Every good ideology needs a "Big Other" which subsumes all ordinary moral concerns. How could you think about something so trivial as the atrocity you see before your eyes when wealth formation/history itself/divine will/trillions of future human lives are at stake?
Big Ideas also inspire hope. Most people seem to be able to engage with them for this purpose without becoming evil. Yes, they also get abused for rationalization, but I'd caution against throwing babies out with the bathwater.
A philosophy differs from an ideology. Long-termism is a philosophy, meaning an abstract framework that is used an intellectual aid. An ideology, on the otherhand, is an all-encompassing world view, that inserts itself at the top of one's value hierarchy, and allows one to do as you describe: define any wrong as a necessary evil to fulfil the greater good.
The reason long-termism is merely a philosophy, and will remain so, is that it doesn't provide a narrative that lends itself to ideological zealotry. Ideological narratives are simplistic models of the world that can be easily digested, and provide a ready litmus test to categorize any person into one of three groups: victims, villains, or saviors.
Everyone thinks they're being reasonable.. and just for context: I don't put much stock in long-termism, but not because I see it as a potentially dangerous ideological dogma, but because I don't see it as that useful.
In my opinion, the tendency of the optimal action for short-term interests to coincide with the optimal action for long-term interests, and how much easier it is to determine the former over the latter, makes it better to focus primarily on the near future, with a less-well-defined long-term objective being used only to orient one's general direction.
Ironically this post only reinforced my longtermist leanings. I do value the species over the individual and I tend to think that if we don’t realign our incentives away from maximizing short term profits we may be destroying our future. Longtermism places species above nations, because nations can threaten our very survival. It’s the evolution of tribalism.
Longtermism, like many ideologies, sounds good on paper. The problem comes when you realize our ability to predict the future in a week is terrible, and a decade out is basically unknowable. You can pick out hindsight examples "oh X predicted Y" all day but hindsight is the mother of all survivorship biases. Therefore in the end, it ends up on the long list of ideologies that promise everything with no means to deliver it.
"Oh just suffer now for this guaranteed future benefit" "Whoops turns out the future is complicated and the suffering and hate was all for nothing"
I feel the same way about the AI ethicist people. We are mostly just guessing that AI will look and function like the sci-fi books we’ve read and how it will integrate/impact society. Not just in the “will we get real AGI” tech sense but even most so in how humans will learn to adapt and protect ourselves. Especially when it involves crippling our primitive AI R&D today for some indefinite future possibility.
One of those things makes claims about the future to justify whatever present actions people prefer.
The other warns about future dangers and cautions us not to take certain present actions. Slowing is not crippling, it's just conservative. And our species has a long history of abusing new tech and causing damage, which leads to strict, regressive reforms. And neither the damage nor the reforms are desirable.
> hindsight is the mother of all survivorship biases
Increasing the chances of success is not predicated on predicting the future. Another strategy (given our knowledge of evolution by natural selection) is that we can increase species chance of long term success by enabling more degrees of freedom so that the good “choices” survive.
Multiplanetaryism is such an example. Another is to avoid authoritarian structures because you don’t know a priory which ideas will turn out to be best/right. Hence, you want idea competition and not suppress dissent.
So, again, you don’t need to predict the future to increase chances of success.
I would say that controlling global warming is another way to increase our degrees of freedom for future choices.
I generally agree but many of the quotes in the article display the kind of extreme hubris that leads to taking large risks that increase our chances of existential doom.
> Another is to avoid authoritarian structures because you don’t know a priory which ideas will turn out to be best/right. Hence, you want idea competition and not suppress dissent.
It's important to note that high wealth inequality is an "authoritarian structure" in this respect because a small number of people end up controlling access to the capital necessary to realize an idea.
> because a small number of people end up controlling access to the capital necessary to realize an idea.
Ignoring the fact that capital isn't static (it is created), do you believe that if there's minimal wealth inequality that we'd see an explosion of great ideas that today aren't realized? If so, how would you account for the natural tendency for money to chase good ideas?
I don't know why people are obsessed with equity (physical or financial) capital.
Capital productivity theories should be rejected on the basis that they fail to consider input materials. The problem with this is that ultimately all value is derived from land or better yet, the universe and the laws of physics itself.
Those factors were not created but we can play attribution games and pretend they were.
Ok, so we should reject longtermism on the basis of rejecting authoritarianism. After all, people can just decide for themselves how future oriented they want to be.
Therefore there is no need for longtermists to force their opinions onto other people, no matter how enticing their expected value calculations are.
Or any philosophy, for that matter. I have been reading up on this subject, "What We Owe The Future" book lately. As I soak up more of the arguments, I see a lot of spilled ink, highly debatable key takeaways, and no practical recommendations for actions which were not already obvious.
In other words, the same thing you will get from any moral philosophy class. If you start philosophy expecting to get something tangibly productive... you are in for a disappointment.
For me, I think the important grain of salt is that better moral accuracy provides little to no value. You or I can do more good for the world with greater effort, but the efficacy of that good is mainly based on the real opportunities which we are connected to through the course of our actual lives. Different moral compasses would give slightly different answers, but the optimization makes a vanishingly thin difference. There was never much doubt about what was needed to be a better person, it's just self-interest and vices, which are completely known quantities, that keeps us from it. The exact flavor of utilitarianism under the hood is pretty much irrelevant.
I do find some value for philosophy as a thought exercise that allows us to entertain radical thought experiments far from the mainstream (see internet trolley cart memes). However, as I see longtermism now, it's pretty vanilla.
>"Oh just suffer now for this guaranteed future benefit"
I don't know why but Austrian Economists genuinely believe in pure time preference theory. They say time preference (there are multiple kinds) is always positive because nobody would delay consumption unless they get rewarded.
Therefore delaying consumption always deserves a reward no matter whether the economy is growing or shrinking. Essentially this is a belief that all present suffering will result in a better future. In other words, longtermism is a very hardcore capitalist philosophy.
The party poopers talking about finite resources and increasing entropy should just shut up.
I believe that some degree of longtermism is a requirement for consistent progress… yes, there’s a lot of pressing problems that need to be addressed today, but at the same time humanity isn’t going to be moving forward as a whole if everybody is busy staring at their feet.
It’s only natural for some number of people to be concerned with making sure that tomorrow brings progress on some axis, because that is not something that just happens on its own. Progress, particularly leaps of it, is made as a result of people having “outlandish” visions and working to achieve them.
Yes this sounds great but the issue is about how longtermists revel in the opportunity to sacrifice near term goals for long term ones, in an almost pathological way. I still don't understand why there should be any conflict between aggressive environmentalism and longtermism, but it keeps coming up over and over again. All I can think of is that longtermists want to demonstrate how truly long-term they are and therefore act like one of the most pressing current issues is secondary to a bunch of other stuff. In general and in the absence of more info I think it's safe to go for the proximal goal of stabilizing the world's ecosystems, even though it _could_ in theory be a non-existential risk. All of that said, the conflict between longtermism and environmentalism might mostly be manufactured by the critics of longtermism, like the author of this article.
> if we don’t realign our incentives away from maximizing short term profits we may be destroying our future.
What does that look like, in practice?
It seems to me the magic of Longtermism is that when time horizons can be arbitrarily set, anything that one dislikes or doesn't care about can be dismissed as "short term."
Longtermists disregard people who only care about the next thousand years, for instance.
Surely, at some point the human ability to process information reaches its end right? Talking about millions of years in the future is beyond any individual
Wild. This was only a weak criticism and still made longtermism look embarrassingly bad.
Why do longtermists put any faith in their ability to discern the current state of the world, to discern the consequences of current events, of their own actions, of reactions to their reactions, etc? Tremendous measurement and prediction error in all these even if you give it a couple coats of "rational" paint so you feel smart when you talk about it.
Any reasonable course of action under so much uncertainty would not try to wiggle the entire future, but to accomplish some smaller part of "the work" now, taking responsibility for something you can actually understand (not just delude yourself into imagining you understand). Go work on some constituent component of spaceflight, maybe, at best. AI X-risk is still OK but only to the extent your work accomplishes anything (thus far—zilch, all wasted.) But absolutely anything else done in service of the "species" is the grandiose delusion of children, and can be used to justify anything. If the species will survive anyway, then you're just comparing infinities—so some other criteria is needed. Better pick a good one and now you still have to decide what Good is. The "longtermist" imagines themself above all finite concerns. The only work good enough for their ego is lecturing others about the vastest things possible.
Early 20thc eugenics committed a fallacy constantly that comes up here too. You learn about evolution, you learn that the ultimate "goal" of evolution is to survive and thrive and outcompete, and then you falsely conclude that therefore you should make that your goal. Not so. It does not follow. You just found some reason to justify your desire to glorify yourself.
Same for long-termism. The species ought to survive, but when you make that your personal objective, you reject all the other emotions that have evolved to ensure survival and have done so so far, in particular, caring for the wellbeing of people around you, and the capacity to solve actual problems, at a scope where you can understand the consequences of your actions.
Furthermore, in other words—god this makes me so mad—it's a question of responsibility. The species has loads of people to take responsibility for it, and will have an infinitely more in the future. The people who need help immediately around you? The actual world? Not so much. If you completely dissociate from your physical existence in the world and imagine all people everywhere at all times as equidistant from you, like a god, well great, but I suspect you're doing that because you're too vain and hurt and too much of a coward to engage with the world around you in all its painful reality—painful to you, because it will remind you that you haven't felt like a valid part of it YET, and you never WILL until you accomplish the Work that makes you worthy of existing—fixing everything everywhere for all time, but starting with—nothing, nowhere, ever. You'd do well to notice that you have voluntarily accepted responsibility for this on some trumped-up rational basis because that's actually EASIER than doing something once for anyone that actually exists.
Not so far into the future, people probably won't even be the same species. Even back a couple hundred thousand years, we probably couldn't mate with our ancestors. Does longtermism place value on making sure future people are genetically similar to us?
Species don't seem that important to me, in the long-term, as they are all quite ephemeral.
The importance of species shows up in longterm focus on AI. They are worried that AI will eliminate or replace humans. It ignores that AI could be people. Are faithful AI better descendants than diverged humans?
Consider the scenario when humans can't live off of Earth so it isn't possible to colonize the galaxy. What is the value of Earth humans compared to AI that can spread across the galaxy?
> my longtermist leanings. I do value the species over the individual
Do you think the essay misrepresents "big L" Longtermist beliefs? My reading of it makes it seem that "value the species over the individual" maybe does not reflect their goals very accurately.
I tend to think in the long term myself. I like a lot of the same goals that Longtermists have: using technology to make ourselves better than we are, and expanding into other star systems being the most obvious ones.
On the other hand, I don't consider myself a Longtermist. I think it's completely futile to try to calculate "utility" for individuals, and abhorrent to develop a society that tries to forcibly maximize that imaginary "utility" number, instead of letting people choose for themselves, because I believe that trying to forcibly maximize a value that can't actually be measured accurately would inherently reduce the overall happiness of the entire species.
In other words, rather than "value the species over the individual", I would describe Longtermism (as portrayed in the article) as trying to forcibly scale up act-utilitarianism to apply to everyone, everywhere, all the time. At that scale, it can superficially seem like valuing the species, but IMO if one actually wants to think in the long term, rule-utilitarianism should be the guiding philosophy. Rule-utilitarianism makes it even more impossible to calculate results, of course, so it can only be a philosophy, not a rigid system of data and calculation.
One problem with neoclassical economics is that utility curves are unobservable and they have philosophical origin.
At some point some has to decide what utility really means and capitalists run into the problem that they run out of things to invest that turn a profit and even if they don't, the profit they get becomes increasingly meaningless. At some point all forms of investment become recreational, just like a video game.
>Even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years
This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook
"This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook"
I think one of us misinterpreted the statement then. My understanding is that the author is labeling the people who believe this as 'dangerous' (close enough to 'kook').
The author themselves believes this statement. They are arguing that the dangerous view is one that looks at the trillion-year timeframe rather than the 100-year one
It does if you remove the previous sentences that are quoted in another comment: "Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why?"
That makes it obvious that it is not what author believes but what author is saying the longtermers believe.
This because climate doomerist rhetoric gets a free pass because most people agree with the general goal to reduce our impact on the climate.
I can live a long and happy life without my pinky finger, but pointing this out doesn't mean I want to lose my finger. I will continue take care when using a saw.
One scary thing that's been becoming uncomfortably evident to me lately is that a lot of things are fragile. Things like countries are very dependent on uncoded, informally agreed on standards of decency. And it takes surprisingly little to throw the system into chaos if there's a group that wants it badly enough, or the people maintaining stability relax too much, or the wrong crisis happens at the wrong time.
Climate change affects many millions of people. That can easily cause mass events like famines, economical crashes, mass unemployment, war and mass migration, and those things quite easily affect countries around it and so on.
So I'm not too optimistic about seeing it as a "pinky finger". The best outcome I see is something like ruining the wine harvest. Yeah, not ideal, but we can live with that. But it's unlikely to stop at that, because millions of unhappy farmers won't just sit quietly and can make a very big mess.
I mean it kind of goes without saying that as long as climate change doesn't make us extinct, it wont matter on a time scale that includes things like the sun exploding. I suspect you don't hear the statement much because it isn't particularly controversial.
The comparison being made in the article is to the longtermist notion of "existential catastrophe" --- even if the impact of climate change reduced humanity to the Stone Age, it wouldn't qualify as such in some longtermist thought, because 10^100 years is a very long term, more than enough for humanity to rebound.
Put differently: he is indeed implying that people that appeal to this idea are kooks.
> reduced humanity to the Stone Age, it wouldn't qualify as such in some longtermist thought, because 10^100 years is a very long term, more than enough for humanity to rebound
Practically speaking, we wouldn't have that long. Until humanity escapes our solar system, it's on a much shorter 5 billion year clock.
