Because otherwise everything up to this point would've been pointless do we really need an article explaining why the survival of our species is important?
I'm not sure why I would do that, although there are instincts which rely on that (e.g. sex). My immediate concerns are of my somatic existence rather than my genes. If my personal survival depended on the survival of the species (as an example: cryogenics), that would certainly be a factor.
Because if your genes didn't historically result in an organism with a drive to propagate itself, your genes would have a significantly higher likelihood of dying out in an ancestor generation.
If you do not have that drive, then it is natural to cull yourself.
you shouldn't, it's not healthy. you'll contribute more to future generations if you're happy, and individuals who are concerned about whole generations tend to despair. despair leads to loss of sexual appetite, which leads to selection against said trait. ;)
you don't need to care about future generations in general, but you probably deeply care about the future of your children. if you do not have any (yet): i'd said similar things before i became a father. since i've had kids... my urge to preserve the well-being of my children specifically is absolutely visceral, and i can only assume (it does seem so) that other parents feel similarly. no parent needs to care about their children's whole generation, the urge to care is decentralized and spread over the whole generation of parents.
the next question might be: why would you care about your offspring? because parental care is a trait that helps carry the DNA which encodes it farther than DNA without this trait will get (all other things equal). in general, we care about (a few particular members of) future generations (our offspring) because people who didn't give a fuck about their own children died out.
This reasoning ignores the tragedy of the commons: Earth is finite, so exponential growth cannot be sustained indefinitely. Even if we go into space, at best we can expand at O(n^2). So the urge to preserve your children has to be tempered by the self-discipline not to have more than two per couple (on average). And that has to somehow be extended to everyone, because even a single breeding pair whose genes allow them to ignore this fundamental fact puts us back on the path to eventual calamity. Sooner or later exponential growth must stop. If we don't do it ourselves, the laws of physics will do it for us.
The population is predicted to max out at 10-11 billion people this century, as birth rates lower when countries become more developed. These are demographic trends that have been unfolding for many decades now, as I recall.
Yes, let's hope those predictions play out. But there's another problem: for several hundred years our economic institutions have been structured on the assumption of exponential economic growth. That has been fueled by both population growth and innovation, but that can't go on forever either. It's an open question whether we'll be able to restructure society to adjust.
There is still the real possibility that life is actually pointless. And there is no real justification why humans should rule this instead of any other species. Except made up ones, of course.
There is a scientific theory out that has yet to be proven, but addresses the actual purpose of life.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...
TL;DR (with my philosophical interpretations included) - his claim is that life occurs as a natural process to help dissipate concentrations of energy. This occurs because the universe is on a never-ending march toward higher entropy and life is a tool to help it achieve that goal - the goal being maximum entropy and the effective end of the universe as we know it, a situation where all matter is in its most stable state and no energy can be obtained from anything anymore. So we are here to help the universe and all life die.
life cannot exist without (outside / away from) energy gradients. is the purpose of life to speed up destruction of its environment? even if the answer is yes which i disagree with, it's only an approximative answer: it's immediately followed by "ok but why is it so?"
imo, life has as much purpose as stars have: none. it's the wrong question to ask. life is simply there, just like stars are there. it "materializes" when-and-where there are the right conditions (a narrow spectrum of energy gradients), just like stars do (the spectra are extremely far apart, of course).
To be clear, all of the teleological claims here are your own philosophical interpretations; they do not appear to be in the paper discussed in the link you have given.
If we accept your interpretation, then I think we must conclude that the purpose of life is to hasten its own extinction, by accelerating dissipative processes.
What would differentiate a real justification from a "made up one"? Point, purpose, justification, etc. are by definition human concepts; without humans, things just are.
With evidence we can refute made up justifications. If we want to. Not all do. In fact, the huge majority prefers made up reasons.
If we humans perish, our knowledge could survive us. What we have found out about how nature works transcends our species. That is not a good justification why life exists, but at least this reason is not limited to humans, like all other ones.
And if there is no one else that can use our knowledge, and no one comes after us, life was pointless all along.
You might feel that life is pointless, but you don't speak for everyone.
You have already admitted that individuals may enjoy life and find much meaning, so it seems only honest to append a very large qualifier to your "life is pointless" belief.
> There is still the real possibility that life is actually pointless.
No there isn't, for a simple reason: I enjoy life, many others do, and those who don't generally want to enjoy it. The point is what we want. Not some external criterion we have yet to discover. (Some Christian fundamentalists make a similar mistake, believing there would be no morals without God —as if we haven't eaten the damn fruit already.)
Now there's this tiny little problem about resolving conflicts: we have yet to extrapolate a collective will from lots of individual wills in a way we'd all agree is "fair" —I believe we have demonstrated the absence of a general solution. The overlap however is quite comprehensive, so I have hope.
Of course, we individuals can find meaning and purpose in our life. Through family, creativity, social bonds, etc. But I am thinking about life as the whole humanity, the whole nature. I do not think individual purpose answers the questions why life or humans should exist.
Life might be nothing more than the most efficient way to hydrate carbon (entropy ftw).
Intelligent life is so far subjectively the most amazing thing that has happened in this universe.
We are the only intelligent species on our planet, our planet is the only place where we know for sure life exists in our solar system.
Based on our limited observations we are also the only intelligent beings in our galaxy at least at this time period.
While intelligent life may have no interensic meaning we have the capacity to give our life and the life of future generations meaning, this trait is quite likely the result of natural selection.
We study history, cherish our past, honor our heroes and plan for a better future and this is a universal trait that we as a species share.
Saying that life has no meaning is a pointless argument there is nothing to benefit from making this assumption, in fact you lose everything.
The survival of our species is irrelevant on the large scale. It is only important to us - the members of the species. Let's he honest, the world as a whole needs nothing from us. In fact, it was arguably better off before us and therefore would benefit without us around.
And it's not true that everything up to now would be pointless. Advancements in technology, science, knowledge, etc. have all been enjoyed by those who are living and have previously lived. Any lack of future humans doesn't mean the benefits of those efforts were not realized or consumed.
We're the only things around with the capacity to care about the future of the planet. "Better off before us" is context-dependent: the concept of "better" is meaningless without knowing who is doing the judging. Since you are doing the judging, it seems a bit disingenuous to say that the world is arguably better off without you.
Well, not exactly. Life on Earth's only hope of surviving beyond the decline of Sol currently hinges on some intelligent species developing space travel. They say, "life finds a way"- maybe we are life's way of getting all her species off this planet before it is engulfed by the sun.
If we get off our planet we will ensure the long-term self-replication. Without us it wouldn't happen and all life on Earth would sooner or later vanish.
There exists a theory that says all the suffering that has been experienced up to this point would have been avoided if our species hadn't survived, and that the scale of human-inflicted horror and injustice, which we are doomed to continue repeating forever, far outweighs the relatively small and inconsequential improvements that humans have contributed to nature.
Doesn't natural suffering of creatures far outweigh anything humans experience or inflict? Plus, we've made life better for countless animals through domestication.
