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This is exactly how I feel when Effective Altruism starts talking about the wellbeing of trillions of humans living in the far distant future that we should be

This is exactly how I feel when Effective Altruism starts talking about the wellbeing of trillions of humans living in the far distant future that we should be devoting ourselves to now. https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cause-profile-long-run-future https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cause-profile-lon...

clueless 1y ago
how are "trillions of humans living in the far distant future" improbable, or poor information or has a lack of information? seems pretty obvious
- munchler 1y ago
  It seems obvious to you that there will be trillions of people alive in the far distant future? Please explain how you know this.
  - tasty_freeze 1y ago
    They claim isn't that there will be trillions of people alive at the same time; they are integrating over the course of tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Although we are at a peak population of a bit over 8B people at the moment, it is estimated that more than 100B people we would classify as humans have ever lived. The population long ago was much smaller than 1B, but thousands of generations have lived and died.
    - andsoitis 1y ago
      What is something specific that an individual should have done or should not have done, say, 2000 years ago, that would have made a positive impact on your life?
      - tasty_freeze 1y ago
        Certainly there are individuals who have had that kind of impact, but I don't think one could have foreseen the consequences at the time, e.g., Jesus and Mohamed. Likewise, the guy who invented the Segway probably thought he was going to revolutionize personal transportation, but that didn't pan out (yet, at least).
- nancyminusone 1y ago
  1. Suppose you have a chart of the total past and future history of human population. 2. Cover up the chart so only the data from the past to present day is visible. 3. Note that most humans in that subset exist near or at the present. You are one of these people today, it should make sense for you to be born in one of the densest parts of the graph. 4. Now uncover the graph. If there are trillions of humans in the future, it seems almost impossibly unlikely that you would born in a part of the graph with "so few" humans as today, and not in the far future. Therefore, you must conclude that the actual graph rapidly drops to zero in the near future. QED. This "doomsday argument" is a pretty shit one, but not worse than others I've seen arguing the opposite.
- breuleux 1y ago
  Regardless, it is an extremely uncertain proposition that we can do anything in the present that would have a reliably positive impact on their lives in the far future. It's hard enough to figure something out for the billions of people who actually exist right now.
tasty_freeze 1y ago
You have personified EA, but it isn't a person. Some EA people are into long-termism, but it is an error to pretend EA is a monolith that speaks with one voice. I think the core idea is simply: since resources for helping the poor/sick is not unlimited, we should try to allocate those resources in the most effective way. Before EA charity evaluation came along, the only metric for most people was simply looking at the charity overhead via Charity Navigator. But that isn't a great metric. A charity with only a 1% overhead with a mission to make balloon animals for children dying in a famine will score well on Charity Navigator but does nothing to help the problem. To be honest I haven't looked deeply into long-termism, but from what I've heard (eg, hearing Will MacAskill on a few podcasts) it seems to ignore a few things. Just like a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, long-termers have no good way to estimate the likelihood of future events, and that discounting needs to increase greatly the further out one looks. At best many of these estimates are like the Drake Equation -- better than nothing, but with multiple orders of magnitude error bars. There are other second-order reasons which don't seem to factor in, or at least haven't come across in the few hours of listening to long-termers talk about the issue. One is that by working to make a better world now, it effects the trajectory of future events much more directly than the low-probability guesswork they think my have an impact in the distant future.
rwmj 1y ago
That was always a convenient excuse to justify amassing lots of money, if necessary by theft (see SBF). They have no intention of actually doing good with it.
Elextric 1y ago
Let me reframe it. Among these trillions of people, there will be many who are 99% similar to you. Wouldn't you want that version of yourself to live a great life?
- munchler 1y ago
  By that kind of logic, I’m actually a Boltzmann brain floating alone in an infinite void, so I don’t have to worry about anyone but myself.
  - Elextric 1y ago
    You can certainly rationalize anything, but I fail to see what help that is to us. "The great subverter of Pyrrhonism [radical skepticism] is action, and employment, and the occupations of common life. [...] I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther." Hume
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > Wouldn't you want that version of yourself to live a great life? The biggest positive change you can make, even for future generations, is to uplevel the people who are alive today.
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  Sure! It's just not actually reasonably possible to predict what will lead to that outcome, whereas I can sorta (badly) predict what will make me happy tomorrow, my wife happy next week, and what will best improve conditions for my current fellow citizens of the world.
jerf 1y ago
One of the things you need to do for this situation, as well as the stuff in the blog post, is apply what is commonly called "the time value of money" to the concept. However the concept extends beyond money into any attempt to modify the future, whether or not it involves money. Money just happens to function as a good, quantifiable example in its "score keeping" role here. Your ability to model the future and take actions based on it exponentially decays, and really quite rapidly. Or to put it another way, everything fuzzes out into noise for me much sooner than humanity will have trillions of new members. There's no way for me to predict whatsoever what effect any action I take today will have a thousand years from now. Even in extreme cases, like, I push a magic button that instantly copies whatever you, the reader, believe is the optimal distribution of ideological beliefs out into the world (ignoring for the moment the possibility that your ideology might consider that unethical, this is just a thought experiment anyhow so no need to go that meta), you really don't know what that would do 1000 years from now, what the seventeenth-order effects of such a thing would be. I'm not even saying that it might not be as good as you think or something; I'm saying you just have no idea what it would be at all. So there's no way to hold people responsible for that, and no way to build plans based on it.
jollyllama 1y ago
That's more of a Bentham's mugging.