Which is still a lot of time, but we need to live past our solar system before we can really start thinking in trillions of years.
The assumption is that we are going to capture hawking radiation from black holes and live in some kind of Dyson sphere after the heat death of the universe. I am not making this up.
That’s pretty nihilistic. And usually written by people who don’t have to suffer from climate change consequences like mass migrations. And by the way in 500 million years the sun will boil the Earth anyways, so let’s just give up completely and do nothing.
"One survey even found that more than half of the people asked about humanity’s future ‘rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next 100 years at 50 per cent or greater.’"
This is so vague it's not even applicable here. It doesn't even imply an apocalypse. No shit our way of life will be different in the next 100 years. Just look at what life was like 100 years ago - completely different.
We don't know whether the survey participants were given the word risk, or whether the authors of the report introduced it. We don't know how risk was defined to the participants either.
I think it comes down to the definition of "love".
There are limits to how far you can redefine what it means to "love" a particular person in your life because we all have a natural intuition of what it is like to live harmoniously with someone in love. People can sense when you're actually acting out of self interest because they can relate to the same temptation. However, there's no way analogous way to call bullshit when you try to redefine "love" for humanity as a whole because it's not even clear what that means. Longtermists have defined loving humanity as a whole as wanting to maximize a metric of how many people exists across the universe, but seeing "loving" humanity that way isn't really a shared experience. There are so many alternate metrics you can come up with about "loving" humanity (spreading democracy and "freedom" or eliminating prejudice get talked about the same way).
The problem is in mixing up the metaphor with the real thing. Especially with media technologies it's tempting to hold up loving humanity above loving other people because it seems so much bigger and more universal, but ironically this is exactly backwards. Love of humanity is just a simulacra of loving real people.
A relevant quote that came to mind from Brothers Karamazov:
I love humanity ... but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams ... I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self‐complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty‐four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me.
...
Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.
"Why do I think this ideology is so dangerous? The short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years."
Right, so, for example the long-termist says no need to worry about global warming, it'll just be a blip in the history of our species.
Meanwhile, the short-termist says, not need to worry about global warming, because it's not that big of a deal right now (they'll figure it later).
I mean, it's pretty obvious that either of these extremes is mistaken. When modeling these sorts of decisions (whether its in RL or in cost/reward analysis), choosing the "right" temporal discounting parameter is crucial. But what that parameter's value should be often comes down to values, morality, philosophy and ethics.
I think the author's fear of longtermism is misplaced, because longtermism is not really manifest anywhere in actual decision making. If anything, it might be used to mask what are actually short-termist motivations for doing short-sighted things (like continuing to rely on fossil-fuels).
One does wonder when all these longtermist people tend to be already pretty successful and rich in their own personal short terms.. Not to mention how all these longterm ethical guidelines seem to validate or forgive their lucrative enterprises. Perhaps even in the best of intentions they aren't epistemologically equipped for this kind of thinking!
Even as a longtermist, I wouldn't discount global warming so fast. Even if you categorize it as a "non-existential" threat (which I wouldn't be so sure of - you just have to look at Venus to see where global warming can lead to), it took less than what we are currently facing to throw (European) civilization back for about 1000 years when the Roman Empire fell.
yes. that's why we have so many written records from western europe at that time <sarcasm>. it's called dark ages for a reason: the paucity of written records from that period. And there is a reason for that!
It really isn't called that anymore by people who study that period. There is a reason for that.
The concept of "dark age" is a cultural myth that is not backed by our modern work on understanding of the period.
Perhaps you think you know better, but before you entrench yourself in that belief you would be well served to spend some time reading the works of those who have spent their lives studying that period.
This feels like quite the large strawman in TFA. Most of the folks I've talked to in longtermist-adjacent circles (futurists, effective altruists, etc., that crowd) see climate change as a very real existential risk, for the same reason the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists do: it greatly increases the risk of large-scale conflict which could lead to nuclear war. Even if Homo sapiens survives, there's an existential state where we knock our progress so far back, we aren't able to re-bootstrap the industrial revolution, due to depletion of surface-level resources at a scale sufficient to restart industry.
So yes, climate change does have the potential to compromise our existence over trillions of years.
I think the bigger problem with this movement is the concentration of already-wealthy types amongst its adherents, which skews the overall perspective away from more common plights.
Yeah took a while trying to find the actual thesis among all the preamble.
My biggest issue with this article as a whole is that every philosophy falls apart when applied in extremes, in fact the examples here are basically the same as the arguments against pure unflinching utilitarianism.
Do any of the named longtermists actually view humanity's potential above all else, or are they just prioritizing spending resources on avoiding existential risks?
The problem is, it is not obvious what the 'correct' decision is today to maximize the future lives. It's all guesses, for longtermist and presentist. Its just that the longtermism people are using this long term argument for things they do want now, but are potentially 'atrocities', but in the view of infinity looks logical. So dress up some logic using the infinite future with trillions of lives, to make my current bad decision seem reasonable. Its tipping the scales when they also do not know which is best decision.
If there is any technological progress trend, then in the long term people will be vastly, incomprehensibly richer than us and so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are.
Ask not what you can do for the future, ask why those b*stards aren't helping us.
>then in the long term people will be vastly, incomprehensibly richer than us
Like Rome after the fall was so much richer than before?
Or how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so much better with the advent of nuclear fission technology? Since, technology basically just makes us richer and safer and everything!
Or like how the average working/middle class US (or European) family is so much more comfortable than in decades before?
>so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are.
Like how we have the best government and Presidents ever?
And the best infrastructure and public policy, and the more capable?
A lot of this attitude is from people in the upper class (at least salary wise) who can't fathom anybody else suffering more now, because it's business as usual or better than ever for them...
This is a bit silly. Imagine life without even commonplace things such as easy access to food, or corrective glasses, or sun cream, or Paracetamol, or a Polio vaccine, or a car, or a bike? You don't need to be rich to access some of the biggest jumps in quality of life in history.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are way better off today than they were before World War 2 lmao
They have the same issues Japan does now (birth rate, long working hours, etc), but they’re not radioactive wastelands like people assume. In a lot of ways their infrastructure is better than the best cities in America
>Hiroshima and Nagasaki are way better off today than they were before World War 2 lmao
Which is neither here nor there lmao.
Were they better in 1947? 1950? Were even the same people alive when they were rehabitated? I'm pretty sure Rome, the other example I mentioned, is also better off today than the 5th century AD.
But the point was that "future == better" is not some guarantee. It might be much worse. Or better for some other people, after decades or generations of people have suffered in between a 'good present' and that 'good future', and then again worse, or any such combination.
What you described is mere technology and conveniences accumulated, which yes, it's often just increasing, though not even this is guaranteed (many places post war or economic collapse lost a lot of their prior conveniences and technology infrastructure). But societies can be optimistic for life, happy, and dynamic in times with less, and be depressed, stressed out, or squeezed in a rat race in times with more. This can even coincide with other things getting better for this or that segment: say, X improving (say network connectivity or gay rights), while cost of living, health costs, prospects of retiring, precarity of work getting worse for a big majority ever since the 70s.
Compate Hiroshima's fate to that of Pyongyang, and maybe a one-time atomic bombing doesn't sound so bad. It was necessary to give Stalin something to think about -- even if our own planners didn't see it that way at the time.
>It was necessary to give Stalin something to think about.
I really wish this meme would die. There's no evidence the US dropped the atomic bombs on Japan as a show of force to Stalin, yet people constantly state it as if it were proven fact. All of the existing documentary evidence from the time points to the purpose of the atomic bombs being to force a surrender from Japan and avoid the cost of an invasion of the main islands.
People need to accept that sometimes the straightforward explanation is actually correct. It isn't always a smokescreen of propaganda hiding a nefarious motive or conspiracy. Yes, the US was concerned about dealing with Russia after the war. No, not to the degree that they were willing to nuke two Japanese cities just to spook him.
Yes, the US was concerned about dealing with Russia after the war. No, not to the degree that they were willing to nuke two Japanese cities just to spook him.
Agreed, and I edited my comment to clarify. It's funny how it had that effect, though, isn't it? War might change, but Russians never do. They respect force and violence, nothing else.
My response was to coldtea's snark: Or how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so much better with the advent of nuclear fission technology? Since technology basically just makes us richer and safer and everything! Yes, in fact, it absolutely did make Japan "richer and safer and everything," by ensuring that the country didn't become the scene of an epic, likely-endless battle with Communist forces for control of the Pacific.
For an additional gedanken exercise, contemplate the likely effect on the net well-being of North Korea's population over time if MacArthur had been given a free hand by Truman.
> It's funny how it had that effect, though, isn't it?
Did it, in the long term? We know Russia had spies inside the Manhattan Project. They knew what the US was doing, and it seems as if their plan was to get their own nuclear arsenal as soon as possible. In hindsight they don't seem to have been deterred at all.
Certainly they were inspired to build their own nuclear arsenal as soon as possible. But Japan was firmly under US hegemony by the time they succeeded, and no longer in play.
The standard assumption seems to be that the US had two options: shock-and-awe by dropping the bombs or engaged in a protracted invasion of the home islands.
Were there other options? By the last months of the war, they had largely lost control of the naval and air spaces. Japan was an import-dependent economy to begin with, and had consumed everything that wasn't nailed down for the war effort.
Couldn't they just be blockaded? Either they end up an isolated novelty that occasionally scrapes together enough scrap iron to launch a low-grade weapon, sort of like the DPRK is seen today, or it "starves out a surrender" by allowing domestic conditions to collapse, potentially nudging a coup towards a new regime who's more willing to negotiate.
That might take 5 or 10 years to reach endgame, but it seems like a less direct, but still viable way to complete the war.
Let’s not forget the Soviet’s. We didn’t want them to invade Japan first, we needed to end the war before they could have an excuse to do so as our ally (which was already coming undone by the end of WW2).
That might take 5 or 10 years to reach endgame, but it seems like a less direct, but still viable way to complete the war.
This plan would have killed more people, and caused far more net suffering, than simply nuking a couple of cities.
As a similar example, it's true that letting MacArthur use nukes would have been a monstrous act of evil that would have put the US up there with the Nazis in the annals of infamy... but it's also true that more North Koreans would be alive and well today if we had. We could hardly have done more damage with our bombs than the Kim family did with ideology.
Of course that's a simplistic assessment that ignores the consequences of normalizing nuclear warfare at a time when its destructive capacity was ramping up at an exponential rate. But it is entirely fair to apply it to Japan at the end of WWII, when the lesson was relatively cheap to learn.
That's the trouble with utilitarianism, isn't it? Even the very wise can't see all ends.
In any case we're discussing the historical intersection of postwar Japan and Soviet expansionism, not an anonymous American city nestled safely in the twenty-first century.
Nagasaki was some fairly unimportant Japanese city nestled safely in Kyūshū, as they probably thought sometime in the 1920's.
I personally find utilitarian views abhorrent. Even if the ends justified the means, I doubt the most adherent utilitarian would put his neck on the line if his head on the plate would be the best outcome for humanity as a whole. It's pure hypocrisy to justify exploitation.
I'm wondering what the other ethical positions would have done when choosing between dropping a nuke on a city or going ahead with a land invasion. Neither of which has anything to do with exploitation, and everything to do with ending a war.
Ehh, I think the usage of atomic bombs had nothing to do with ending the war, and everything to do with military dick-waving.
"We have nukes, and we're not afraid to use it".
Well, it's war. Discussing morality of actions in war is a fool's errand. Typically the actions of the winners are morally justifiable because they won, and for this reason they tend to write history.
The thinking was Japan, like Germany, had to unconditionally surrender. Whether that was from firebombing, nuking or a land invasion. Germany took a land invasion by both fronts. I'll agree that morality goes out the window in war. You try to win and then justify what you had to do to win.
Hint: Most countries in Japan's position would surrender after being nuked once. Actually most countries in Japan's position, with the Soviets charging in from one flank and the Americans on the other, would have surrendered long before that.
And, given that the leader finally did surrender after being told twice, most countries wouldn't have a junta conspiring to assassinate him so that they could keep fighting.
Japan wasn't -- and isn't -- "most countries." Monday morning quarterbacking is always fun but I'm personally glad I wasn't in that particular decision loop in the Oval Office. As goatlover so wisely suggests, war is basically a contest to see who can pull the most horrific atrocities on the other guy. We ultimately won the game but Japan gave it one hell of an effort.
They would certainly have done the same to us, given the technology, and without as much as 1% of the guilty feelings afterward.
And it would later be justified as it being necessary for the US to surrender, and maybe now we would be discussing in Japanese how a couple of US cities are much nicer some 70 years after being nuked.
Either way, this is already far beyond the point of the thread.
They sit in comfortable homes with clean running hot and cold water, air conditioning, refrigeration, automated clothes and dish washers, waterproof under tile laminates, municipal sewer service which can be provided cheaper and faster then at any point in history, and electric lightning with tens of thousands of hours of lifetime at 30% quantum efficiency.
They use a computer which has more power then took us to the moon, connect instantly across half the planet, and post a lament: "has technology really made our lives better?"
This is an important question. Just like with AI, future generations don’t need us because history and the arrow of time has already caused them to emerge — there’s more risk for them in changing the past (our current time) than just let it be. How much do you care about going back in time and help your 10 generations ago ancestor have better access to clean water?
There are more ways to be dead than being alive. They're alive in their future time (they won the lotto!); any change they make in the past carries the risk that their future selves won't emerge.
> If there is any technological progress trend, then in the long term people will be vastly, incomprehensibly richer than us
There are still people who enjoy "roughing it", some who enjoy it so much they spend large amounts of their lives effectively living as pre-agricultural people did.
As is seen in ennui and frustration among the rich, or grouchiness among the old, the human psyche adapts to what it is used to in terms of emotional responses.