If you're going to play the weighing game of pleasure versus suffering of domesticated animals, I would bet that factory farming far outweighs pets/animal helpers/more humane farms. The numbers are pretty incredible.
Note: nothing in this comment should be taken as an endorsement of that. I'm just offering it as an example of people who are making an argument that we should not try to survive as a species.
I was really surprised by this, too. It seems like the majority of people don't care for the fate of humanity. Of the people I've asked in the past, they either don't care because they'll be long dead by then, or they believe that we shouldn't change the course of nature.
Nobody cares about humanity 600 generations from now. We're only truly concerned about our immediate family. I'd sacrifice my life for my son, but I could give a shit about my great great great great great great great great great great grandson.
I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to stop.
Define "stop". Like VHEMT? On a not more serious note, most people on this planet do not drive cars. 947M registered passenger cars for 7350M people in 2015 is 12.8%.
> I'd sacrifice my life for my son, but I could give a shit about my great great great great great great great great great great grandson.
That makes sense from a "maximizing your descendants" point of view--maybe.
Assuming a normal sized family losing your son knocks out from 25 to 100% of your living descendants.
Assuming that your descendants on average have average sized families then by the time you have a great^10 grandson you should have a large number of living descendants. Losing one barely makes a dent.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine a scenario where you could take an action now that would greatly affect (positively or negatively) a great^10 grandson without similarly affecting hundreds of your other great^10 grandchildren.
> Nobody cares about humanity 600 generations from now. We're only truly concerned about our immediate family.
Please don't project your own personal thoughts and opinions on to the entire human population. It's possible that some, even many people do not think this way. I would claim to be one, although of course I can offer no evidence other than my word.
> I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to stop.
Again, that seems like a projection of yourself on to the whole population. This ones easier to refute though, since it's an objective fact that I don't drive a car (and haven't even bothered learning). Concern for the environment is certainly a large part of the reason.
Sometimes humans talk in terms of self evident generalities derived from common sense instead of solely relying on scientifically verified facts. This is actually a very typical scenario when you communicate with other humans.
I have troubled finding exemples in history where we made the "right" decisions for the future of humanity when we wanted too. Think religion oppression, communism, etc. Why today will be different?
As an experiment, I think communism was absolutely worthwhile. Why not? Societies with private property have all sorts of problems, so let's see what happens when we change that variable.
The problem is when experiments continue despite failure.
"you should know there were communities without property before the Soviet Union."
And after. Arguably the problem with Communism isn't so much that it is entirely impossible, but that it is entirely possible for it to scale much past 50-100 people, making it an exceedingly poor choice to try to structure a country's governance with. (And generally even by the 50 person mark the strains are seriously setting in and the community frequently still becomes unstable and disintegrates.)
Equality wasn't an explicit goal of that system though. It was for communism, which never achieved it at any significant scale. My comment was less about it being a failed experiment though, and more about whether or not it was "worthwhile".
> Equality wasn't an explicit goal of that system though. It was for communism, which never achieved it at any significant scale
Well, thats kind of unsurprising, since all the actual attempts to implement “Communism” on a national scale threw out the prerequisites in Marxism on favor of the (notionally transitional) elite ruling class of Leninist vanguardism (an adaptation to allow bypassing capitalist democracy entirely, because—viewed generously—the Bolsheviks and their successors were too impatient for Marxism.)
At that point you're just arguing that capitalism has never existed, so perhaps you should use another term for your "true Scotsman" version to reduce confusion when talking to people who use the common definition.
There is a reason why slavery was abolished on the brink of capitalism birth. It's because capitalism depends on free trade, not just any kind of it - the freer the better it grows.
As someone who has grown up in a communist Eastern European country, I would have to disagree. This "experiment" cost many people their lives, simply for ideological purposes.
By the same token, you could argue that Nazi Germany was an "absolutely worthwhile" experiment. "Hey, societies with mixed race have all sorts of problems, let's see what happends when we change that variable!"
Some ideas are simply WRONG when you try to apply them in practice.
(I don't know you, so maybe you've also experienced communism and totalitarianism first-hand; but if not, I would respectfully argue that it's easy to judge something as "worthwhile" if you haven't personally been affected by it.)
> a sense of wonder about the universe we find ourselves in
If we have a sense of wonder about the universe or our planet, then what we should really do is rid it of us, because all we have ever done is ruin it, make it hideous, inflict pain and destruction on it.
I have kids. My behavior is not consistent with my beliefs. In that I'm very human.
Ruin it and make it hideous by what measure of utility and beauty?
Humanity is beautiful, and the things humanity creates are beautiful. In our solar system, or in the local group of stars, as far as I know, it's the humans who are making the things that are the most beautiful.
There is a type of beauty in nature, but that beauty was based on a harmony. The mountains don't have an intention behind them. The art that humans make does. They're very different things, and the u universe would be at a loss if humans were not a part of it.
I don't understand this point of view. My interpretation of it is that there is some idealized, perfect form of earth (and apparently the universe) that doesn't include humans. Everything in it is perfect except for the humans, which ruin and devalue it.
What confounds me about this view is that humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it. What is so unique about humanity in the universe that gives us the exclusive agency to tarnish it? Why are the products of humanity somehow excluded from the perfection of the other productions of the universe?
Excellent questions. The issue is speciesism. Humanity wasn't a problem for most of its existence. But it has now started to consume every ressource, spread on every tiny bit of land, and exterminate every other form of life.
If, as you say, humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it, what is the justification for speciesism? What gives us the right to take everything for ourselves, kill and decimate other forms of life?
The rate of the extinction of species that the earth is going through right now is unprecedented in all of earth's history, to say nothing of the torture we inflict on farm animals. And this is not an accident. We are doing it on purpose and we're proud of it; we call it "development", when the right word should be: destruction.
Speciesism is a new concept to me. Thank you for introducing me to it. Since you seem to be familiar with the concept and its application to the discussion at hand, perhaps you can clarify a point.
Are humans, among the species on earth at least, uniquely capable of speciesism? Are rats or ants guilty of it too, to the extent that they exercise speciesism until they run up against limitations of their environment? Or is speciesism a moral ideal, similar to murder, meaning rats and ants can't be guilty of it because they can't reason and act with intent?
"Why the long-term future of humans matters more than anything else"
Because humans care about humans more than anything else and that's fully sufficient. Let's not kid ourselves, we care about us, most everybody else is kinda meh. Symbiotic species like us too, I guess.
In part I think this is why Musk is such a bigger than life figure. His whole spiel about making humanity a multi-planet specie makes for good PR but as far as I can tell it also genuinely matter to him & provides drive.
Once the first colony dies on Mars I think we'll forget about that distraction for a while. Near term future of humanity is on this planet and there won't be any long term future if we fuck things up here
Humanity is the most incredible thing in what we know of the universe. Stars and gas clouds sure are beautiful too, but unless you are very religious, the those are simple an artifact of statistics, there was no intention there.
It doesn't assume it. It only assumes a value qualification that is necessary from our perspective: without human morality (which determines the value of things), there is no guarantee to exist anything that humans value. It doesn't matter if life exists elsewhere if we're the only ones that ever cared about it.