clueless 1y ago

how are "trillions of humans living in the far distant future" improbable, or poor information or has a lack of information? seems pretty obvious

munchler 1y ago
It seems obvious to you that there will be trillions of people alive in the far distant future? Please explain how you know this.
- tasty_freeze 1y ago
  They claim isn't that there will be trillions of people alive at the same time; they are integrating over the course of tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Although we are at a peak population of a bit over 8B people at the moment, it is estimated that more than 100B people we would classify as humans have ever lived. The population long ago was much smaller than 1B, but thousands of generations have lived and died.
  - andsoitis 1y ago
    What is something specific that an individual should have done or should not have done, say, 2000 years ago, that would have made a positive impact on your life?
    - tasty_freeze 1y ago
      Certainly there are individuals who have had that kind of impact, but I don't think one could have foreseen the consequences at the time, e.g., Jesus and Mohamed. Likewise, the guy who invented the Segway probably thought he was going to revolutionize personal transportation, but that didn't pan out (yet, at least).
nancyminusone 1y ago
1. Suppose you have a chart of the total past and future history of human population. 2. Cover up the chart so only the data from the past to present day is visible. 3. Note that most humans in that subset exist near or at the present. You are one of these people today, it should make sense for you to be born in one of the densest parts of the graph. 4. Now uncover the graph. If there are trillions of humans in the future, it seems almost impossibly unlikely that you would born in a part of the graph with "so few" humans as today, and not in the far future. Therefore, you must conclude that the actual graph rapidly drops to zero in the near future. QED. This "doomsday argument" is a pretty shit one, but not worse than others I've seen arguing the opposite.
breuleux 1y ago
Regardless, it is an extremely uncertain proposition that we can do anything in the present that would have a reliably positive impact on their lives in the far future. It's hard enough to figure something out for the billions of people who actually exist right now.

tasty_freeze 1y ago

You have personified EA, but it isn't a person. Some EA people are into long-termism, but it is an error to pretend EA is a monolith that speaks with one voice. I think the core idea is simply: since resources for helping the poor/sick is not unlimited, we should try to allocate those resources in the most effective way. Before EA charity evaluation came along, the only metric for most people was simply looking at the charity overhead via Charity Navigator. But that isn't a great metric. A charity with only a 1% overhead with a mission to make balloon animals for children dying in a famine will score well on Charity Navigator but does nothing to help the problem. To be honest I haven't looked deeply into long-termism, but from what I've heard (eg, hearing Will MacAskill on a few podcasts) it seems to ignore a few things. Just like a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, long-termers have no good way to estimate the likelihood of future events, and that discounting needs to increase greatly the further out one looks. At best many of these estimates are like the Drake Equation -- better than nothing, but with multiple orders of magnitude error bars. There are other second-order reasons which don't seem to factor in, or at least haven't come across in the few hours of listening to long-termers talk about the issue. One is that by working to make a better world now, it effects the trajectory of future events much more directly than the low-probability guesswork they think my have an impact in the distant future.

rwmj 1y ago

That was always a convenient excuse to justify amassing lots of money, if necessary by theft (see SBF). They have no intention of actually doing good with it.

Elextric 1y ago

Let me reframe it. Among these trillions of people, there will be many who are 99% similar to you. Wouldn't you want that version of yourself to live a great life?

munchler 1y ago
By that kind of logic, I’m actually a Boltzmann brain floating alone in an infinite void, so I don’t have to worry about anyone but myself.
- Elextric 1y ago
  You can certainly rationalize anything, but I fail to see what help that is to us. "The great subverter of Pyrrhonism [radical skepticism] is action, and employment, and the occupations of common life. [...] I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther." Hume
andsoitis 1y ago
> Wouldn't you want that version of yourself to live a great life? The biggest positive change you can make, even for future generations, is to uplevel the people who are alive today.
BobaFloutist 1y ago
Sure! It's just not actually reasonably possible to predict what will lead to that outcome, whereas I can sorta (badly) predict what will make me happy tomorrow, my wife happy next week, and what will best improve conditions for my current fellow citizens of the world.

jerf 1y ago

One of the things you need to do for this situation, as well as the stuff in the blog post, is apply what is commonly called "the time value of money" to the concept. However the concept extends beyond money into any attempt to modify the future, whether or not it involves money. Money just happens to function as a good, quantifiable example in its "score keeping" role here. Your ability to model the future and take actions based on it exponentially decays, and really quite rapidly. Or to put it another way, everything fuzzes out into noise for me much sooner than humanity will have trillions of new members. There's no way for me to predict whatsoever what effect any action I take today will have a thousand years from now. Even in extreme cases, like, I push a magic button that instantly copies whatever you, the reader, believe is the optimal distribution of ideological beliefs out into the world (ignoring for the moment the possibility that your ideology might consider that unethical, this is just a thought experiment anyhow so no need to go that meta), you really don't know what that would do 1000 years from now, what the seventeenth-order effects of such a thing would be. I'm not even saying that it might not be as good as you think or something; I'm saying you just have no idea what it would be at all. So there's no way to hold people responsible for that, and no way to build plans based on it.

jollyllama 1y ago

That's more of a Bentham's mugging.