> so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are.
We are still dealing with the fallout (literal, and figurative) of tetraethyl lead. Stopping it at the beginning would have been far more cost effective, and "deal with it" effective, than all of the technology we have put into remediating it since. This is one example. An ounce of prevention is often far better than a pound of cure. Let's let future scientists, who will be far more capable than us, invent new things instead of spending their efforts rectifying our mistakes.
Imo, you can have all of the philosophical arguments you want but in the end, how do you make people go along with your goals? Not everyone is ever on board and the 'means' of the famous idiom have looked the same everywhere for most of human history.
Maybe we should first be more effective at policing our means than dream up better ends. The chosen means of centuries ago caused what people want to heal now. The ends (colonial industry, hegemony, religion, power) didn't matter at all for the people who were their victims.
Edit:
What if, by being too zealous, longtermists damage the image of their goal so much that it won't be seen as acceptable to pursue for centuries (ref. communism).
This is the challenge that "degrowth" or other scarcity-rooted environmentalists have. When you are pushing a promise of deprivation on the currently comfortable, your message is going to struggle to gain traction. For any movement, it is of primary tactical importance to have a message that is appealing to your audience.
It's not the currently comfortable who push back the most, it's those who don't have much and hear that they will have to lose even that (even if this is not true).
Constraints on the rich are popular even among some of the rich. Shared suffering is something the poor, rightfully, don't believe.
I feel like you are missing an opportunity here, the submission is about longtermism.
If you wanted to stay on topic you would say something like, if people have the option of certain deprivation and uncertain deprivation (effects of climate change) they will choose uncertain deprivation and that is exactly the problem with longtermism as well.
Of course, also, can't fight "Moloch". To best help the future, we should change ourselves in the present to not fall into the traps, local minima, "Moloch" has set out. This isn't going to happen through any philosophy or social program, we need to change ourselves as humans into something else. Some genetic change to change our brain to not 'keep up with the neighbors', and all of the other drives that make us form hierarchies and consume. But then, we wouldn't be human anymore, so does this violate longtermism?
In order to save humanity, we would need to stop being human.
OR the opposite, humans are not going to make it.
Why? Humanity has had a pretty good run so far with all of its flaws, Dr. Frankensteining the entire species out of some general dislike of competition has barely any upside and a ton of downside
Guess responding more directly to the 'longtermism' argument.
If we , humans today, are so awful at making decisions (with our drive towards consuming, hierarchies, war), that we need to stop doing what we are doing, and focus on the future or we will die out.
Then, what I am saying is, there is no way to do that, other than to change ourselves to not be human. There is no way to form an organization, or re-work capitalism, or form a new government, to change the future, because all of the human based drives will remain and inevitably devolve to the current situation again. Over millions of years, we'll get what we have now, unless we change what we are. And the longtermism people are saying what we have now is no good, will lead to us dyeing out.
Because as the longtermist state, if we are heading towards dying out because of our current human decisions, then how can we do otherwise except to change our human reasoning.
Even if we accept their motivations at face value (which is naive), it's a totally incoherent morality. There are infinitely many future states with trillions of of lives. Which one is the one we attach moral value to? If it's all of them, then every single decision you make is equivalent to killing infinitely many future people. If it's one particular future state how do we decide which one? (I am not, of course, saying that you shouldn't value making the future better, just that applying this specific kind of utilitarian calculus to future humans is childish nonsense.)
It's somewhat dangerous, agree, especially if it was to be a commonly held opinion. But it's likely just another folly that (it seems) mostly the rich and powerful use to fill their minds with delusions of grandeur, but one in a long row of such delusions. I doubt it will be of any real consequence except as an elitist project.
That said, the article touches on the type of folly that this is: i.e. mixing the "goals" of the species with that of individuals, as if the trajectory of the species was like getting an education and a career. This leap is more common than we might imagine and I believe it is caused by an underestimated characteristic of the human mind: we take esoteric knowledge that has been presented to us by instruments of science and transpose these concepts onto familiar things: a planet is like an orange, the atomic system is like an apple with electrons like busy bees swirling round it, gravity is like a steel ball in a rubber net and so on. It gives us the impression that we know things when we (at least as amateurs) will likely miss out on essential properties that we have not yet grasped, because these things are so far removed from our everyday reality.
It is the same with the concept "species" in this case. It is a largely scientific concept, for the individual it is only really relevant if the other person is possible to mate and get offspring with. That's the concept of species we have had as humans for millions of years, it's likely to continue to be so, and who knows where that will take us. It's really none of my business.
> we take esoteric knowledge that has been presented to us by instruments of science and transpose these concepts onto familiar things: a planet is like an orange, the atomic system is like an apple with electrons like busy bees swirling round it, gravity is like a steel ball in a rubber net and so on. It gives us the impression that we know things when we (at least as amateurs) will likely miss out on essential properties that we have not yet grasped, because these things are so far removed from our everyday reality.
“Us” is misleading.
I highly doubt that those who are thinking seriously about how to extend the species success in time and space (and taking actions that make a difference) think of atoms or earth in the way you describe.
Having spoken to a few of them, I doubt they think of those things any other way. Someone who is trying to think of the big picture necessarily has to abstract a few things. They know that a planet is not an orange, and can describe it in detail, but in the grand model of the big picture, a planet gets modeled with simplifications (to make reasoning possible) that reduce it to a big orange. Many people don't deeply interrogate these simplifications at all to understand whether they are correct.
Well you’d hope it’s not just an individual figuring this stuff how but a body of research and debate among many people which is honest and open enough to cut into assumptions and challenge them. Like all good science. Although I don’t know enough about longtermism to make a critique of their ideas.
I don't think the debate is very open about assumptions, and this is not science, this is basically at the border of philosophy and religion. I personally think that a lot of long-terminist thinkers today have separate sets of simplifying assumptions (which they do not question), but come to some sort of negotiated compromise on what the future holds in order to fund projects, for example. This is the worst of all possible forms of discussion.
It seems clear that they take the concept of "species" (which scientifically is a fuzzy concept, and where each "species" is without any inherent goals as far as we can tell) and transpose it onto a much simpler concept, which can have goals much like individuals (hence the orange).
I get the longing for new ideology, but that's not going to be it. Dominating intent to identify, predict and mitigate "existential risks" is simply arrogant.
The underlying concern isn't complicated, and it's stated succinctly in a single sentence in the middle of the article, quoting Bostrom:
"[E]ven if there is ‘a mere 1 per cent chance’ of 10^54 people existing in the future, then ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth 100 billion times as much as a billion human lives[...]"
The problem, in other words, is that these people are aspiring Bond villains.
That’s what it might mean on paper when you get philosophical but I’m more curious what it means day to day.
Is this just a giant opportunity cost risk where a bunch of wealthy people are donating money in X potentially wasteful “charity” instead of more local/timely Y organization? Or is there some more tangible harm?
What makes it perfectly supervillainous is the idea that resources should be directed away from present, obvious harms towards speculative future charms on the "one billionth of one billionth of one percent" chance of safeguarding an intergalactic expansion of humanity. The bar is so low you can divert money away from malaria and towards establishing Professor Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters, on the billion-billionth chance that mutant superpowers will emerge.
The amount we spend on malaria prevention rounds to zero. We are at no risk of spending all our resources on malaria prevention. Like I said, this is Bond villain thinking.
It is "bond villian thinking" in the sense that it is fictional. Indeed, the Author of this article has a long history of deliberately misrepresenting the views of longtermists.
In particular, there is significant overlap between longtermists and members of the EA community that donate a portion of their income to Malaria prevent that does not round to zero.
The "Future of Humanity" article your link cites is a wonderful illustration of the phenomenon I'm describing, and thank you for providing it. It nitpicks percentage probabilities of environmental catastrophe (and the downstream effects of those catastrophes) in order to distinguish them from the real threats, which are characterized in part by Bostrom's assigned percentage probability ranges to such things as nanotechnological breakthroughs, neurotechnical rewiring of brains, and the vast, uncharted possibilities of (checks again) prediction markets.
I'm happy with what this thread says about our respective positions! We disagree, and that's fine.
I don't see how that paper illustrates that Bolstrom is a "James Bond Villian"... I also don't think that is a very constructive or productive way to criticize longtermists beliefs or arguments. I would much rather under the specific issues you have as I don't feel like I understand your position very well.
> nitpicks percentage probabilities of environmental catastrophe (and the downstream effects of those catastrophes) in order to distinguish them from the real threats, which are characterized in part by Bostrom's assigned percentage probability ranges to such things as nanotechnological breakthroughs, neurotechnical rewiring of brains,
I don't see much discussion, let alone nitpicking of those probabilities, nor do I seem any assignment of probability ranges in that paper.
The closest I can find is where he discounts the predicted reduction of GPD due to global warming by comparing it to the last century of global GDP growth on page 13. To me this does seem a bit myopic as the potential for secondary effects, like an uptick in regional conflicts or the disruptive effects of mass migration seem extremely hard to predictively model and discount.
The only place where I see Bostrom make probabalistic claims is where he talks about how the chances of a plateaued or recurrent collapse scenario seem to decrease as the time scale increases which the chances of a posthuman or extinction scenario increase. While we can't ascribe specific or even vague probabilities to these scenarios with any degree of accuracy for any timeframe, the overall statement about how these probabilities change as the timescale increases seems very reasonable. If this is what you disagree with, I'd be very curious to understand your reasoning.
I think it suffices to respond that I attach some importance (not all the importance, but some) to estimates of the likelihood and cost of global climate catastrophe generated by thousands of specialist scientists working on the problem, and zero importance to the probabilities Bostrom attaches to technologies that don't exist today and the impacts they will have on society.
Later
The rebuttal in the blog post you cited previously is weak (it depends on the claim that Bostrom is discussing a hypothetical "standard utilitarian", when he uses similar logic to attribute the same conclusions, with some "modifications", to (what I'll call, because he's pilfered the word "standard") "normal" utilitarians. But that's neither here nor there. The Bostrom article he cites does a fine job of making my point for me.
Eh. Bond villains are self-interested and cynical. These are altruistic idealists trying to immanentize the eschaton: The world is unjust and disordered (it’s too short-term focused). And we can fix it and bring about a state of justice (a long term focus). And this is such a big deal don’t need to pay too much attention to how we do it, what we inflict on others by us fixing it, or our conflicts of interest; we’re Justified.
Bostrom's moral logic has always been the philosophybro version of using numerically unstable floating point algorithms. He contrives to find situations where multiplying a tiny probability by an enormous weighting factor leads to some kind of publishable result in doomsday philosophy, where the bar is not set high.
The thinking appears to be that even if the ideas in each individual paper are trifling, publishing a sufficient number of them will lead in the aggregate to a great lurch forward for human thought.
The fact that some of the world's most annoying people (eg Musk, Thiel) are throwing money at this should clue you in to the point: it is about maintaining the current economic structure and, in "ideal" world, living forever (eg transhumanism, mentioned in the article) to "enjoy" it for the very few on top.
Honestly I draw some comfort from our own mortality because the very worst people ultimately die too. If we ever achieve effective immortality, part of me believes that could be truly catastrophic for society.
> We can now begin to see how longtermism might be self-defeating.
Karl Marx talked abou tthe contradictions inherent in capitalism and that it was ultimately unsustainable in the 1840s through the over-accumulation or cconcentration of capital. Marx predicted a response to this being a revolution by the proletariat, which has thus far not come to pass, but the tool for squashing uprisings has been and continues to be fascism.
Marx also failed to predict that communist governments would try to implement their take on Marxist policies and those ended up being worse than the capitalist ones.
Communism predates Marx (to the 18th century) and differs from socialism. Both seek to have labor own the means of production but communism also concerns itself with consumption (Marx: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs").
But really what you're talking about is what's called Marxist-Leninism as crafted by the Bolshevik in Russia in 1917 and beyond.
But what Marx is really known for is creating an analytical framework to be able to discuss these things. Abraham Lincoln's views on this pretty closely match Marx's, as an aside.
> ... those ended up being worse than the capitalist ones.
You really want to start comparing communist outcomes against Western colonialism and imperialism? The slave trade? And you can rightfully say a bunch of bad things about Stalin but he'll always get credit for killing Nazis and defeating Hitler (at an absolutely horrendous cost, as an aside).
Mao and Pol Pot don't get credit. Colonialism predates capitalism. Imperialism is something empires have historically done, regardless of the economic system. Slavery existed in the ancient world. How about capitalism in the 20th century compared to communism?
Any prediction more than 50 years in the future is pure guesswork. There are just too many interconnected feedback loops and branching possibilities. This applies to any side of any debate, be it climate, economy, social sciences and so on. This applies to doom-sayers and it_will_be_fine-ers. This applies to the original article as well.
That being said humanity evolves having multiple camps, each with their own ideas, fighting, competing, allying with each other. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, rinse and repeat. And we are the definition of adaptability. I would not be worried unless some camp gains absolute power monopoly over a very long period of time. Which is, funny enough, what every camp tries to do with the worse or best intentions.
> Any prediction more than 50 years in the future is pure guesswork.
Predictions are a curious thing. They also shape current behavior and thinking, either in alignment with making those predictions becoming more likely to be true eventually, or fires up opponents.
> technology is far more likely to cause our extinction before [the Sun goes out] than to save us from it
Surely there is some middle ground between this neo-ludditism espoused by the author and the outright fascism of longterminists that can justify any current action if it's somehow even marginally likely to decrease existential risk?
For example, we could agree that current lives and suffering are morally superior to possible lives in the future, and that technology can help us solve our quintessential human problems, such as competition for resources, disease and death.
We are a technological species since the first rock hit the first bone, and what "humanity is" is first and foremost a question answered by the technology of the era. We have no idea what future humans will want and value because the technology that will define them has not yet been invented. We're just along for the ride.