Besides, the only alternative is useless optimism - to assume that life elsewhere does exist and implements our values (perhaps better than we do,) and thus we are totally unnecessary and it makes no difference if we all die. (This is the same nihilism inherent in believing in an afterlife.)
Not familiar with the source from the parent, but the "point" to anything depends on a form of consciousness assigning that definition. There is no point to a water logged ball of rock, orbiting a giant ball of hot gas unless there is someone on that rock to say "the point of this rock is so I may exist.". Ignoring some cosmic creators with some purpose for us to exist (which would just be another form of consciousness), the whole point is decided by us. So without us, there would be no point.
I agree that humanity is astronomically more important than anything else we know, but your argument for why isn't very good. Humans are just as much an artefact of statistics as stars, but with complexer patterns.
It matters... but not more than anything else. What matters even more is that we retain our humanity.
Notice that this idea is only one step removed from "the long-term future of the race matters more than anything else". Think about what horrors have been done in the service of that idea. Let us be very careful, then, that we commit no horrors in the service of this idea. ("Nothing matters more than X" easily becomes "therefore it's OK - even good - to trample on people in the service of X".)
Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years. I'm sure most people don't either.
A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards.
I genuinely feel horrified by that. Like, it legitimately alarms me in the same way I'd be alarmed to find out everyone else in a room with me is a psychopath. I'm not very personally frightened to think that most people would be fine with me being hurt- it's not an imminent threat.
I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay with people suffering. Obviously this is more acute with people in other countries than people who do not yet exist, and I have some allowance for laziness. But... people are genuinely fine with the idea that people starve to death? That's horrifying.
Consider that apathy and ambivalence are an enormous improvement over the abject animosity, antipathy, and aversion in-groups have felt toward out-groups for most of human history.
You shouldn't be alarmed about people being psychopaths, because as you see empathy doesn't get you very far. To reliably care about the far future, it has to be a rational decision, not an emotional one.
The question is before you even start throwing the moral gauntlet on other people, what are you doing about it? Now you might be doing something but then the question is whether you are actually doing something about it.
There are plenty of arguments for why ex. doing NGO work or sponsoring a child is doing more harm than good and actually hurting. So I wouldn't be so fast to cast judgement.
I don't think you find many people who don't care about other people suffering intellectually. The question is whether they are choosing to suffer more others to suffer less.
Thats a tu quoque fallacy[1] and also fails on a couple levels to address what I mean.
First off I'm not making a moral judgement, and I'm not talking about actions at all. I'm not even trying to judge them at all. They made an assertion about humanity and i find that assertion alarming, but i didnt try to reflect it on them and stayed as impersonal as I could.
Its the intentions i was concerned about, not the effects. They were describing people who dont even care intellectually- thats freaky to think about.
> I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay with people suffering.
But future people don't exist. If a nuclear holocaust wipes us all out, they will never exist, and hence will never suffer. So really it depends on whether you consider "the continued existence of the human race" to be a moral imperative or whether you don't.
You may be interested in this article [1] by David Wong (author of 'John Dies at the end'). It pretty much sums up the attitude in the parent comment and why, to a greater or lesser extent, we are all subject to it.
The state of the world proves to you that basically everybody is a "psychopath". We are all self obsessed and our empathy barely reaches to our next door neighbor. The world is a mad house, is this really news to you?
On the contrary. I can't imagine experiencing the emotions of all the people in 10000AD; at our current population growth rate, 10000AD will witness an unfathomable number of human beings! Being concerned about all those people is far too much emotional stress for any one mind.
(Of course, experiencing others' emotions can in general be debilitating. Obviously, then, experiencing trillions of others' emotions would be trillionsfold worse.)
I mean for people you havent and never will meet; I can somewhat understand for people that dont actually exist yet.
I'm not thinking of personally being aware of them and i can even rationalize not finding strangers to be tangible. I understand the bystander effect and all that. There are any number of ways I can accept not doing anything, but the idea that someone could legitimately just not care is deeply unsettling.
Like, for the bystander effect to apply a person has to care and then think "someone should do something". Its the idea that someone can instead just not care even superficially that is disturbing.
> Like, for the bystander effect to apply a person has to care and then think "someone should do something". Its the idea that someone can instead just not care even superficially that is disturbing.
To me, the idea that someone think "someone should do something" about that "something" is disturbing.
But this is HN, the place where those that make $100k/year a more wax poetically about the plight of poor people in third world countries while munching on the cheese and drinking the wine thinking that it is the waxing that counts.
You've put your finger on a very important point. It's a point that some of the most important ethicists (Parfit, Singer) in recent history have focused on, namely the deficit in empathy we have for individuals who are distant from us whether it be in space or time.
Progressing beyond this is one of the important moral challenges faced by humanity.
But trying to empathize with someone who is going to live thousands of years from now seems like designing software based on speculative requirements changes. You end up with a custom DSL for a custom rules engine and only 2 rules ever got written with it. Except that predicting what humanity will be like in 1000 years is harder than predicting what your software will be like in 10 years.
A rule I would consider would be that any decision should, all else being equal, maximize the degrees of freedom available to other persons relative to other exclusionary options. Obviously, this would require quite a bit of further discussion and fleshing out as to its precise meaning, but I'd take it as a starting point for philosophical analysis.
True, we can't make predictions in the form of hyperparticularizations. But we can make predictions in broad strokes about industrialization and ecology and how our current behaviors will serve the welfare of future generations in those respects.
Empathy, thinking about the near-term future or past, worrying - all products of evolution, traits that have helped us enough in the past to have been selected for.
There has been no evolutionary pressure to develop much of a concern beyond one or two generations.
And evolution hasn't equipped us with reward pathways or cognitive capacity to solve many of the problems now facing us and our surroundings - because those problems are new
I guess I can sort of understand the sentiment of not caring much for the individuals of humanity, but there is a difference between that and not caring about humanity as a whole, as the species, as the beings that, as more time and generations go by, understand more about the universe and find ways to do what was previously thought to be impossible. Doesn't it excite you what humanity might accomplish with more time? Doesn't it disappoint you that they might lose everything they've accomplished through millenia of work simply because of carelessness of previous generations?
I believe humanity could survive longer if people only cared enough to prepare for disasters they know will come, even if it's multiple generations into the future. This is like humanity is one big human procastinating. Some things can only be accomplished if you prepare for them with time.
A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards.
There is quite a bit of mental variation. One of the rarest qualities I have found in people is the ability to connect abstractions to feelings. I once dated a woman who would sometimes get angry at me because she was mistaken. That is fine, as we are all human, sometimes one makes mistakes. However, she would stay angry at me even when I exonerated myself factually. I should've taken that as an early sign and bailed out of that relationship much sooner!
When hiring someone for a startup or choosing a co-founder, I would recommend that one look for this quality.
