular ideology. I like the following quotation: “Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.” ― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Was it hijacked by the rich and powerful? Well, as any ideology. No, they don't believe in that nearly as they say. Compare (not much to contrast) with invading a neighboring country as it is pagan.

jmull 3y ago

This doesn't even remotely make the case that "longtermism" is dangerous. It appears to be just one more of the many, many "philosophies" people talk about while they go ahead and do whatever the hell they want anyway. It does seem particularly transparent about it, but that just makes it relatively dumb, not dangerous.

Connor_Creegan1 3y ago

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baerrie 3y ago

No human or group of humans can have enough certainty about the future to make decisions for it now. Effectively it is such a ludicrous task to predict the future that it is akin to saying god told you so, rendering this belief system just as irrational as any other religion that tries to weigh in on matters on certainty

imtringued 3y ago
It also has a moral to self perpetuation as longtermists will have to be around for the next trillion years. It's not a once and done thing. Converting longtermists to something else is like ending the future of humanity.

SThomas256 3y ago

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pdonis 3y ago

To me the money quote is this one: "The underlying reasoning here is based on the idea that people – you and I – are nothing more than means to an end. We don’t matter in ourselves; we have no inherent value of our own. Instead, people are understood as the ‘containers’ of value" This is the central problem with any kind of utilitarianism: it gets things backwards. People are not means to an end; they are ends in themselves. Any kind of "value" (which, as the article notes, utilitarians, including "longtermists", basically equate with hedonistic pleasure) is a means to an end, with people being the end.

pcthrowaway 3y ago

If you take longtermism and reduction of suffering to the extreme, isn't nuking the whole planet the most "ethical" thing to do, because it would prevent thousands of generations of humans from suffering?