> we could agree that current lives and suffering are morally superior to possible lives in the future
This isn’t even necessarily true, but the thing is that you can’t predict the future with 100% certainty. The influential longtermists pretty much all thought Sam Bankman-Fried would have his tens of billions forever (which even without his scamming wasn’t a certainty, crypto is absurdly volatile and fortunes appear and disappear overnight), I highly doubt their ability to predict much of anything
This is what usually prevents me from understanding longtermist arguments. I'm not convinced think the average person from even ~100 years ago would be able to do anything about (what I would consider) most of the biggest problems of today, and besides structural changes (governance, suffrage, etc.) I don't know what they could realistically have foreseen as the correct thing to do to solve problems >= 100yrs out. Why would I presume to know the problems of >= 100 yrs from now? It seems like the obvious path is addressing structural issues, supporting effective research, and beating out various fires (all of which are pretty much neartermist concerns).
To abuse a thought experiment, I care about the child running through the woods 100 years from now as much as the child today, but I would place way, way higher likelihood of broken glass on the ground hurting the child today.
> current lives and suffering are morally superior to possible lives in the future
I think this is a dangerous ethos. That can be used to justify horrific acts.
The moral reason why we should often prioritize the present (and those close to us) is because we have a better understanding of how to help them, not because they are morally superior. However, when the harm to others far from us (in either space or time) is clear, we should not justify perpetuating that harm because those close to us are "morally superior".
Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear: the moral choice is between saving existing lives and suffering versus preventing future lives and future descendents from existing at all.
For example, birth control would be completely unacceptable since you could lose an immense number of future people regardless of any benefit for the living out their limited number of direct descendants.
I'm not sure I'm following you here. At the very least I think the phrase I quoted is a poor way of making your point.
The reason why birth control is not inherently wrong is that we cannot at all predict the long term effects of avoiding any specific birth.
Indeed, I think removing reproductive choice creates a situation with negative utilitarian/longtermist outcomes because it prevents fine tuned decision making at the individual level by those with the most accurate understanding of the situation.
I do think we have a moral obligation to aim for a sustainable birth rate, neither too high nor too low, precisely because of the moral value of future lives. However, you need to approach this goal by making structural changes that change the optimal decision for individuals, not by removing that choice from them.
> birth control would be completely unacceptable since you could lose an immense number of future people
Operative word = "could"
Or lack of birth control could lead to an unsustainable level of population that causes resource exhaustion and we die that way. Oh, wait, that's already happening. We can't know how our actions effect the far future, but we can be more confident in our ability to improve the near future, and we should do that.
> For example, birth control would be completely unacceptable since you could lose an immense number of future people regardless of any benefit for the living out their limited number of direct descendants.
But what about pollution/environmental destruction vs creating more wealth/food/average living conditions for everyone right now?
I am pretty sure that voluntary birth control is good for the long term. In fact, one problem with longtermism is the idea of constant and never interrupted progress. No backtracking is allowed.
Once you allow backtracking. It is possible to spend millions of years in stagnation and then billions of years with massive progress. So the people who talk about getting to the future faster might end up wasting more time on getting back to the optimal path.
Middle ground not quite, alternative yes. More than one.
Multitude of options and diversity plus diversification.
See, the middle ground between fascism and primitivism is eco-fascism. Not a place to be. It results in strict rationing, control and many people dying.
Neither is solar punk an actual thing to aspire to.
Instead you can do anarchism. Decentralized collective action with multiple approaches, as long as they play for the similar good goals of actually surviving and not destroying ourselves in the short or long run. Some technical solutions, some social solutions, a bunch of separate big and small actions.
There not even a necessity to actually cut consumption by much, as a lot of waste is due to distribution from centralized manufacturing and stockpiling.
The decentralized diversity ensures that at least a bunch of people will find a right sustainable way to live and survive in local conditions.
You can have a reasonably primitive eco-village next to a high tech agglomeration, next to a village straight from Aboriginal dream, side with a rastafarian farm, flanked by an industrial cleaned up soviet factory and cyberneticized arcology.
As long as the resources are parcelled equitably and people are free to move. Resources include clean air and water.
Our biggest problem here is that centralized power, be it corporate or state, will play to maximize control and exploitation of people and resources.
>eco-fascism. Not a place to be. It results in strict rationing, control and many people dying
I don't know what you are trying to communicate with the term eco-fascism but a look at the Wikipedia page tells me you aren't concerned about state enforced euthanasia because dying is underselling eco fascism. Eco facisim is about intentional murder in extermination camps not accidental death.
The secondary meaning of 'luddite' according to Webster is: "any opponent of new technologies or of technological change". I hesitated using this sense anticipating the retort and, sure enough, someone was quick to point out historical trivia. But language is fluid and long held opinions change the meaning of terms, even if they are technically incorrect. See, for example, "indian", "ether" or "humor".
I don't know why people consider organized state violence against forcibly unemployed people as some form of historical trivia.
It's not like they had unemployment benefits like we have today. Most social benefits are designed to keep people complacent and not rebel against the state. People who don't understand this will end up repeating history. Presenting the abandoned people as backwards thinking people who are against technological progress does a huge disservice to them and our present society. If you know the history then the modern word for "Luddite" is "technological unemployment" but people don't use it that way, they mean "dumb person", i.e. it is just an insult.
People can spend their time and money on whatever they want, but a lot of these longtermism organizations seem like a massive waste of time and money. I liked effective altruism when it was about donating mosquito nets, but the AI stuff seems like pure nerd larping. Honestly, with all the research they've done, they don't seem to have anything interesting to say about recent AI trends.
I do believe that future people do have moral value and deserve ethical consideration.
The fundamental problem with longtermism, like with utilitarianism, is our limited capacity to understand and predict chaotic systems.
Thus justifying horrific acts in the name of some "predicted good" becomes an act of enormous hubris.
We are better off striving to act virtously towards utilitarianism towards utilitarian / longtermist goals since that reduces the chances that a misprediction leads to our acts having a net negative result.
I considered myself a longtermist, but climate change is the #1 risk to me, not AI, and I thought this prioritization was more common amongst the EA and longtermist communities. But my longtermist views come mainly from Derek Parfit, and it's probably the case that the contemporary longtermists are not of Parfit's kind, and unhealthily intertwined with billionaire weirdos (Theil, SBF).
> But longtermists have an answer to this conundrum: the so-called ‘value-neutrality thesis’. This states that technology is a morally neutral object, ie, ‘just a tool’.
This is indeed a stupid idea, but the writer's following examples don't show longtermists endorsing this view. What Toby Ord is arguing is about an incompatibility between technological advancement and public ignorance (invoking Sagan, as he should). As Margaret Mead said, you can have advancement in technology, but you "have to move the whole pattern". You have to change the social, political, and educational realms in concert with technological change. The editor of this piece really should have fixed this part of the essay, because it's obviously weak.
How could climate change lead to an extinction event? Seems impossible to me even if it kills billions. Extremely easy to see how AI leads to an extinction event.
The most dramatic example of climate induced extinction that many of us learned about as children would be the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event 66 million years ago. This was most likely exogenous (caused by an enormous asteroid) but it still resulted in the "sudden mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth." Most notably this included the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs.
Most of the mass extinction events in the geological history of this planet were related to rapid changes in the atmospheric composition, and we are currently living through a rapid decline in biodiversity caused by human activity. This statement is incredibly ignorant.
AI and climate change extinction events are equally likely to me because they need the same amount of wishful thinking that literally everything goes wrong perfectly.
After all, both can be seen coming with plenty of notice. If the extinction event is avoidable humans will prepare against it.
In the third paragraph, the author writes that COVID was probably "cooked up in the kitchen of nature", and links to an article to support that assertion. But the linked-to article does not make that point. In the comments section of the article, a commenter pointed this out, and the author replied to that specific comment with an answer that did not address the issue but expressed the author's personal opinion on the matter, and has not updated the article to be more clear.
* However, one agency believes it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory that handled coronaviruses.
* But, according to four elements of the Intelligence Community and the National Intelligence Council, natural exposure to an animal with the virus was the most likely cause of the outbreak.
"""
is the exact opposite of "probably natural origin" (in an article headlined "US intelligence rules out biological weapon origin" even!) is such a tortured reading of the text it has snapped in two: the interpretation is a limp, bloody, stump being dragged along by wild horses of motivated reasoning, while the text just sits there and stares in disbelief at the hole where its actual message used to be.
> But the linked-to article says the exact opposite, that COVID was probably a lab leak.
No, it does not. The article lists the opinions and results of several different organizations, and some of them think a lab-leak is possible OR even likely. But most think it was natural. That article is just very awful and disconnected written. Probably generated by some AI?
As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present. "Sure, my actions are causing harm to hundreds of people, but that's outweighed by the good that will be realized millions of years in the future."
For me the universal antidote to this kind of thinking is this Stephen Jay Gould quote:
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Thus actions that put more people into "cotton fields and sweatshops" today instead of lifting them out of poverty are detrimental to the long-term survival of our species.
Why would effective altruists or longtermists be putting more people into cotton fields and sweatshops? Have any of them proposed doing that instead of making life better?
This is actually answered in the article, if one bothers to read it. Quite a long text, but not bad at all.
> All that matters is the total net sum. For example, imagine that there are 1 trillion people who have lives of value ‘1’, meaning that they are just barely worth living. This gives a total value of 1 trillion. Now consider an alternative universe in which 1 billion people have lives with a value of ‘999’, meaning that their lives are extremely good. This gives a total value of 999 billion. Since 999 billion is less than 1 trillion, the first world full of lives hardly worth living would be morally better than the second world, and hence, if a utilitarian were forced to choose between these, she would pick the former. (This is called the ‘repugnant conclusion’, which longtermists such as Ord, MacAskill and Greaves recently argued shouldn’t be taken very seriously. For them, the first world really might be better!)
That's Utilitarianism of the kind that e.g. Eliezer preaches.
Which leads to the question, are all longtermists really utilitarians like that? (The article seems to insist, even while acknowledging that at least some explicitly say they're not.)
The difference is that normal utilitarians want to have high certainty that what they are doing is a net good while longtermists actually don't care if the outcome will be reached or not, essentially allowing a loophole for negative utility to slip in.
That certainly looks like a problem. Personally, I wouldn't go near anything like that anyway.
On one hand it seems prudent to me to consider the likely consequences of your actions, even long term, although such projections should be suitably discounted for their rapidly increasing uncertainty.
On the other hand I find the idea that you can quantify utility and do calculations with it to compare societal outcomes philosophically wrong, even naive. Should the outcomes of these calculations then be used to justify overriding the personal life choices of others, for the greater good™, it becomes outright evil.
My personal ethics is more of a deontological one.
Sounds like an argument against utilitarianism in general. If you're forcing people to make train trolley kind of choices, then every ethical position is going to sound unappealing. I still don't see where effective altruists and longtermists are advocating for more sweat shops and slaving away in cotton fields.
I agree with your fundamental point, but I find this quote somewhat confusing when applied to this conversation. Surely there are people who would have an equally great negative impact on humanity were they not working in a sweatshop, too?
That’s a particularly hilarious way to frame it but also an interesting person to pick considering he was born into a family of inventors and had the resources to attend an ivy league. Quite literally humanity might be much better off had he not had an opportunity to innovate.
To clarify my point, it just feels odd to hear a purely utilitarian argument against slavery, which hinges on some kind of implied rule of nature that equality can only result in more altruistic geniuses benefitting the greater good -without taking into account all the very intelligent people who, with the best of intentions, have set us on our supposed course towards apocalypse. Because the argument is utilitarian, it can be dismissed with theoretically advantageous results of slavery, which is beyond the pale for me personally.
There were people at the time who pushed back against Midgley and his employer with respect to leaded gasoline. The power differential overwhelmed their criticisms for decades until years after Patterson definitely proved how bad it was.
A utilitarian argument in favor of a flatter power landscape is that such a landscape may have stopped tetraethyl lead, at least for automobiles and house paints.
Whether or not this would have caught CFCs, I don't know.
Sure but the trouble in applying that is that we need a level of precognition of people's future activities that's just not possible. Better to give everyone a path out of horrible labor conditions and deal with the bad eggs down stream of that where we actually know who they are through either structuring society so they don't have the pressures to commit crimes or through whatever version of incarceration and rehabilitation we can figure out.
>> As with "effective altruism", the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present.
The talk of long-term vs short-term harm does seem like what you say, but Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects.
I see this philosophy more as "I am so self important that I think I can positively influence the course of humanity over the timescale of the universe". The irony of thinking like that while talking about the insignificance of things like WWII is telling. Like dude, you and your philosophy are damn near irrelevant like the rest of us - get some therapy for your existential angst.
> The talk of long-term vs short-term harm does seem like what you say, but Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects.
> Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects
Everything can, to some extent, have some positive side effects. But keep in mind what is the real reason why Elon (and other libertarians) are so interested in colonising Mars - as opposed to exploring other, and much closer, "undiscovered countries", like Antarctica or the ocean floor: the existing legal systems do not reach there, or if they do it's very difficult to enforce them. Their idea is to create a "libertarian paradise" where they would define the rules of the society.
I mean, it has zero chance of working the way they envision it, but they envision it nonetheless.
As a life-long space buff, no that's not the reason at all.
The solar system can support a vastly greater civilization than our little planet, with millions of times the resources available and no existing ecosystems to screw up (that we know of so far). Antarctica does not compare.
Earth's ecosystem can only absorb the side-effect of so many spaceflights per year. It's one thing to advance the state-of-the-art of space travel vehicles, it's another thing to plan on colonizing the solar system with the equivalent of coal-burning, soot-emitting, 19th century locomotives.