This is related to something I heard on "Fresh Air." The author of this book had a "bad boss" character who kept on calling things a "dog whistle." As far as he was concerned, a phenomenon he couldn't directly perceive might as well not exist. Such an idea strikes me as a degree of idiocy that makes me angry. The physical phenomenon of sound waves at higher than 20 kHz is a physical fact! Denying the truth of an objective fact because of a shortsighted prioritization of one's limited subjective point of view -- this is exactly the kind of thing that can get one in trouble, if one is doing substantive knowledge work!
Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years.
Well, how many years ahead are you willing to worry? 10? 100? It sounds like you might be saying that you don't put much weight on the future of humanity on any timescale, and worry only about things that affect you personally. If so, then yes, I'd say that is the definition of selfish.
I'm sure most people don't either.
It might look this way, but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people", rather than just some people in some societies?
Let's put it this way - I won't sacrifice something my child needs for the benefit of someone who will be born in the year 10000. I care about that far future person in an abstract way. Maybe I'll buy an electric car and feel a bit better about those future people. But I definitely care more immediately and viscerally for the here and now.
> Well, how many years ahead are you willing to worry? 10? 100?
Let me reverse the question : how many years ahead is enough for you not to worry? A million years? Fifty billions? Do you worry about the ultimate fate of the universe[1]?
It's pretty clear to me that, all other things being equal, events tend to matter less and less as they are occurring further and further into the future. That's why, for instance, most young people don't worry much about death, unless they're told it will happen soon.
I don't have an accurate way to measure it, but to me, once you start talking about thousands of years, it's such a far future that I don't worry about it.
> but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people",
People are anxious or obsessed about many things, but I very rarely hear anyone whining about the future of the World in geological time scales. There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff.
Let me reverse the question: how many years ahead is enough for you not to worry?
A fair question. I'm not worried by the heat death of the universe, as I'm fairly certain that any action I take during my life will have no effect on it. I can't really picture the difference between a million years and a billion, so they don't really concern me, although I don't have a logical explanation for this.
My actual concerns vary between the 100 to 10,000 year time frame. I'm periodically incapacitated by my inability to find a convincing counterargument to the Great Filter theory, whereby the reason we haven't ever ever encountered aliens is because all civilizations collapse before achieving interstellar travel. While I'm doubtful that I can personally do anything to prevent this eventuality, when I do have hope, it's that I can make it slightly less likely or less catastrophic.
There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff.
Thanks for the link, although I find it more bittersweet than straightforwardly humorous. Having had similar failed conversations with psychological professionals over the years, I sympathize with young Alvy. I can say from experience that trying to explain your concerns about the 1000 year time frame doesn't go over any better.
> , but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people",
The climate change bandwagon is joined only by tiny Europe and some parts of America. We Indians or our Chinese neighbors don't care much about global warming and will never care of course unless until we can guilt trip the rich nations into giving us money to do something in that case it is a good deal at the expense of people like you.
India + China is approx 1/3rd of world population. I think that should qualify for "most people".
So if you are a parent you are setting your kids up to fail and their kids and so on.
What a great parent, theres nothing like over population to strain finite resources, plus it seems like a logical survival strategy or not, and in a way its a form of child abuse considering the Flynn effect, but Dunbars number is an indicator of intellect.
Call me selfish but some people dont worry about ensuring the stupid dont survive. For thousands of years clever people have been manipulating the stupid en masse sometimes called society, simply by putting the fear of god or whatever one's chosen sky fairy happens to be, into them.
I care about others because I care about the person I am.
> A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me.
And if treated with a modicum of attention and love, it will be much wiser than you before it even enters school. Rationalizing having given up, and pretending everybody has, comes way after that.
> I care about others because I care about the person I am.
When someone says that I ask them "Have you donated everything you made this month above the poverty level in your country to some kids who can't afford to eat say in Bangladesh per chance or its equivalent?" They typically respond with a "No" followed by a very convoluted explanation why it is the empathy that matters as in their view situational empathy should stop the moment such actions inconvenience them.
> "Have you donated everything you made this month above the poverty level in your country to some kids who can't afford to eat say in Bangladesh per chance or its equivalent?"
> the moment such actions inconvenience them
That's "not even silly", the threshold for "inconvenience" begins way earlier. And "caring for others" doesn't mean not caring for oneself, I'm also one of those other people, if you will. And your need to somehow disprove the empathy, love and/or generosity of everybody else, with such cheap sophistry to boot, says more about you than about the people you know nothing about. If you're looking for convolution, you might want to also look into that.
And why does caring for others only requiring those who get oppressed, and not attacking their oppressors? Give a man a fish, and he has a fish. Denazify the world and he has a place to raise kids in. Everybody has their own views what caring and doing good means, and comforting a bullied person ranks way lower for me than dealing with the bully. I wouldn't answer "no" and squirm, I'd laugh in your face.
Its also one of the reasons, why i like family fathers and mothers so much- even though most of them vote conservative. There is something selfish, that wants to see that the selfishness last forever.
Thats why those future persons need a spokesman, a long term selfish bastard/algorithm, who is able to veto on short-term behavior that is ultimative self-destructive.
The problem here is, that with such a control mechanism, its easy to go idealistic and try to "patch" humanity up while your at it- ending up with something, somialhinn, socialism.
So the patching up process, known as government, needs a reality check to prevent a run-a-way - and balances, to prevent a lock-out of the living from base resources and short term solutions on the way to long term solutions. Some flaws might be unfixable, and only work arounds will prevent them from flaring up again and again.
For example i can not get this generation to worry about the earth of tomorrows temperature.
The obvious solution would be to have a Future-Gen-House-of-Parliament veto on all usage of coal and oil.
Leading to a total standstill.
Thus the future-gen, could be bargained with- give us oil for another generation, and we will trade you in Carbon-Emission-Taxes and the development of fusion.
I dont claim to have a answer here, but it would be nice if there was some modeling software on how to build a better government here- including a simulation on how to reign in corroding elements like financially well endowed industries and tax-strained voters.
I love this idea. We have representatives for space, so why shouldn't we have representatives for time as well? A representative for the past would be welcome as well. Maybe preservationists try to hold on to the past, and conservatives hold down the present, while progressivists spend on the future.
This would be impossible. We can't accurately speculate what values will be important to future people any more than we can discern what a cow is thinking.
Thanks for saying that. I do not care about humanity or earth's future 100 years down the line leave alone 1000 years.
I think it is incredible arrogant to even assume that we can have any impact on future that distant. Most of our forefathers could not have imagined even a fraction of technological advancement we have achieved and compared to our children 500 years in future we are still pretty much uncivilized cavemans.
Cavemen should not bother about the earth, they should bother about themselves first.
To provide a bit of contrast, I have near-zero interest in the human condition over the next few generations (with the exception of the development of a few technologies) and am only really interested in where humanity could be in another 10,000 years and how I can help to make sure we get there.
Everybody's different, it doesn't do well to derive generalizations of society from your own internal conclusions.
> Robert Wiblin: Are there some approaches that you think are just obviously too broad?
> Toby Ord: Good question. I think just saying, “Okay, what about improving science?” my guess is that because this begets technology, which begets some of the risk, it’s unlikely that just pushing on that is a plausible thing to particularly help.
