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Having spoken to a few of them, I doubt they think of those things any other way. Someone who is trying to think of the big picture necessarily has to abstract
by pclmulqdq 4y ago
Having spoken to a few of them, I doubt they think of those things any other way. Someone who is trying to think of the big picture necessarily has to abstract a few things. They know that a planet is not an orange, and can describe it in detail, but in the grand model of the big picture, a planet gets modeled with simplifications (to make reasoning possible) that reduce it to a big orange. Many people don't deeply interrogate these simplifications at all to understand whether they are correct.
- dmix 4y agoWell you’d hope it’s not just an individual figuring this stuff how but a body of research and debate among many people which is honest and open enough to cut into assumptions and challenge them. Like all good science. Although I don’t know enough about longtermism to make a critique of their ideas.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoI don't think the debate is very open about assumptions, and this is not science, this is basically at the border of philosophy and religion. I personally think that a lot of long-terminist thinkers today have separate sets of simplifying assumptions (which they do not question), but come to some sort of negotiated compromise on what the future holds in order to fund projects, for example. This is the worst of all possible forms of discussion.