Billions of people could live in habitats in orbit around Earth, while mining local asteroids or the moon. Targeting one of the deepest gravity wells in the inner solar system doesn't seem like a good first step.
Starship's exhaust is CO2 and water. At scale, make the fuel from ambient CO2 and you're net-zero carbon. Water vapor in the stratosphere is a potential problem but only at extreme volume, since most of the exhaust is at lower altitude.
Definitely we should do the moon and orbitals too, and Starship's launch costs would make that a lot easier. Mars does have things to recommend it though: lots of local resources, gravity only 1/3 of Earth's so you can get to orbit with just the Starship upper stage, only place in the solar system besides Earth where you can grow crops on natural sunlight, close to the asteroid belt.
That's a very transient, localized effect. I have a hard time imagining it making a real impact, though if you can reference a study showing otherwise I'd be interested.
See, the idea of exploring and colonizing Mars is not a bad one.
But from everything Elon has said on the subject, it's very clear that what he means when he talks about it and what I mean when I talk about it are not the same thing.
What I mean when I say "exploring and colonizing Mars":
- Do basic scientific research to understand Mars better
- Learn how to better survive in environments that are hostile to human life
- Work toward being able to create fully self-sustaining colonies of humans offworld, as an (eventual) hedge against problems on Earth (eg, massive meteor strike, nuclear winter, etc)
What Elon Musk means when he says "exploring and colonizing Mars":
- Setting up in a place where no human laws reach
- Bringing indentured servants along so that he and his wealthy friends will have people they can effectively own
- Making a fully stratified society with himself as the highest stratum
> What Elon Musk means when he says "exploring and colonizing Mars":
> - Setting up in a place where no human laws reach
> - Bringing indentured servants along so that he and his wealthy friends will have people they can effectively own
> - Making a fully stratified society with himself as the highest stratum
This is probably some variety of horrible -ism but I gotta say that the more exposure I have to expat white South Africans the more I think they shouldn't be allowed to be in charge of... anything. Like you start talking and it's just a matter of time before certain things start to come out.
Is there a succinct source that backs this assertion up?
For my edification as someone who has no idea who you are and has paid almost no attention to Elon Musk and his delusions of someday living on Mars but is going "If this is true: light bulb moment!"
Sadly, no—this is based on a relatively distant observation of various tweets and other statements by and about Musk over the course of the past few years.
> But from everything Elon has said on the subject, it's very clear that what he means when he talks about it and what I mean when I talk about it are not the same thing.
Not my recollection. This article is a good summary:
> People interested in moving to Mars could pay for their flight with a loan. Once there, people would be able to pay off the loan by working in anything from iron foundries to pizzerias.
Indentured servitude.
> This city would be free to govern itself on its own terms, as indicated by the Starlink internet service terms and conditions released in October 2020. This appears to stand in contradiction to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which states that the launch origin country is responsible for subsequent space activities.
Working to pay off loans doesn’t mean they won’t have salary. You’ve had loans, haven’t you?
How do you suggest the people who move there to pay for the tickets? Corporations who pay in exchange for labor? Or governments who pay in exchange for services? If anything that would make them beholden to their employers.
> Avoiding all current human laws
That is an uncharitable take. He said they should govern in their own terms, not that they should “avoiding all current human laws”. American laws are very similar to British ones, even if Americans refused to be governed by the British ones.
If you want to judge his intention according to your bias, be my guest, but nothing he said clearly indicates whatever ideas you think he has, according to this article.
>> Working to pay off loans doesn’t mean they won’t have salary. You’ve had loans, haven’t you?
But those people would be on Mars, entirely dependent even for the air they breathe on the same institutions controlling their debt and making the laws. What kind of protections against abuse would those people have?
You might quibble about the terminology of "indentured servitude" but what is described really sounds like a situation that nobody who wouldn't want to be the property of someone else would like to put themselves in.
> Working to pay off loans doesn’t mean they won’t have salary. You’ve had loans, haven’t you?
I didn't say they wouldn't be getting any money. I said they'd be indentured servants.
Which they would.
Indentured servants aren't slaves. They are beholden to the people or corporation who hold their debt, though—and I have absolutely zero faith that a Mars colony run by Elon Musk would make the life of an indentured servant in his colony look like anything close to the life of someone who paid full price to come.
> That is an uncharitable take.
You're damn right it's an uncharitable take. I do not believe Elon Musk deserves the benefit of any doubt at this point. He has demonstrated himself to be a despicable human being on a number of accounts—even before he started actively allying himself with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Let me reiterate, just to be 100% clear: I believe that because of his demonstrated behavior, Elon Musk, unlike nearly anyone else one could name, deserves his statements in articles like this to be treated with the maximum skepticism and interpreted in the least charitable way.
Starship isn't the ticket to colonizing Mars despite the hype. They're just not big enough to bring the people and the goods they would need to even tenuously subsist for a few months at least not the 100 per ship Musk claims would be possible.
Cost to orbit isn't the only issue, maybe as part of building something else but actually shipping 100 people to Mars on Starship is wildly impractical. First big hurdle is actually getting the Eyes Wide Shut refueling to work and you have to do it multiple times for each Starship you're sending. Then there's not that much space in the upper stage of Starships to pack that many people and several months worth of food. It's approaching possible but you'd be jammed in like cordwood not having the time of your life in a big open atrium.
As I understand the plan, Starship is the ticket to launching incredible numbers of Starlink satellites very cheaply, which will lead to enormous profits, which will fund the development of an even larger successor rocket, which will allow colonization.
If that's the plan no one told SpaceX's PR team to use a different rocket design on their pages or Musk himself as recently as 2020. AFAIK he's never said anything about a successor rocket to BFR/Starship being the actual colonization vehicle.
Perhaps I am reading too much into it - I'm no insider! - but the original 100-tons-to-Mars "ITS" proposal called for a rocket 12 meters in diameter, quite a bit larger than the current 9-meter Starship; then Elon Musk made some tweet back in 2019 after the Starhopper test suggesting that the "next gen system" would actually be 18 meters wide.
I can't find anything about any of this on spacex.com. Maybe they've changed the plan or maybe they're just not thinking so much about Mars colonization lately, who knows.
He's been much more consistent about "Starship" to Mars than a single tweet about a "next-gen". Maybe they are but Starship is what they're currently saying will take people to Mars and he's said that for a while.
Does "fighting poverty" mean to fight the people who profit from slave labor?
Because in my experience, "fighting poverty" is often translated to "let's educate all people and at the end no one will have to work on a cotton field". While wearing and eating slave labor products.
In German there is a quote that says "a society can't make a living by everyone giving each other a haircut". While I don't think that the answer is to subsidize manufacturing of goods (that's the context of the original quote IIRC), I think that this equally applies to what we call "skilled labor".
That said, one should be interested in the weights and convolutions of Einstein's brain, instead of ignoring them for the sake of virtue-signalling about the people in the cotton fields and sweatshops, to the extent that said convolutions may well be in fact the very thing that could have lifted people of equal talent from the very cotton fields and sweatshops they lived and died in instead.
In other words, that quote has a very real "think of the children" vibe to it, and we all know how often that is used in earnest.
They didn't lift Einstein out of cotton fields and sweatshops. If one is interested in the contribution of weights and convolutions of brains to being lifted out of cotton fields and sweatshops, one should measure the brains of people who lifted themselves out of cotton fields and sweatshops, not someone who didn't.
Too many people have been told "you're extremely talented and will go far", who didn't, for sociological reasons, such as lack of support, because they were assumed to not need it by the "adults" in the room. Where other people, lacking support, went far because of other talents that were adaptive to their sociological situation.
The point isn't to 'think of the children' but that the only way to address these injustices is to do literally that, there is no way around ethics by way of intellect or dwelling on abstract issues. Some of the worst camps humans have been shoved in have been during modernity, using modern tools conceived of by people with very big brains.
People who have no interest in the ordinary suffering around them are much more likely to add to it. Or going with Rousseau:
"Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.”
I think that if we lifted billions of people out of childhood poverty and they had access to quality food, healthcare, and education starting at a young age, we would have 100x more people producing top-tier scientific output.
So no, I don't think it's absurd to really care much more about the people in cotton fields and sweatshops, even if all you really care about is scientific output.
I love that the narrative surrounding neuroscience has been so poisoned by AI bullshit that we're talking about weights and convolutions like those are things that actually exist in brains.
I think the "weight" here is weight as in mass and "convolutions" here is as in folds. The size/weight and folds of Einstein's brain have been the subject of studies, and the quote was from 1980.
It was not Einstein like brain that ended slavery. And it was not kind of people that complain about 'virtue signaling' either. The latter were just obstacle anyway.
Einstein was smart, did awful lot for physics, even did some active virtue signing moves toward racial equality.
But, his kind of brain had presidly zero with solving issues in question, no matter how much distasteful you find people who talk about those issues.
So while some of the high level arguments in this seems plainly right, their overall strength and the integrity of the author seem pretty questionable.
I skimmed through the article and it kind of reminded me of „Transhumanism: The most dangerous idea“ [1] by Francis Fukuyama.
Turns out Nick Bostrom —- the founder of the „Future of Humanity“ institute and who is mentioned several times in this piece — grew out of the fin-du-siècle “Transhumanist” movement (I actually met him in 2000 in London at a European Transhumanist gathering) and I guess many people inside “longtermism” also happen to be “Transhumanists” in the broadest sense.
Fukuyama warned about the dystopian and self-destructive potential of Transhumanists accepting (and wanting) to change our human nature through individual technological modifications extending the human life-span and, ultimately, transcending us into post-human almost god-like beings. Now Torres warns us the same ideology (if becoming wide-spread) with its vision of human grandeur will marginalize the concern about present environmental dangers.
I think, ultimately, this debate boils down to a conflict of two word views. You either are techno optimistic or techno pessimistic. The former camp will perceive climate change not as a huge threat and present well-founded arguments why humans will most likely overcome the „climate crisis“ with their technology irrespective of the prevailing politics. The latter camp present (also) well-founded arguments why human technology will likely destroy our civilization and propose a life-style that is more aligned with nature.
If you take a step back, human technology has indeed improved our living condition massively: Never in the history of mankind so many people have lived so comfortably and also so healthily [2]. This is also proven by the fact that there never have been so many people alive at the same time. Of course, now we might face the consequences of our species thriving so well and multiplying in numbers. That does not need to be the end of the world though if we as human beings stick to the facts, act accordingly and don’t commit to an ideology blatantly telling you either the future is bright or dark. To live a meaningful live and help humanity to survive it is important to stay open-minded and regularly take a reality-check. That’s all I want to say as an old bloke directed at the younger generations.
> If you take a step back, human technology has indeed improved our living condition massively: Never in the history of mankind so many people have lived so comfortably and also so healthily
True, but we also have the ability to kill more people more quickly.
Technology presents both great opportunities and great risks.
We are well served to take seriously the short, medium and long term risks of that technology. From nuclear war, to climate change, to becoming a multi-planetary and eventual a multi-solar species.
It is both simultaneously true that the potential of technology is not so great as to justify destroying everything we have in it's pursuit and that the potential of technology is great enough to take some risks in it's pursuit.
In the end, I think we are best served by empowering people to make their own choices. Whether that choice is to become transhuman or to live in harmony with nature, or some fusion of the two.
> I think, ultimately, this debate boils down to a conflict of two word views.
I'm pessimistic about the technologists. I favor a future in which god-like beings have good-like (notice the extra "o") morality, not just in how they treat others of their ilk, but in how they treat all others. I certainly don't want people in charge who feel about humanity the way Putin feels about Russia, but who also feel about nature (and other life in nature) the way Putin feels about Ukraine.
Live, and let live. It's not about tolerance, it's not about inclusion, it's about respect.
Fighting against environmental destruction (including global warming) is longtermism. We need to pay some price now, but IMHO, it is worth it. The opposite is myopia - like setting a house on fire in the winter, so it will keep us warm.
What's risky is not the long-term thinking but the weights we put on real now vs the virtual future. We run into fanatism if we put all weight on our beliefs against what is here and now. Be it killing nonbelievers and heretics for the promise of eternal happiness (or preventing God from sending a calamity) or sacrificing people for one or the other secular ideology. I like the following quotation:
“Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Was it hijacked by the rich and powerful? Well, as any ideology. No, they don't believe in that nearly as they say. Compare (not much to contrast) with invading a neighboring country as it is pagan.
This doesn't even remotely make the case that "longtermism" is dangerous.
It appears to be just one more of the many, many "philosophies" people talk about while they go ahead and do whatever the hell they want anyway. It does seem particularly transparent about it, but that just makes it relatively dumb, not dangerous.
243 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadA philosophy differs from an ideology. Long-termism is a philosophy, meaning an abstract framework that is used an intellectual aid. An ideology, on the otherhand, is an all-encompassing world view, that inserts itself at the top of one's value hierarchy, and allows one to do as you describe: define any wrong as a necessary evil to fulfil the greater good.
The reason long-termism is merely a philosophy, and will remain so, is that it doesn't provide a narrative that lends itself to ideological zealotry. Ideological narratives are simplistic models of the world that can be easily digested, and provide a ready litmus test to categorize any person into one of three groups: victims, villains, or saviors.
In my opinion, the tendency of the optimal action for short-term interests to coincide with the optimal action for long-term interests, and how much easier it is to determine the former over the latter, makes it better to focus primarily on the near future, with a less-well-defined long-term objective being used only to orient one's general direction.
"Oh just suffer now for this guaranteed future benefit" "Whoops turns out the future is complicated and the suffering and hate was all for nothing"
The other warns about future dangers and cautions us not to take certain present actions. Slowing is not crippling, it's just conservative. And our species has a long history of abusing new tech and causing damage, which leads to strict, regressive reforms. And neither the damage nor the reforms are desirable.