> ... They probably wouldn’t even know about asteroid risk, or super volcano risk, or various other natural risks.
I think talking about these kind of risks is a mistake. They're not the biggest thing on our plate and people will always be able to foresee them as too distant and too small.
~~~~~
> Robert Wiblin: We’ve talked a lot about reducing risks to the future. What about thinking about the opposite of that, which is extremely large upsides? Are there any practical ways that people might go about not so much preventing extinction or something horrible, but also trying to create something that’s much more positive than what we have reason to hope for?
> Toby Ord: It’s a good question. I’m not sure.
If you want a specific technology, work on electric transportation. Fossil fuel transportation in agriculture allowed us to scale up humanity to 7.5+ billion people, but it created a time-bomb because as soon as its too pricey to move food around, we can no longer create it as scale, and there's no going back to agrarian pastoral society without killing almost all the humans. Over the long term, we have a moral imperative to advance ourselves beyond fossil fuels for transportation. This is what I believe to be the most moral technology we could work on.[1]
"Humanity has a bug. We think of the future too little, and too often we think technology propels itself, that the future will simply unfold automatically. Or worse, many seem to have suffered a loss of faith in any real vision of the future. I wish this was not so."
Baffled by Ord's defence of discount rates. The transcript reads like a primer on the pure theory of discounting.
In practice it's a cargo cult ritual that leads to the conclusion that we should give within epsilon of zero fucks about anything that happens N years from now for sufficiently large N (which you get to choose as the author of an analysis).
That's partly because there's no mathematical difference in exponential discounting for the role played by 'pure rate of time preference' and the 'good' discount rate. It's always just 3.5% for no particular reason other than that's what in the back of the Treasury handbook written before 2008 during the Great Moderation.
Oh, and is 3.5% a reasonable number? Sounds kinda like inflation/mortgage rates, right? But if you look at CPI $100 dollars in 1817 is, equivalent to roughly $2k dollars in 2017. But would I rather spend this 'same' amount of money in 1817 or 2017? It's a no-brainer as long as I prefer penicillin and smart phones to legal opiods and vintage mustache waxing. This is really hard stuff to model, which is a clue that it doesn't get done.
If Ord and Wiblin could pick one easy fight to change about government policy making and promote longtermism it would be savaging the use of discounting in long term policy decisions rather than beating around the bush.
Apologies if I missed the nuance but in the paper's conclusions:
> Instead we will try to:
> 1. discount money in the normal way to take account of inflation and opportunity costs.
This is one of the problems with discounting though. Inflation is measured very badly over time due to technological change. If you go back to a policy maker in 1817 would have no idea that 2017 dollars could treat schistosomiasis, or any number of other medical conditions, so they would undervalue a 2017 dollar. I think it's fair to assume this process will continue to some extent over the next few hundred years.
This suggests that money is the wrong way to weigh up long term decisions. While problematic in their own way, something like QALYs and functions of QALYs could serve much better as a unit of account because their meaning is not relative with time. But you'd have to model how many you get in the future explicitly.
It's a very subtle issue I can't go fully into here. I agree with a lot of your concerns. Personally I would usually go for cost-welfare analysis rather than cost-benefit analysis, which resolves many of the problems you're concerned about.
Sure, I was just hoping to move you a little towards the position that lazy exponential discounting is generally not compatible with longtermism.
In terms of behaviour change, giving a mixed message is just going to excuse people falling back into the default method. This is what thoughtless acceptance of the default means:
This is my philosophy on the future. Feel free to adopt or reject it as you see fit.
Trying to reason about the future on cosmic scales is beyond our current and any foreseeable capabilities so let's discount that right away; we don't quite know if the universe will end in heat death (though we have some hints). We don't know if it is possible to create or move to other universes or even whether such a concept makes sense. As long as such things haven't been ruled out we can assume they're true: if life survives to the end of this universe it will have accumulated enough knowledge and technology to create or move to a new one.
Back in the present every species on earth is doomed. Whether an asteroid strike or the sun turning into a red giant eventually this planet will become uninhabitable.
It is not known whether intelligent life is a common result of evolution or we're a fluke. We do know it takes a very long time if it happens at all. It is possible we are the only highly intelligent species that will ever appear on this planet.
The primary responsibility of humanity then is to balance resource consumption with the creation of an interplanetary society first, then eventually an interstellar one. We must protect the earth's resources and preserve as many species as we can reasonably preserve... but we must also preserve modern technology and pursue the establishment of permanent self-sufficient colonies on other worlds in the solar system. Once we do so we must take and spread as many species from earth as we can. In the medium term (next million years) this isn't so important but once we can achieve some form of interstellar movement spreading life to other systems is key to ensuring it isn't wiped out (or reset back to single-cell organisms).
We are the only natural process capable of preserving life and so far as we are aware ours may be the only instance of life (or intelligent life) in the universe. What future iterations of life will make of such an opportunity we can only guess, but if we don't do it in all likelihood no one else ever will.
If no intelligent life survives then our existence is pointless and will be erased when the sun's red-giant phase scours every last trace that any living thing has ever existed from the face of the earth.
It should be "Why the long-term future of the global ecosystem matters more than anything else". Not humanity. Humans cause nothing but destruction and suffering on an unprecedented scale. 80000hours and the EA community are not better than any other anthropocentric interest group. Seriously what's with this obsession about humanity? How shortsighted are people?
What is paramount is to support the force which brought humanity here, not humanity itself. We are an instantiation of a process, not the process. To best support that force we as a planet of people need to realize we are not the end-all-be-all and our species time will come and go. When our successor supersedes humanity we should celebrate that beautiful expression of a yet more well adapted carrier of the torch ... do not fight progress on this more supra anthropocentric perspective, embrace it, celebrate it
God, it annoys me to see so many people spouting Rick & Morty-tier nihilistic verdicts on life and it being "pointless". Seriously, go outside and read some more books, and synthesize your experiences and observations.
Even without going into rigorous philosophical discussion, if you still confidently claim that all of it is fatally worthless even after having seen as much of what there is to life, I think you seriously lack perception.
It's just shallow pessimism, not a thoughtful outlook on conscious existence.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadIf you do not have that drive, then it is natural to cull yourself.
you don't need to care about future generations in general, but you probably deeply care about the future of your children. if you do not have any (yet): i'd said similar things before i became a father. since i've had kids... my urge to preserve the well-being of my children specifically is absolutely visceral, and i can only assume (it does seem so) that other parents feel similarly. no parent needs to care about their children's whole generation, the urge to care is decentralized and spread over the whole generation of parents.
the next question might be: why would you care about your offspring? because parental care is a trait that helps carry the DNA which encodes it farther than DNA without this trait will get (all other things equal). in general, we care about (a few particular members of) future generations (our offspring) because people who didn't give a fuck about their own children died out.
imo, life has as much purpose as stars have: none. it's the wrong question to ask. life is simply there, just like stars are there. it "materializes" when-and-where there are the right conditions (a narrow spectrum of energy gradients), just like stars do (the spectra are extremely far apart, of course).
