Representative quote from the article: > “by my calculations, [not using adderall] decreased Kelsey’s effectiveness by 20%, thus costing approximately 54 billi

Representative quote from the article: > “by my calculations, [not using adderall] decreased Kelsey’s effectiveness by 20%, thus costing approximately 54 billion lives.” Yeah, rationalists really do say that sort of thing as if it’s normal. If I remember their reasoning correctly, the billions of lives here are potential future humans that would have been born some milennia from now, had Kelsey just gotten over herself and taken Adderall. But in longermist logic, a future human that never was born is equivalent to the violent death of an actual real-life human. However as of course there are infinitely many more potential future humans than actual living humans, preventing future humans from being born is in practice a much greater offense for longtermists than letting real-life humans die. That being said, I think the article conflates a bit "rationalists", "effective altruists" and "longtermists". I'm pretty sure the boundaries between the groups are very blurry, but I guess for reasons of fairness one should still make an attempt to distinguish them.