And
> hindsight is the mother of all survivorship biases
Increasing the chances of success is not predicated on predicting the future. Another strategy (given our knowledge of evolution by natural selection) is that we can increase species chance of long term success by enabling more degrees of freedom so that the good “choices” survive.
Multiplanetaryism is such an example. Another is to avoid authoritarian structures because you don’t know a priory which ideas will turn out to be best/right. Hence, you want idea competition and not suppress dissent.
So, again, you don’t need to predict the future to increase chances of success.
I generally agree but many of the quotes in the article display the kind of extreme hubris that leads to taking large risks that increase our chances of existential doom.
It's important to note that high wealth inequality is an "authoritarian structure" in this respect because a small number of people end up controlling access to the capital necessary to realize an idea.
Ignoring the fact that capital isn't static (it is created), do you believe that if there's minimal wealth inequality that we'd see an explosion of great ideas that today aren't realized? If so, how would you account for the natural tendency for money to chase good ideas?
Capital productivity theories should be rejected on the basis that they fail to consider input materials. The problem with this is that ultimately all value is derived from land or better yet, the universe and the laws of physics itself.
Those factors were not created but we can play attribution games and pretend they were.
In other words, the same thing you will get from any moral philosophy class. If you start philosophy expecting to get something tangibly productive... you are in for a disappointment.
For me, I think the important grain of salt is that better moral accuracy provides little to no value. You or I can do more good for the world with greater effort, but the efficacy of that good is mainly based on the real opportunities which we are connected to through the course of our actual lives. Different moral compasses would give slightly different answers, but the optimization makes a vanishingly thin difference. There was never much doubt about what was needed to be a better person, it's just self-interest and vices, which are completely known quantities, that keeps us from it. The exact flavor of utilitarianism under the hood is pretty much irrelevant.
I do find some value for philosophy as a thought exercise that allows us to entertain radical thought experiments far from the mainstream (see internet trolley cart memes). However, as I see longtermism now, it's pretty vanilla.
I don't know why but Austrian Economists genuinely believe in pure time preference theory. They say time preference (there are multiple kinds) is always positive because nobody would delay consumption unless they get rewarded.
Therefore delaying consumption always deserves a reward no matter whether the economy is growing or shrinking. Essentially this is a belief that all present suffering will result in a better future. In other words, longtermism is a very hardcore capitalist philosophy.
The party poopers talking about finite resources and increasing entropy should just shut up.
It’s only natural for some number of people to be concerned with making sure that tomorrow brings progress on some axis, because that is not something that just happens on its own. Progress, particularly leaps of it, is made as a result of people having “outlandish” visions and working to achieve them.
What does that look like, in practice?
It seems to me the magic of Longtermism is that when time horizons can be arbitrarily set, anything that one dislikes or doesn't care about can be dismissed as "short term."
Surely, at some point the human ability to process information reaches its end right? Talking about millions of years in the future is beyond any individual
Why do longtermists put any faith in their ability to discern the current state of the world, to discern the consequences of current events, of their own actions, of reactions to their reactions, etc? Tremendous measurement and prediction error in all these even if you give it a couple coats of "rational" paint so you feel smart when you talk about it.
Any reasonable course of action under so much uncertainty would not try to wiggle the entire future, but to accomplish some smaller part of "the work" now, taking responsibility for something you can actually understand (not just delude yourself into imagining you understand). Go work on some constituent component of spaceflight, maybe, at best. AI X-risk is still OK but only to the extent your work accomplishes anything (thus far—zilch, all wasted.) But absolutely anything else done in service of the "species" is the grandiose delusion of children, and can be used to justify anything. If the species will survive anyway, then you're just comparing infinities—so some other criteria is needed. Better pick a good one and now you still have to decide what Good is. The "longtermist" imagines themself above all finite concerns. The only work good enough for their ego is lecturing others about the vastest things possible.
Early 20thc eugenics committed a fallacy constantly that comes up here too. You learn about evolution, you learn that the ultimate "goal" of evolution is to survive and thrive and outcompete, and then you falsely conclude that therefore you should make that your goal. Not so. It does not follow. You just found some reason to justify your desire to glorify yourself.
Same for long-termism. The species ought to survive, but when you make that your personal objective, you reject all the other emotions that have evolved to ensure survival and have done so so far, in particular, caring for the wellbeing of people around you, and the capacity to solve actual problems, at a scope where you can understand the consequences of your actions.
Not so far into the future, people probably won't even be the same species. Even back a couple hundred thousand years, we probably couldn't mate with our ancestors. Does longtermism place value on making sure future people are genetically similar to us?
Species don't seem that important to me, in the long-term, as they are all quite ephemeral.
Consider the scenario when humans can't live off of Earth so it isn't possible to colonize the galaxy. What is the value of Earth humans compared to AI that can spread across the galaxy?
You don't get 10^58 people in flesh and blood bodies. Most of them only exist in their version of the matrix inside a quantum computer.
Do you think the essay misrepresents "big L" Longtermist beliefs? My reading of it makes it seem that "value the species over the individual" maybe does not reflect their goals very accurately.
I tend to think in the long term myself. I like a lot of the same goals that Longtermists have: using technology to make ourselves better than we are, and expanding into other star systems being the most obvious ones.
On the other hand, I don't consider myself a Longtermist. I think it's completely futile to try to calculate "utility" for individuals, and abhorrent to develop a society that tries to forcibly maximize that imaginary "utility" number, instead of letting people choose for themselves, because I believe that trying to forcibly maximize a value that can't actually be measured accurately would inherently reduce the overall happiness of the entire species.
In other words, rather than "value the species over the individual", I would describe Longtermism (as portrayed in the article) as trying to forcibly scale up act-utilitarianism to apply to everyone, everywhere, all the time. At that scale, it can superficially seem like valuing the species, but IMO if one actually wants to think in the long term, rule-utilitarianism should be the guiding philosophy. Rule-utilitarianism makes it even more impossible to calculate results, of course, so it can only be a philosophy, not a rigid system of data and calculation.
At some point some has to decide what utility really means and capitalists run into the problem that they run out of things to invest that turn a profit and even if they don't, the profit they get becomes increasingly meaningless. At some point all forms of investment become recreational, just like a video game.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook
I think one of us misinterpreted the statement then. My understanding is that the author is labeling the people who believe this as 'dangerous' (close enough to 'kook').
That makes it obvious that it is not what author believes but what author is saying the longtermers believe.
The attitude the author takes is that discounting the short term harms from climate change is morally repugnant.
I can live a long and happy life without my pinky finger, but pointing this out doesn't mean I want to lose my finger. I will continue take care when using a saw.
Climate change affects many millions of people. That can easily cause mass events like famines, economical crashes, mass unemployment, war and mass migration, and those things quite easily affect countries around it and so on.
So I'm not too optimistic about seeing it as a "pinky finger". The best outcome I see is something like ruining the wine harvest. Yeah, not ideal, but we can live with that. But it's unlikely to stop at that, because millions of unhappy farmers won't just sit quietly and can make a very big mess.
Put differently: he is indeed implying that people that appeal to this idea are kooks.
Practically speaking, we wouldn't have that long. Until humanity escapes our solar system, it's on a much shorter 5 billion year clock.
Which is still a lot of time, but we need to live past our solar system before we can really start thinking in trillions of years.
Even the Long Now folks are looking at the xx,000 timeframe which is… approachable by comparison.
Nothing survives a trillion-year timeframe.
This is so vague it's not even applicable here. It doesn't even imply an apocalypse. No shit our way of life will be different in the next 100 years. Just look at what life was like 100 years ago - completely different.
There are limits to how far you can redefine what it means to "love" a particular person in your life because we all have a natural intuition of what it is like to live harmoniously with someone in love. People can sense when you're actually acting out of self interest because they can relate to the same temptation. However, there's no way analogous way to call bullshit when you try to redefine "love" for humanity as a whole because it's not even clear what that means. Longtermists have defined loving humanity as a whole as wanting to maximize a metric of how many people exists across the universe, but seeing "loving" humanity that way isn't really a shared experience. There are so many alternate metrics you can come up with about "loving" humanity (spreading democracy and "freedom" or eliminating prejudice get talked about the same way).
The problem is in mixing up the metaphor with the real thing. Especially with media technologies it's tempting to hold up loving humanity above loving other people because it seems so much bigger and more universal, but ironically this is exactly backwards. Love of humanity is just a simulacra of loving real people.
A relevant quote that came to mind from Brothers Karamazov:
I love humanity ... but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams ... I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self‐complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty‐four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me.
...
Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.
Meanwhile, the short-termist says, not need to worry about global warming, because it's not that big of a deal right now (they'll figure it later).
I mean, it's pretty obvious that either of these extremes is mistaken. When modeling these sorts of decisions (whether its in RL or in cost/reward analysis), choosing the "right" temporal discounting parameter is crucial. But what that parameter's value should be often comes down to values, morality, philosophy and ethics.
I think the author's fear of longtermism is misplaced, because longtermism is not really manifest anywhere in actual decision making. If anything, it might be used to mask what are actually short-termist motivations for doing short-sighted things (like continuing to rely on fossil-fuels).
The whole "dark ages" trope is generally understood by people who study that period to be a popular misunderstanding.
The concept of "dark age" is a cultural myth that is not backed by our modern work on understanding of the period.
Perhaps you think you know better, but before you entrench yourself in that belief you would be well served to spend some time reading the works of those who have spent their lives studying that period.
So yes, climate change does have the potential to compromise our existence over trillions of years.
I think the bigger problem with this movement is the concentration of already-wealthy types amongst its adherents, which skews the overall perspective away from more common plights.
My biggest issue with this article as a whole is that every philosophy falls apart when applied in extremes, in fact the examples here are basically the same as the arguments against pure unflinching utilitarianism.
Ask not what you can do for the future, ask why those b*stards aren't helping us.
Like Rome after the fall was so much richer than before?
Or how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so much better with the advent of nuclear fission technology? Since, technology basically just makes us richer and safer and everything!
Or like how the average working/middle class US (or European) family is so much more comfortable than in decades before?
>so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are.
Like how we have the best government and Presidents ever?
And the best infrastructure and public policy, and the more capable?
A lot of this attitude is from people in the upper class (at least salary wise) who can't fathom anybody else suffering more now, because it's business as usual or better than ever for them...
They have the same issues Japan does now (birth rate, long working hours, etc), but they’re not radioactive wastelands like people assume. In a lot of ways their infrastructure is better than the best cities in America
Which is neither here nor there lmao.
Were they better in 1947? 1950? Were even the same people alive when they were rehabitated? I'm pretty sure Rome, the other example I mentioned, is also better off today than the 5th century AD.
But the point was that "future == better" is not some guarantee. It might be much worse. Or better for some other people, after decades or generations of people have suffered in between a 'good present' and that 'good future', and then again worse, or any such combination.
What you described is mere technology and conveniences accumulated, which yes, it's often just increasing, though not even this is guaranteed (many places post war or economic collapse lost a lot of their prior conveniences and technology infrastructure). But societies can be optimistic for life, happy, and dynamic in times with less, and be depressed, stressed out, or squeezed in a rat race in times with more. This can even coincide with other things getting better for this or that segment: say, X improving (say network connectivity or gay rights), while cost of living, health costs, prospects of retiring, precarity of work getting worse for a big majority ever since the 70s.
I really wish this meme would die. There's no evidence the US dropped the atomic bombs on Japan as a show of force to Stalin, yet people constantly state it as if it were proven fact. All of the existing documentary evidence from the time points to the purpose of the atomic bombs being to force a surrender from Japan and avoid the cost of an invasion of the main islands.
People need to accept that sometimes the straightforward explanation is actually correct. It isn't always a smokescreen of propaganda hiding a nefarious motive or conspiracy. Yes, the US was concerned about dealing with Russia after the war. No, not to the degree that they were willing to nuke two Japanese cities just to spook him.
Agreed, and I edited my comment to clarify. It's funny how it had that effect, though, isn't it? War might change, but Russians never do. They respect force and violence, nothing else.
My response was to coldtea's snark: Or how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so much better with the advent of nuclear fission technology? Since technology basically just makes us richer and safer and everything! Yes, in fact, it absolutely did make Japan "richer and safer and everything," by ensuring that the country didn't become the scene of an epic, likely-endless battle with Communist forces for control of the Pacific.
For an additional gedanken exercise, contemplate the likely effect on the net well-being of North Korea's population over time if MacArthur had been given a free hand by Truman.
Did it, in the long term? We know Russia had spies inside the Manhattan Project. They knew what the US was doing, and it seems as if their plan was to get their own nuclear arsenal as soon as possible. In hindsight they don't seem to have been deterred at all.
Were there other options? By the last months of the war, they had largely lost control of the naval and air spaces. Japan was an import-dependent economy to begin with, and had consumed everything that wasn't nailed down for the war effort.
Couldn't they just be blockaded? Either they end up an isolated novelty that occasionally scrapes together enough scrap iron to launch a low-grade weapon, sort of like the DPRK is seen today, or it "starves out a surrender" by allowing domestic conditions to collapse, potentially nudging a coup towards a new regime who's more willing to negotiate.
That might take 5 or 10 years to reach endgame, but it seems like a less direct, but still viable way to complete the war.
This plan would have killed more people, and caused far more net suffering, than simply nuking a couple of cities.
As a similar example, it's true that letting MacArthur use nukes would have been a monstrous act of evil that would have put the US up there with the Nazis in the annals of infamy... but it's also true that more North Koreans would be alive and well today if we had. We could hardly have done more damage with our bombs than the Kim family did with ideology.
Of course that's a simplistic assessment that ignores the consequences of normalizing nuclear warfare at a time when its destructive capacity was ramping up at an exponential rate. But it is entirely fair to apply it to Japan at the end of WWII, when the lesson was relatively cheap to learn.