If we accept your interpretation, then I think we must conclude that the purpose of life is to hasten its own extinction, by accelerating dissipative processes.
If we humans perish, our knowledge could survive us. What we have found out about how nature works transcends our species. That is not a good justification why life exists, but at least this reason is not limited to humans, like all other ones.
And if there is no one else that can use our knowledge, and no one comes after us, life was pointless all along.
You have already admitted that individuals may enjoy life and find much meaning, so it seems only honest to append a very large qualifier to your "life is pointless" belief.
No there isn't, for a simple reason: I enjoy life, many others do, and those who don't generally want to enjoy it. The point is what we want. Not some external criterion we have yet to discover. (Some Christian fundamentalists make a similar mistake, believing there would be no morals without God —as if we haven't eaten the damn fruit already.)
Now there's this tiny little problem about resolving conflicts: we have yet to extrapolate a collective will from lots of individual wills in a way we'd all agree is "fair" —I believe we have demonstrated the absence of a general solution. The overlap however is quite comprehensive, so I have hope.
What we should do is defined by what we want. Most of us want life and humans to continue to exist. Therefore they should. It's that simple.
Intelligent life is so far subjectively the most amazing thing that has happened in this universe.
We are the only intelligent species on our planet, our planet is the only place where we know for sure life exists in our solar system.
Based on our limited observations we are also the only intelligent beings in our galaxy at least at this time period.
While intelligent life may have no interensic meaning we have the capacity to give our life and the life of future generations meaning, this trait is quite likely the result of natural selection.
We study history, cherish our past, honor our heroes and plan for a better future and this is a universal trait that we as a species share.
Saying that life has no meaning is a pointless argument there is nothing to benefit from making this assumption, in fact you lose everything.
And it's not true that everything up to now would be pointless. Advancements in technology, science, knowledge, etc. have all been enjoyed by those who are living and have previously lived. Any lack of future humans doesn't mean the benefits of those efforts were not realized or consumed.
Arguably humans make life on earth worse for most other types of life we are in contact with
Well, not exactly. Life on Earth's only hope of surviving beyond the decline of Sol currently hinges on some intelligent species developing space travel. They say, "life finds a way"- maybe we are life's way of getting all her species off this planet before it is engulfed by the sun.
If we get off our planet we will ensure the long-term self-replication. Without us it wouldn't happen and all life on Earth would sooner or later vanish.
Note: nothing in this comment should be taken as an endorsement of that. I'm just offering it as an example of people who are making an argument that we should not try to survive as a species.
I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to stop.
That makes sense from a "maximizing your descendants" point of view--maybe.
Assuming a normal sized family losing your son knocks out from 25 to 100% of your living descendants.
Assuming that your descendants on average have average sized families then by the time you have a great^10 grandson you should have a large number of living descendants. Losing one barely makes a dent.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine a scenario where you could take an action now that would greatly affect (positively or negatively) a great^10 grandson without similarly affecting hundreds of your other great^10 grandchildren.
Please don't project your own personal thoughts and opinions on to the entire human population. It's possible that some, even many people do not think this way. I would claim to be one, although of course I can offer no evidence other than my word.
> I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to stop.
Again, that seems like a projection of yourself on to the whole population. This ones easier to refute though, since it's an objective fact that I don't drive a car (and haven't even bothered learning). Concern for the environment is certainly a large part of the reason.
The problem is when experiments continue despite failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
Also - you should know there were communities without property before the Soviet Union.
And after. Arguably the problem with Communism isn't so much that it is entirely impossible, but that it is entirely possible for it to scale much past 50-100 people, making it an exceedingly poor choice to try to structure a country's governance with. (And generally even by the 50 person mark the strains are seriously setting in and the community frequently still becomes unstable and disintegrates.)
But I get your point, just substitute any of the human catastrophes of the nineteenth century.
Well, thats kind of unsurprising, since all the actual attempts to implement “Communism” on a national scale threw out the prerequisites in Marxism on favor of the (notionally transitional) elite ruling class of Leninist vanguardism (an adaptation to allow bypassing capitalist democracy entirely, because—viewed generously—the Bolsheviks and their successors were too impatient for Marxism.)
There is a reason why slavery was abolished on the brink of capitalism birth. It's because capitalism depends on free trade, not just any kind of it - the freer the better it grows.
*freedom for the property owner. Which is why it can facilitate a slave trade, property is a limitation of freedom.
By the same token, you could argue that Nazi Germany was an "absolutely worthwhile" experiment. "Hey, societies with mixed race have all sorts of problems, let's see what happends when we change that variable!"
Some ideas are simply WRONG when you try to apply them in practice.
(I don't know you, so maybe you've also experienced communism and totalitarianism first-hand; but if not, I would respectfully argue that it's easy to judge something as "worthwhile" if you haven't personally been affected by it.)
If we have a sense of wonder about the universe or our planet, then what we should really do is rid it of us, because all we have ever done is ruin it, make it hideous, inflict pain and destruction on it.
I have kids. My behavior is not consistent with my beliefs. In that I'm very human.
Humanity is beautiful, and the things humanity creates are beautiful. In our solar system, or in the local group of stars, as far as I know, it's the humans who are making the things that are the most beautiful.
There is a type of beauty in nature, but that beauty was based on a harmony. The mountains don't have an intention behind them. The art that humans make does. They're very different things, and the u universe would be at a loss if humans were not a part of it.
What confounds me about this view is that humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it. What is so unique about humanity in the universe that gives us the exclusive agency to tarnish it? Why are the products of humanity somehow excluded from the perfection of the other productions of the universe?
If, as you say, humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it, what is the justification for speciesism? What gives us the right to take everything for ourselves, kill and decimate other forms of life?
The rate of the extinction of species that the earth is going through right now is unprecedented in all of earth's history, to say nothing of the torture we inflict on farm animals. And this is not an accident. We are doing it on purpose and we're proud of it; we call it "development", when the right word should be: destruction.
Are humans, among the species on earth at least, uniquely capable of speciesism? Are rats or ants guilty of it too, to the extent that they exercise speciesism until they run up against limitations of their environment? Or is speciesism a moral ideal, similar to murder, meaning rats and ants can't be guilty of it because they can't reason and act with intent?
Because humans care about humans more than anything else and that's fully sufficient. Let's not kid ourselves, we care about us, most everybody else is kinda meh. Symbiotic species like us too, I guess.
Humanity is the most incredible thing in what we know of the universe. Stars and gas clouds sure are beautiful too, but unless you are very religious, the those are simple an artifact of statistics, there was no intention there.
Without the humans, the universe is empty.
Besides, the only alternative is useless optimism - to assume that life elsewhere does exist and implements our values (perhaps better than we do,) and thus we are totally unnecessary and it makes no difference if we all die. (This is the same nihilism inherent in believing in an afterlife.)
Max Tegmark adds a twist to that statement: without consciousness (subjective experience), the universe is pointless.