In any case we're discussing the historical intersection of postwar Japan and Soviet expansionism, not an anonymous American city nestled safely in the twenty-first century.
I personally find utilitarian views abhorrent. Even if the ends justified the means, I doubt the most adherent utilitarian would put his neck on the line if his head on the plate would be the best outcome for humanity as a whole. It's pure hypocrisy to justify exploitation.
"We have nukes, and we're not afraid to use it".
Well, it's war. Discussing morality of actions in war is a fool's errand. Typically the actions of the winners are morally justifiable because they won, and for this reason they tend to write history.
And, given that the leader finally did surrender after being told twice, most countries wouldn't have a junta conspiring to assassinate him so that they could keep fighting.
Japan wasn't -- and isn't -- "most countries." Monday morning quarterbacking is always fun but I'm personally glad I wasn't in that particular decision loop in the Oval Office. As goatlover so wisely suggests, war is basically a contest to see who can pull the most horrific atrocities on the other guy. We ultimately won the game but Japan gave it one hell of an effort.
They would certainly have done the same to us, given the technology, and without as much as 1% of the guilty feelings afterward.
And it would later be justified as it being necessary for the US to surrender, and maybe now we would be discussing in Japanese how a couple of US cities are much nicer some 70 years after being nuked.
Either way, this is already far beyond the point of the thread.
They use a computer which has more power then took us to the moon, connect instantly across half the planet, and post a lament: "has technology really made our lives better?"
This is an important question. Just like with AI, future generations don’t need us because history and the arrow of time has already caused them to emerge — there’s more risk for them in changing the past (our current time) than just let it be. How much do you care about going back in time and help your 10 generations ago ancestor have better access to clean water?
Why would it be possible? And what would the risk be?
There are more ways to be dead than being alive. They're alive in their future time (they won the lotto!); any change they make in the past carries the risk that their future selves won't emerge.
There are still people who enjoy "roughing it", some who enjoy it so much they spend large amounts of their lives effectively living as pre-agricultural people did.
As is seen in ennui and frustration among the rich, or grouchiness among the old, the human psyche adapts to what it is used to in terms of emotional responses.
> so they will be much more able to deal with problems than we are.
We are still dealing with the fallout (literal, and figurative) of tetraethyl lead. Stopping it at the beginning would have been far more cost effective, and "deal with it" effective, than all of the technology we have put into remediating it since. This is one example. An ounce of prevention is often far better than a pound of cure. Let's let future scientists, who will be far more capable than us, invent new things instead of spending their efforts rectifying our mistakes.
Maybe we should first be more effective at policing our means than dream up better ends. The chosen means of centuries ago caused what people want to heal now. The ends (colonial industry, hegemony, religion, power) didn't matter at all for the people who were their victims.
Edit:
What if, by being too zealous, longtermists damage the image of their goal so much that it won't be seen as acceptable to pursue for centuries (ref. communism).
This is the challenge that "degrowth" or other scarcity-rooted environmentalists have. When you are pushing a promise of deprivation on the currently comfortable, your message is going to struggle to gain traction. For any movement, it is of primary tactical importance to have a message that is appealing to your audience.
Constraints on the rich are popular even among some of the rich. Shared suffering is something the poor, rightfully, don't believe.
If you wanted to stay on topic you would say something like, if people have the option of certain deprivation and uncertain deprivation (effects of climate change) they will choose uncertain deprivation and that is exactly the problem with longtermism as well.
In order to save humanity, we would need to stop being human. OR the opposite, humans are not going to make it.
If we , humans today, are so awful at making decisions (with our drive towards consuming, hierarchies, war), that we need to stop doing what we are doing, and focus on the future or we will die out.
Then, what I am saying is, there is no way to do that, other than to change ourselves to not be human. There is no way to form an organization, or re-work capitalism, or form a new government, to change the future, because all of the human based drives will remain and inevitably devolve to the current situation again. Over millions of years, we'll get what we have now, unless we change what we are. And the longtermism people are saying what we have now is no good, will lead to us dyeing out.
Because as the longtermist state, if we are heading towards dying out because of our current human decisions, then how can we do otherwise except to change our human reasoning.
That said, the article touches on the type of folly that this is: i.e. mixing the "goals" of the species with that of individuals, as if the trajectory of the species was like getting an education and a career. This leap is more common than we might imagine and I believe it is caused by an underestimated characteristic of the human mind: we take esoteric knowledge that has been presented to us by instruments of science and transpose these concepts onto familiar things: a planet is like an orange, the atomic system is like an apple with electrons like busy bees swirling round it, gravity is like a steel ball in a rubber net and so on. It gives us the impression that we know things when we (at least as amateurs) will likely miss out on essential properties that we have not yet grasped, because these things are so far removed from our everyday reality.
It is the same with the concept "species" in this case. It is a largely scientific concept, for the individual it is only really relevant if the other person is possible to mate and get offspring with. That's the concept of species we have had as humans for millions of years, it's likely to continue to be so, and who knows where that will take us. It's really none of my business.
Those are the ones can yield the most damage tho
“Us” is misleading.
I highly doubt that those who are thinking seriously about how to extend the species success in time and space (and taking actions that make a difference) think of atoms or earth in the way you describe.
"[E]ven if there is ‘a mere 1 per cent chance’ of 10^54 people existing in the future, then ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth 100 billion times as much as a billion human lives[...]"
The problem, in other words, is that these people are aspiring Bond villains.
Is this just a giant opportunity cost risk where a bunch of wealthy people are donating money in X potentially wasteful “charity” instead of more local/timely Y organization? Or is there some more tangible harm?
We need balance, we need to invest in the future while also taking care of the present.
In particular, there is significant overlap between longtermists and members of the EA community that donate a portion of their income to Malaria prevent that does not round to zero.
Here's some counter points:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kageSSDLSMpuwkPKK/...
https://markfuentes1.substack.com/p/emile-p-torress-history-...
I'm happy with what this thread says about our respective positions! We disagree, and that's fine.
> nitpicks percentage probabilities of environmental catastrophe (and the downstream effects of those catastrophes) in order to distinguish them from the real threats, which are characterized in part by Bostrom's assigned percentage probability ranges to such things as nanotechnological breakthroughs, neurotechnical rewiring of brains,
I don't see much discussion, let alone nitpicking of those probabilities, nor do I seem any assignment of probability ranges in that paper.
The closest I can find is where he discounts the predicted reduction of GPD due to global warming by comparing it to the last century of global GDP growth on page 13. To me this does seem a bit myopic as the potential for secondary effects, like an uptick in regional conflicts or the disruptive effects of mass migration seem extremely hard to predictively model and discount.
The only place where I see Bostrom make probabalistic claims is where he talks about how the chances of a plateaued or recurrent collapse scenario seem to decrease as the time scale increases which the chances of a posthuman or extinction scenario increase. While we can't ascribe specific or even vague probabilities to these scenarios with any degree of accuracy for any timeframe, the overall statement about how these probabilities change as the timescale increases seems very reasonable. If this is what you disagree with, I'd be very curious to understand your reasoning.
Later
The rebuttal in the blog post you cited previously is weak (it depends on the claim that Bostrom is discussing a hypothetical "standard utilitarian", when he uses similar logic to attribute the same conclusions, with some "modifications", to (what I'll call, because he's pilfered the word "standard") "normal" utilitarians. But that's neither here nor there. The Bostrom article he cites does a fine job of making my point for me.
The thinking appears to be that even if the ideas in each individual paper are trifling, publishing a sufficient number of them will lead in the aggregate to a great lurch forward for human thought.
Honestly I draw some comfort from our own mortality because the very worst people ultimately die too. If we ever achieve effective immortality, part of me believes that could be truly catastrophic for society.
> We can now begin to see how longtermism might be self-defeating.
Karl Marx talked abou tthe contradictions inherent in capitalism and that it was ultimately unsustainable in the 1840s through the over-accumulation or cconcentration of capital. Marx predicted a response to this being a revolution by the proletariat, which has thus far not come to pass, but the tool for squashing uprisings has been and continues to be fascism.
Great. Thank you for your contribution.
just fyi - this is an extremely popular take among the young and non-rich
But really what you're talking about is what's called Marxist-Leninism as crafted by the Bolshevik in Russia in 1917 and beyond.
But what Marx is really known for is creating an analytical framework to be able to discuss these things. Abraham Lincoln's views on this pretty closely match Marx's, as an aside.
> ... those ended up being worse than the capitalist ones.
You really want to start comparing communist outcomes against Western colonialism and imperialism? The slave trade? And you can rightfully say a bunch of bad things about Stalin but he'll always get credit for killing Nazis and defeating Hitler (at an absolutely horrendous cost, as an aside).
That being said humanity evolves having multiple camps, each with their own ideas, fighting, competing, allying with each other. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, rinse and repeat. And we are the definition of adaptability. I would not be worried unless some camp gains absolute power monopoly over a very long period of time. Which is, funny enough, what every camp tries to do with the worse or best intentions.
Predictions are a curious thing. They also shape current behavior and thinking, either in alignment with making those predictions becoming more likely to be true eventually, or fires up opponents.
Put differently, predictions are also visions.
Surely there is some middle ground between this neo-ludditism espoused by the author and the outright fascism of longterminists that can justify any current action if it's somehow even marginally likely to decrease existential risk?
For example, we could agree that current lives and suffering are morally superior to possible lives in the future, and that technology can help us solve our quintessential human problems, such as competition for resources, disease and death.
We are a technological species since the first rock hit the first bone, and what "humanity is" is first and foremost a question answered by the technology of the era. We have no idea what future humans will want and value because the technology that will define them has not yet been invented. We're just along for the ride.
This isn’t even necessarily true, but the thing is that you can’t predict the future with 100% certainty. The influential longtermists pretty much all thought Sam Bankman-Fried would have his tens of billions forever (which even without his scamming wasn’t a certainty, crypto is absurdly volatile and fortunes appear and disappear overnight), I highly doubt their ability to predict much of anything
To abuse a thought experiment, I care about the child running through the woods 100 years from now as much as the child today, but I would place way, way higher likelihood of broken glass on the ground hurting the child today.
I think this is a dangerous ethos. That can be used to justify horrific acts.
The moral reason why we should often prioritize the present (and those close to us) is because we have a better understanding of how to help them, not because they are morally superior. However, when the harm to others far from us (in either space or time) is clear, we should not justify perpetuating that harm because those close to us are "morally superior".
For example, birth control would be completely unacceptable since you could lose an immense number of future people regardless of any benefit for the living out their limited number of direct descendants.
The reason why birth control is not inherently wrong is that we cannot at all predict the long term effects of avoiding any specific birth.
Indeed, I think removing reproductive choice creates a situation with negative utilitarian/longtermist outcomes because it prevents fine tuned decision making at the individual level by those with the most accurate understanding of the situation.
I do think we have a moral obligation to aim for a sustainable birth rate, neither too high nor too low, precisely because of the moral value of future lives. However, you need to approach this goal by making structural changes that change the optimal decision for individuals, not by removing that choice from them.
Operative word = "could"
Or lack of birth control could lead to an unsustainable level of population that causes resource exhaustion and we die that way. Oh, wait, that's already happening. We can't know how our actions effect the far future, but we can be more confident in our ability to improve the near future, and we should do that.
But what about pollution/environmental destruction vs creating more wealth/food/average living conditions for everyone right now?
Once you allow backtracking. It is possible to spend millions of years in stagnation and then billions of years with massive progress. So the people who talk about getting to the future faster might end up wasting more time on getting back to the optimal path.
Multitude of options and diversity plus diversification.
See, the middle ground between fascism and primitivism is eco-fascism. Not a place to be. It results in strict rationing, control and many people dying. Neither is solar punk an actual thing to aspire to.
Instead you can do anarchism. Decentralized collective action with multiple approaches, as long as they play for the similar good goals of actually surviving and not destroying ourselves in the short or long run. Some technical solutions, some social solutions, a bunch of separate big and small actions. There not even a necessity to actually cut consumption by much, as a lot of waste is due to distribution from centralized manufacturing and stockpiling.
The decentralized diversity ensures that at least a bunch of people will find a right sustainable way to live and survive in local conditions. You can have a reasonably primitive eco-village next to a high tech agglomeration, next to a village straight from Aboriginal dream, side with a rastafarian farm, flanked by an industrial cleaned up soviet factory and cyberneticized arcology. As long as the resources are parcelled equitably and people are free to move. Resources include clean air and water.
Our biggest problem here is that centralized power, be it corporate or state, will play to maximize control and exploitation of people and resources.
Monocultures are vulnerable and dangerous.
I don't know what you are trying to communicate with the term eco-fascism but a look at the Wikipedia page tells me you aren't concerned about state enforced euthanasia because dying is underselling eco fascism. Eco facisim is about intentional murder in extermination camps not accidental death.
It's not like they had unemployment benefits like we have today. Most social benefits are designed to keep people complacent and not rebel against the state. People who don't understand this will end up repeating history. Presenting the abandoned people as backwards thinking people who are against technological progress does a huge disservice to them and our present society. If you know the history then the modern word for "Luddite" is "technological unemployment" but people don't use it that way, they mean "dumb person", i.e. it is just an insult.
The fundamental problem with longtermism, like with utilitarianism, is our limited capacity to understand and predict chaotic systems.
Thus justifying horrific acts in the name of some "predicted good" becomes an act of enormous hubris.
We are better off striving to act virtously towards utilitarianism towards utilitarian / longtermist goals since that reduces the chances that a misprediction leads to our acts having a net negative result.
The underlying valuation is
> But longtermists have an answer to this conundrum: the so-called ‘value-neutrality thesis’. This states that technology is a morally neutral object, ie, ‘just a tool’.
This is indeed a stupid idea, but the writer's following examples don't show longtermists endorsing this view. What Toby Ord is arguing is about an incompatibility between technological advancement and public ignorance (invoking Sagan, as he should). As Margaret Mead said, you can have advancement in technology, but you "have to move the whole pattern". You have to change the social, political, and educational realms in concert with technological change. The editor of this piece really should have fixed this part of the essay, because it's obviously weak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
After all, both can be seen coming with plenty of notice. If the extinction event is avoidable humans will prepare against it.
"""
* However, one agency believes it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory that handled coronaviruses.
* But, according to four elements of the Intelligence Community and the National Intelligence Council, natural exposure to an animal with the virus was the most likely cause of the outbreak.
"""
is the exact opposite of "probably natural origin" (in an article headlined "US intelligence rules out biological weapon origin" even!) is such a tortured reading of the text it has snapped in two: the interpretation is a limp, bloody, stump being dragged along by wild horses of motivated reasoning, while the text just sits there and stares in disbelief at the hole where its actual message used to be.
No, it does not. The article lists the opinions and results of several different organizations, and some of them think a lab-leak is possible OR even likely. But most think it was natural. That article is just very awful and disconnected written. Probably generated by some AI?
Also incorrect. All that article really says is that we're pretty certain that it wasn't a genetically engineered weapon.
The majority of the intelligence community believes it was species overspill, but with low confidence.
A minority of the intelligence community believes it was lab leak, with a moderate level of confidence.
The best you can really take from that is there wasn't conclusive evidence available either way at the end of 2021.
For me the universal antidote to this kind of thinking is this Stephen Jay Gould quote:
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Thus actions that put more people into "cotton fields and sweatshops" today instead of lifting them out of poverty are detrimental to the long-term survival of our species.
> All that matters is the total net sum. For example, imagine that there are 1 trillion people who have lives of value ‘1’, meaning that they are just barely worth living. This gives a total value of 1 trillion. Now consider an alternative universe in which 1 billion people have lives with a value of ‘999’, meaning that their lives are extremely good. This gives a total value of 999 billion. Since 999 billion is less than 1 trillion, the first world full of lives hardly worth living would be morally better than the second world, and hence, if a utilitarian were forced to choose between these, she would pick the former. (This is called the ‘repugnant conclusion’, which longtermists such as Ord, MacAskill and Greaves recently argued shouldn’t be taken very seriously. For them, the first world really might be better!)
Which leads to the question, are all longtermists really utilitarians like that? (The article seems to insist, even while acknowledging that at least some explicitly say they're not.)
On one hand it seems prudent to me to consider the likely consequences of your actions, even long term, although such projections should be suitably discounted for their rapidly increasing uncertainty.
On the other hand I find the idea that you can quantify utility and do calculations with it to compare societal outcomes philosophically wrong, even naive. Should the outcomes of these calculations then be used to justify overriding the personal life choices of others, for the greater good™, it becomes outright evil.
My personal ethics is more of a deontological one.
To clarify my point, it just feels odd to hear a purely utilitarian argument against slavery, which hinges on some kind of implied rule of nature that equality can only result in more altruistic geniuses benefitting the greater good -without taking into account all the very intelligent people who, with the best of intentions, have set us on our supposed course towards apocalypse. Because the argument is utilitarian, it can be dismissed with theoretically advantageous results of slavery, which is beyond the pale for me personally.
A utilitarian argument in favor of a flatter power landscape is that such a landscape may have stopped tetraethyl lead, at least for automobiles and house paints.
Whether or not this would have caught CFCs, I don't know.
The talk of long-term vs short-term harm does seem like what you say, but Elon wanting to colonized Mars is an example that isn't like that at all and his effort seems to have positive side effects.
I see this philosophy more as "I am so self important that I think I can positively influence the course of humanity over the timescale of the universe". The irony of thinking like that while talking about the insignificance of things like WWII is telling. Like dude, you and your philosophy are damn near irrelevant like the rest of us - get some therapy for your existential angst.
"Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay of that colossal wreck,
Boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ozymandias
By Percy Byesshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
who said: two gigantic, fucked-up rock legs
be out there in the middle of goddamn nowhere
right next to them covered in shit some kinda big face
looked pretty pissed & upset & whatnot
all damn covered in words
“yo ozymandias here, this my shit”
“better than your shit, get fucked buddy”
not much else tho, just sand
shitloads of sand all over the place
Everything can, to some extent, have some positive side effects. But keep in mind what is the real reason why Elon (and other libertarians) are so interested in colonising Mars - as opposed to exploring other, and much closer, "undiscovered countries", like Antarctica or the ocean floor: the existing legal systems do not reach there, or if they do it's very difficult to enforce them. Their idea is to create a "libertarian paradise" where they would define the rules of the society.
I mean, it has zero chance of working the way they envision it, but they envision it nonetheless.
The solar system can support a vastly greater civilization than our little planet, with millions of times the resources available and no existing ecosystems to screw up (that we know of so far). Antarctica does not compare.
Billions of people could live in habitats in orbit around Earth, while mining local asteroids or the moon. Targeting one of the deepest gravity wells in the inner solar system doesn't seem like a good first step.
Definitely we should do the moon and orbitals too, and Starship's launch costs would make that a lot easier. Mars does have things to recommend it though: lots of local resources, gravity only 1/3 of Earth's so you can get to orbit with just the Starship upper stage, only place in the solar system besides Earth where you can grow crops on natural sunlight, close to the asteroid belt.
And fast moving, directional heat.
But from everything Elon has said on the subject, it's very clear that what he means when he talks about it and what I mean when I talk about it are not the same thing.
What I mean when I say "exploring and colonizing Mars":
- Do basic scientific research to understand Mars better
- Learn how to better survive in environments that are hostile to human life
- Work toward being able to create fully self-sustaining colonies of humans offworld, as an (eventual) hedge against problems on Earth (eg, massive meteor strike, nuclear winter, etc)
What Elon Musk means when he says "exploring and colonizing Mars":
- Setting up in a place where no human laws reach
- Bringing indentured servants along so that he and his wealthy friends will have people they can effectively own
- Making a fully stratified society with himself as the highest stratum
> - Setting up in a place where no human laws reach
> - Bringing indentured servants along so that he and his wealthy friends will have people they can effectively own
> - Making a fully stratified society with himself as the highest stratum
This is probably some variety of horrible -ism but I gotta say that the more exposure I have to expat white South Africans the more I think they shouldn't be allowed to be in charge of... anything. Like you start talking and it's just a matter of time before certain things start to come out.
"expat white South Africans the more I think they shouldn't be allowed to be in charge of... anything."
How is any of this thread reasonable?
For my edification as someone who has no idea who you are and has paid almost no attention to Elon Musk and his delusions of someday living on Mars but is going "If this is true: light bulb moment!"
Not my recollection. This article is a good summary:
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-codex
The article went back to some of his presentations far back.
> People interested in moving to Mars could pay for their flight with a loan. Once there, people would be able to pay off the loan by working in anything from iron foundries to pizzerias.
Indentured servitude.
> This city would be free to govern itself on its own terms, as indicated by the Starlink internet service terms and conditions released in October 2020. This appears to stand in contradiction to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which states that the launch origin country is responsible for subsequent space activities.
Avoiding all current human laws.
How do you suggest the people who move there to pay for the tickets? Corporations who pay in exchange for labor? Or governments who pay in exchange for services? If anything that would make them beholden to their employers.
> Avoiding all current human laws
That is an uncharitable take. He said they should govern in their own terms, not that they should “avoiding all current human laws”. American laws are very similar to British ones, even if Americans refused to be governed by the British ones.
If you want to judge his intention according to your bias, be my guest, but nothing he said clearly indicates whatever ideas you think he has, according to this article.
But those people would be on Mars, entirely dependent even for the air they breathe on the same institutions controlling their debt and making the laws. What kind of protections against abuse would those people have?
You might quibble about the terminology of "indentured servitude" but what is described really sounds like a situation that nobody who wouldn't want to be the property of someone else would like to put themselves in.
I didn't say they wouldn't be getting any money. I said they'd be indentured servants.
Which they would.
Indentured servants aren't slaves. They are beholden to the people or corporation who hold their debt, though—and I have absolutely zero faith that a Mars colony run by Elon Musk would make the life of an indentured servant in his colony look like anything close to the life of someone who paid full price to come.
> That is an uncharitable take.
You're damn right it's an uncharitable take. I do not believe Elon Musk deserves the benefit of any doubt at this point. He has demonstrated himself to be a despicable human being on a number of accounts—even before he started actively allying himself with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Let me reiterate, just to be 100% clear: I believe that because of his demonstrated behavior, Elon Musk, unlike nearly anyone else one could name, deserves his statements in articles like this to be treated with the maximum skepticism and interpreted in the least charitable way.
One hour weapon delivery anywhere on earth is not exactly a positive side-effect.
https://www.businessinsider.com/musks-spacex-partners-us-mil...
Drastically low cost of getting things to orbit is a more direct effect.
One hour weapon delivery has been around for decades - see ICBM
https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1217990326867988480
https://www.space.com/elon-musk-starship-spacex-flights-mars...
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1166856662336102401
I can't find anything about any of this on spacex.com. Maybe they've changed the plan or maybe they're just not thinking so much about Mars colonization lately, who knows.
[0] https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund
Because in my experience, "fighting poverty" is often translated to "let's educate all people and at the end no one will have to work on a cotton field". While wearing and eating slave labor products.
In German there is a quote that says "a society can't make a living by everyone giving each other a haircut". While I don't think that the answer is to subsidize manufacturing of goods (that's the context of the original quote IIRC), I think that this equally applies to what we call "skilled labor".
In other words, that quote has a very real "think of the children" vibe to it, and we all know how often that is used in earnest.
Too many people have been told "you're extremely talented and will go far", who didn't, for sociological reasons, such as lack of support, because they were assumed to not need it by the "adults" in the room. Where other people, lacking support, went far because of other talents that were adaptive to their sociological situation.
People who have no interest in the ordinary suffering around them are much more likely to add to it. Or going with Rousseau:
"Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfill around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbors.”
So no, I don't think it's absurd to really care much more about the people in cotton fields and sweatshops, even if all you really care about is scientific output.
Einstein was smart, did awful lot for physics, even did some active virtue signing moves toward racial equality.
But, his kind of brain had presidly zero with solving issues in question, no matter how much distasteful you find people who talk about those issues.
That said, the author of this piece seems to be a bit of a nutcase. There's a well-evidenced writeup of various dubious behaviors in this blog post:
https://markfuentes1.substack.com/i/81210415/tyler-cowen
So while some of the high level arguments in this seems plainly right, their overall strength and the integrity of the author seem pretty questionable.
Turns out Nick Bostrom —- the founder of the „Future of Humanity“ institute and who is mentioned several times in this piece — grew out of the fin-du-siècle “Transhumanist” movement (I actually met him in 2000 in London at a European Transhumanist gathering) and I guess many people inside “longtermism” also happen to be “Transhumanists” in the broadest sense.
Fukuyama warned about the dystopian and self-destructive potential of Transhumanists accepting (and wanting) to change our human nature through individual technological modifications extending the human life-span and, ultimately, transcending us into post-human almost god-like beings. Now Torres warns us the same ideology (if becoming wide-spread) with its vision of human grandeur will marginalize the concern about present environmental dangers.
I think, ultimately, this debate boils down to a conflict of two word views. You either are techno optimistic or techno pessimistic. The former camp will perceive climate change not as a huge threat and present well-founded arguments why humans will most likely overcome the „climate crisis“ with their technology irrespective of the prevailing politics. The latter camp present (also) well-founded arguments why human technology will likely destroy our civilization and propose a life-style that is more aligned with nature.
If you take a step back, human technology has indeed improved our living condition massively: Never in the history of mankind so many people have lived so comfortably and also so healthily [2]. This is also proven by the fact that there never have been so many people alive at the same time. Of course, now we might face the consequences of our species thriving so well and multiplying in numbers. That does not need to be the end of the world though if we as human beings stick to the facts, act accordingly and don’t commit to an ideology blatantly telling you either the future is bright or dark. To live a meaningful live and help humanity to survive it is important to stay open-minded and regularly take a reality-check. That’s all I want to say as an old bloke directed at the younger generations.
[1] https://www.au.dk/fukuyama/boger/essay
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better
True, but we also have the ability to kill more people more quickly.
Technology presents both great opportunities and great risks.
We are well served to take seriously the short, medium and long term risks of that technology. From nuclear war, to climate change, to becoming a multi-planetary and eventual a multi-solar species.
It is both simultaneously true that the potential of technology is not so great as to justify destroying everything we have in it's pursuit and that the potential of technology is great enough to take some risks in it's pursuit.
In the end, I think we are best served by empowering people to make their own choices. Whether that choice is to become transhuman or to live in harmony with nature, or some fusion of the two.
I'm pessimistic about the technologists. I favor a future in which god-like beings have good-like (notice the extra "o") morality, not just in how they treat others of their ilk, but in how they treat all others. I certainly don't want people in charge who feel about humanity the way Putin feels about Russia, but who also feel about nature (and other life in nature) the way Putin feels about Ukraine.
Live, and let live. It's not about tolerance, it's not about inclusion, it's about respect.
What's risky is not the long-term thinking but the weights we put on real now vs the virtual future. We run into fanatism if we put all weight on our beliefs against what is here and now. Be it killing nonbelievers and heretics for the promise of eternal happiness (or preventing God from sending a calamity) or sacrificing people for one or the other secular ideology. I like the following quotation:
“Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Was it hijacked by the rich and powerful? Well, as any ideology. No, they don't believe in that nearly as they say. Compare (not much to contrast) with invading a neighboring country as it is pagan.
It appears to be just one more of the many, many "philosophies" people talk about while they go ahead and do whatever the hell they want anyway. It does seem particularly transparent about it, but that just makes it relatively dumb, not dangerous.