Notice that this idea is only one step removed from "the long-term future of the race matters more than anything else". Think about what horrors have been done in the service of that idea. Let us be very careful, then, that we commit no horrors in the service of this idea. ("Nothing matters more than X" easily becomes "therefore it's OK - even good - to trample on people in the service of X".)
Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years. I'm sure most people don't either.
A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards.
I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay with people suffering. Obviously this is more acute with people in other countries than people who do not yet exist, and I have some allowance for laziness. But... people are genuinely fine with the idea that people starve to death? That's horrifying.
This represents improvement.
The question is before you even start throwing the moral gauntlet on other people, what are you doing about it? Now you might be doing something but then the question is whether you are actually doing something about it.
There are plenty of arguments for why ex. doing NGO work or sponsoring a child is doing more harm than good and actually hurting. So I wouldn't be so fast to cast judgement.
I don't think you find many people who don't care about other people suffering intellectually. The question is whether they are choosing to suffer more others to suffer less.
First off I'm not making a moral judgement, and I'm not talking about actions at all. I'm not even trying to judge them at all. They made an assertion about humanity and i find that assertion alarming, but i didnt try to reflect it on them and stayed as impersonal as I could.
Its the intentions i was concerned about, not the effects. They were describing people who dont even care intellectually- thats freaky to think about.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
But future people don't exist. If a nuclear holocaust wipes us all out, they will never exist, and hence will never suffer. So really it depends on whether you consider "the continued existence of the human race" to be a moral imperative or whether you don't.
[1] http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html/
(Of course, experiencing others' emotions can in general be debilitating. Obviously, then, experiencing trillions of others' emotions would be trillionsfold worse.)
I'm not thinking of personally being aware of them and i can even rationalize not finding strangers to be tangible. I understand the bystander effect and all that. There are any number of ways I can accept not doing anything, but the idea that someone could legitimately just not care is deeply unsettling.
Like, for the bystander effect to apply a person has to care and then think "someone should do something". Its the idea that someone can instead just not care even superficially that is disturbing.
To me, the idea that someone think "someone should do something" about that "something" is disturbing.
But this is HN, the place where those that make $100k/year a more wax poetically about the plight of poor people in third world countries while munching on the cheese and drinking the wine thinking that it is the waxing that counts.
Progressing beyond this is one of the important moral challenges faced by humanity.
There has been no evolutionary pressure to develop much of a concern beyond one or two generations.
And evolution hasn't equipped us with reward pathways or cognitive capacity to solve many of the problems now facing us and our surroundings - because those problems are new
I believe humanity could survive longer if people only cared enough to prepare for disasters they know will come, even if it's multiple generations into the future. This is like humanity is one big human procastinating. Some things can only be accomplished if you prepare for them with time.
There is quite a bit of mental variation. One of the rarest qualities I have found in people is the ability to connect abstractions to feelings. I once dated a woman who would sometimes get angry at me because she was mistaken. That is fine, as we are all human, sometimes one makes mistakes. However, she would stay angry at me even when I exonerated myself factually. I should've taken that as an early sign and bailed out of that relationship much sooner!
When hiring someone for a startup or choosing a co-founder, I would recommend that one look for this quality.
This is related to something I heard on "Fresh Air." The author of this book had a "bad boss" character who kept on calling things a "dog whistle." As far as he was concerned, a phenomenon he couldn't directly perceive might as well not exist. Such an idea strikes me as a degree of idiocy that makes me angry. The physical phenomenon of sound waves at higher than 20 kHz is a physical fact! Denying the truth of an objective fact because of a shortsighted prioritization of one's limited subjective point of view -- this is exactly the kind of thing that can get one in trouble, if one is doing substantive knowledge work!
Well, how many years ahead are you willing to worry? 10? 100? It sounds like you might be saying that you don't put much weight on the future of humanity on any timescale, and worry only about things that affect you personally. If so, then yes, I'd say that is the definition of selfish.
I'm sure most people don't either.
It might look this way, but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people", rather than just some people in some societies?
We're all selfish bastards.
I don't think this is true.
Let me reverse the question : how many years ahead is enough for you not to worry? A million years? Fifty billions? Do you worry about the ultimate fate of the universe[1]?
It's pretty clear to me that, all other things being equal, events tend to matter less and less as they are occurring further and further into the future. That's why, for instance, most young people don't worry much about death, unless they're told it will happen soon.
I don't have an accurate way to measure it, but to me, once you start talking about thousands of years, it's such a far future that I don't worry about it.
> but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people",
People are anxious or obsessed about many things, but I very rarely hear anyone whining about the future of the World in geological time scales. There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pa34orcwwA
A fair question. I'm not worried by the heat death of the universe, as I'm fairly certain that any action I take during my life will have no effect on it. I can't really picture the difference between a million years and a billion, so they don't really concern me, although I don't have a logical explanation for this.
My actual concerns vary between the 100 to 10,000 year time frame. I'm periodically incapacitated by my inability to find a convincing counterargument to the Great Filter theory, whereby the reason we haven't ever ever encountered aliens is because all civilizations collapse before achieving interstellar travel. While I'm doubtful that I can personally do anything to prevent this eventuality, when I do have hope, it's that I can make it slightly less likely or less catastrophic.
There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff.
Thanks for the link, although I find it more bittersweet than straightforwardly humorous. Having had similar failed conversations with psychological professionals over the years, I sympathize with young Alvy. I can say from experience that trying to explain your concerns about the 1000 year time frame doesn't go over any better.
The climate change bandwagon is joined only by tiny Europe and some parts of America. We Indians or our Chinese neighbors don't care much about global warming and will never care of course unless until we can guilt trip the rich nations into giving us money to do something in that case it is a good deal at the expense of people like you.
India + China is approx 1/3rd of world population. I think that should qualify for "most people".
What a great parent, theres nothing like over population to strain finite resources, plus it seems like a logical survival strategy or not, and in a way its a form of child abuse considering the Flynn effect, but Dunbars number is an indicator of intellect.
Call me selfish but some people dont worry about ensuring the stupid dont survive. For thousands of years clever people have been manipulating the stupid en masse sometimes called society, simply by putting the fear of god or whatever one's chosen sky fairy happens to be, into them.
Reap what you sow.
> A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me.
And if treated with a modicum of attention and love, it will be much wiser than you before it even enters school. Rationalizing having given up, and pretending everybody has, comes way after that.
When someone says that I ask them "Have you donated everything you made this month above the poverty level in your country to some kids who can't afford to eat say in Bangladesh per chance or its equivalent?" They typically respond with a "No" followed by a very convoluted explanation why it is the empathy that matters as in their view situational empathy should stop the moment such actions inconvenience them.
> the moment such actions inconvenience them
That's "not even silly", the threshold for "inconvenience" begins way earlier. And "caring for others" doesn't mean not caring for oneself, I'm also one of those other people, if you will. And your need to somehow disprove the empathy, love and/or generosity of everybody else, with such cheap sophistry to boot, says more about you than about the people you know nothing about. If you're looking for convolution, you might want to also look into that.
And why does caring for others only requiring those who get oppressed, and not attacking their oppressors? Give a man a fish, and he has a fish. Denazify the world and he has a place to raise kids in. Everybody has their own views what caring and doing good means, and comforting a bullied person ranks way lower for me than dealing with the bully. I wouldn't answer "no" and squirm, I'd laugh in your face.
Its also one of the reasons, why i like family fathers and mothers so much- even though most of them vote conservative. There is something selfish, that wants to see that the selfishness last forever. Thats why those future persons need a spokesman, a long term selfish bastard/algorithm, who is able to veto on short-term behavior that is ultimative self-destructive.
The problem here is, that with such a control mechanism, its easy to go idealistic and try to "patch" humanity up while your at it- ending up with something, somialhinn, socialism. So the patching up process, known as government, needs a reality check to prevent a run-a-way - and balances, to prevent a lock-out of the living from base resources and short term solutions on the way to long term solutions. Some flaws might be unfixable, and only work arounds will prevent them from flaring up again and again.
For example i can not get this generation to worry about the earth of tomorrows temperature.
The obvious solution would be to have a Future-Gen-House-of-Parliament veto on all usage of coal and oil. Leading to a total standstill. Thus the future-gen, could be bargained with- give us oil for another generation, and we will trade you in Carbon-Emission-Taxes and the development of fusion.
I dont claim to have a answer here, but it would be nice if there was some modeling software on how to build a better government here- including a simulation on how to reign in corroding elements like financially well endowed industries and tax-strained voters.
I think it is incredible arrogant to even assume that we can have any impact on future that distant. Most of our forefathers could not have imagined even a fraction of technological advancement we have achieved and compared to our children 500 years in future we are still pretty much uncivilized cavemans.
Cavemen should not bother about the earth, they should bother about themselves first.
If we're not impacting it... then who is?
Everybody's different, it doesn't do well to derive generalizations of society from your own internal conclusions.
> Toby Ord: Good question. I think just saying, “Okay, what about improving science?” my guess is that because this begets technology, which begets some of the risk, it’s unlikely that just pushing on that is a plausible thing to particularly help.
> ... They probably wouldn’t even know about asteroid risk, or super volcano risk, or various other natural risks.
I think talking about these kind of risks is a mistake. They're not the biggest thing on our plate and people will always be able to foresee them as too distant and too small.
~~~~~
> Robert Wiblin: We’ve talked a lot about reducing risks to the future. What about thinking about the opposite of that, which is extremely large upsides? Are there any practical ways that people might go about not so much preventing extinction or something horrible, but also trying to create something that’s much more positive than what we have reason to hope for?
> Toby Ord: It’s a good question. I’m not sure.
If you want a specific technology, work on electric transportation. Fossil fuel transportation in agriculture allowed us to scale up humanity to 7.5+ billion people, but it created a time-bomb because as soon as its too pricey to move food around, we can no longer create it as scale, and there's no going back to agrarian pastoral society without killing almost all the humans. Over the long term, we have a moral imperative to advance ourselves beyond fossil fuels for transportation. This is what I believe to be the most moral technology we could work on.[1]
"Humanity has a bug. We think of the future too little, and too often we think technology propels itself, that the future will simply unfold automatically. Or worse, many seem to have suffered a loss of faith in any real vision of the future. I wish this was not so."
[1] https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-technology-6413ca...
In practice it's a cargo cult ritual that leads to the conclusion that we should give within epsilon of zero fucks about anything that happens N years from now for sufficiently large N (which you get to choose as the author of an analysis).
That's partly because there's no mathematical difference in exponential discounting for the role played by 'pure rate of time preference' and the 'good' discount rate. It's always just 3.5% for no particular reason other than that's what in the back of the Treasury handbook written before 2008 during the Great Moderation.
Oh, and is 3.5% a reasonable number? Sounds kinda like inflation/mortgage rates, right? But if you look at CPI $100 dollars in 1817 is, equivalent to roughly $2k dollars in 2017. But would I rather spend this 'same' amount of money in 1817 or 2017? It's a no-brainer as long as I prefer penicillin and smart phones to legal opiods and vintage mustache waxing. This is really hard stuff to model, which is a clue that it doesn't get done.
If Ord and Wiblin could pick one easy fight to change about government policy making and promote longtermism it would be savaging the use of discounting in long term policy decisions rather than beating around the bush.
> Instead we will try to:
> 1. discount money in the normal way to take account of inflation and opportunity costs.
This is one of the problems with discounting though. Inflation is measured very badly over time due to technological change. If you go back to a policy maker in 1817 would have no idea that 2017 dollars could treat schistosomiasis, or any number of other medical conditions, so they would undervalue a 2017 dollar. I think it's fair to assume this process will continue to some extent over the next few hundred years.
This suggests that money is the wrong way to weigh up long term decisions. While problematic in their own way, something like QALYs and functions of QALYs could serve much better as a unit of account because their meaning is not relative with time. But you'd have to model how many you get in the future explicitly.
In terms of behaviour change, giving a mixed message is just going to excuse people falling back into the default method. This is what thoughtless acceptance of the default means:
http://www.heritage.org/environment/report/discounting-clima... http://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/questio...
So I think there's a real cost and risk associated with not taking a clear position on this.
Trying to reason about the future on cosmic scales is beyond our current and any foreseeable capabilities so let's discount that right away; we don't quite know if the universe will end in heat death (though we have some hints). We don't know if it is possible to create or move to other universes or even whether such a concept makes sense. As long as such things haven't been ruled out we can assume they're true: if life survives to the end of this universe it will have accumulated enough knowledge and technology to create or move to a new one.
Back in the present every species on earth is doomed. Whether an asteroid strike or the sun turning into a red giant eventually this planet will become uninhabitable.
It is not known whether intelligent life is a common result of evolution or we're a fluke. We do know it takes a very long time if it happens at all. It is possible we are the only highly intelligent species that will ever appear on this planet.
The primary responsibility of humanity then is to balance resource consumption with the creation of an interplanetary society first, then eventually an interstellar one. We must protect the earth's resources and preserve as many species as we can reasonably preserve... but we must also preserve modern technology and pursue the establishment of permanent self-sufficient colonies on other worlds in the solar system. Once we do so we must take and spread as many species from earth as we can. In the medium term (next million years) this isn't so important but once we can achieve some form of interstellar movement spreading life to other systems is key to ensuring it isn't wiped out (or reset back to single-cell organisms).
We are the only natural process capable of preserving life and so far as we are aware ours may be the only instance of life (or intelligent life) in the universe. What future iterations of life will make of such an opportunity we can only guess, but if we don't do it in all likelihood no one else ever will.
If no intelligent life survives then our existence is pointless and will be erased when the sun's red-giant phase scours every last trace that any living thing has ever existed from the face of the earth.
Even without going into rigorous philosophical discussion, if you still confidently claim that all of it is fatally worthless even after having seen as much of what there is to life, I think you seriously lack perception.
It's just shallow pessimism, not a thoughtful outlook on conscious existence.