Why the long-term future of humanity matters more than anything else
80000hours.org
80000hours.org
Call me selfish, but I personally don't worry about the future of humanity in thousands of years. I'm sure most people don't either.
A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me. Sure, people can feel concerned about his fate, just as people can feel concerned about a stranger in a foreign country, but most people just don't. We're all selfish bastards.
I still feel a deep discomfort from the idea that people could just be okay with people suffering. Obviously this is more acute with people in other countries than people who do not yet exist, and I have some allowance for laziness. But... people are genuinely fine with the idea that people starve to death? That's horrifying.
This represents improvement.
The question is before you even start throwing the moral gauntlet on other people, what are you doing about it? Now you might be doing something but then the question is whether you are actually doing something about it.
There are plenty of arguments for why ex. doing NGO work or sponsoring a child is doing more harm than good and actually hurting. So I wouldn't be so fast to cast judgement.
I don't think you find many people who don't care about other people suffering intellectually. The question is whether they are choosing to suffer more others to suffer less.
First off I'm not making a moral judgement, and I'm not talking about actions at all. I'm not even trying to judge them at all. They made an assertion about humanity and i find that assertion alarming, but i didnt try to reflect it on them and stayed as impersonal as I could.
Its the intentions i was concerned about, not the effects. They were describing people who dont even care intellectually- thats freaky to think about.
But future people don't exist. If a nuclear holocaust wipes us all out, they will never exist, and hence will never suffer. So really it depends on whether you consider "the continued existence of the human race" to be a moral imperative or whether you don't.
[1] http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html/
(Of course, experiencing others' emotions can in general be debilitating. Obviously, then, experiencing trillions of others' emotions would be trillionsfold worse.)
I'm not thinking of personally being aware of them and i can even rationalize not finding strangers to be tangible. I understand the bystander effect and all that. There are any number of ways I can accept not doing anything, but the idea that someone could legitimately just not care is deeply unsettling.
Like, for the bystander effect to apply a person has to care and then think "someone should do something". Its the idea that someone can instead just not care even superficially that is disturbing.
To me, the idea that someone think "someone should do something" about that "something" is disturbing.
But this is HN, the place where those that make $100k/year a more wax poetically about the plight of poor people in third world countries while munching on the cheese and drinking the wine thinking that it is the waxing that counts.
Progressing beyond this is one of the important moral challenges faced by humanity.
There has been no evolutionary pressure to develop much of a concern beyond one or two generations.
And evolution hasn't equipped us with reward pathways or cognitive capacity to solve many of the problems now facing us and our surroundings - because those problems are new
I believe humanity could survive longer if people only cared enough to prepare for disasters they know will come, even if it's multiple generations into the future. This is like humanity is one big human procastinating. Some things can only be accomplished if you prepare for them with time.
There is quite a bit of mental variation. One of the rarest qualities I have found in people is the ability to connect abstractions to feelings. I once dated a woman who would sometimes get angry at me because she was mistaken. That is fine, as we are all human, sometimes one makes mistakes. However, she would stay angry at me even when I exonerated myself factually. I should've taken that as an early sign and bailed out of that relationship much sooner!
When hiring someone for a startup or choosing a co-founder, I would recommend that one look for this quality.
This is related to something I heard on "Fresh Air." The author of this book had a "bad boss" character who kept on calling things a "dog whistle." As far as he was concerned, a phenomenon he couldn't directly perceive might as well not exist. Such an idea strikes me as a degree of idiocy that makes me angry. The physical phenomenon of sound waves at higher than 20 kHz is a physical fact! Denying the truth of an objective fact because of a shortsighted prioritization of one's limited subjective point of view -- this is exactly the kind of thing that can get one in trouble, if one is doing substantive knowledge work!
Well, how many years ahead are you willing to worry? 10? 100? It sounds like you might be saying that you don't put much weight on the future of humanity on any timescale, and worry only about things that affect you personally. If so, then yes, I'd say that is the definition of selfish.
I'm sure most people don't either.
It might look this way, but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people", rather than just some people in some societies?
We're all selfish bastards.
I don't think this is true.
Let me reverse the question : how many years ahead is enough for you not to worry? A million years? Fifty billions? Do you worry about the ultimate fate of the universe[1]?
It's pretty clear to me that, all other things being equal, events tend to matter less and less as they are occurring further and further into the future. That's why, for instance, most young people don't worry much about death, unless they're told it will happen soon.
I don't have an accurate way to measure it, but to me, once you start talking about thousands of years, it's such a far future that I don't worry about it.
> but what makes you sure that this is true of "most people",
People are anxious or obsessed about many things, but I very rarely hear anyone whining about the future of the World in geological time scales. There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
A fair question. I'm not worried by the heat death of the universe, as I'm fairly certain that any action I take during my life will have no effect on it. I can't really picture the difference between a million years and a billion, so they don't really concern me, although I don't have a logical explanation for this.
My actual concerns vary between the 100 to 10,000 year time frame. I'm periodically incapacitated by my inability to find a convincing counterargument to the Great Filter theory, whereby the reason we haven't ever ever encountered aliens is because all civilizations collapse before achieving interstellar travel. While I'm doubtful that I can personally do anything to prevent this eventuality, when I do have hope, it's that I can make it slightly less likely or less catastrophic.
There is of course the famous exception of the young Woody Halen in Annie Hall[2], but it's a comical scene precisely for this reason : most people don't worry about these stuff.
Thanks for the link, although I find it more bittersweet than straightforwardly humorous. Having had similar failed conversations with psychological professionals over the years, I sympathize with young Alvy. I can say from experience that trying to explain your concerns about the 1000 year time frame doesn't go over any better.
The climate change bandwagon is joined only by tiny Europe and some parts of America. We Indians or our Chinese neighbors don't care much about global warming and will never care of course unless until we can guilt trip the rich nations into giving us money to do something in that case it is a good deal at the expense of people like you.
India + China is approx 1/3rd of world population. I think that should qualify for "most people".
> A kid born in the year 10,000 is a stranger to me.
And if treated with a modicum of attention and love, it will be much wiser than you before it even enters school. Rationalizing having given up, and pretending everybody has, comes way after that.
When someone says that I ask them "Have you donated everything you made this month above the poverty level in your country to some kids who can't afford to eat say in Bangladesh per chance or its equivalent?" They typically respond with a "No" followed by a very convoluted explanation why it is the empathy that matters as in their view situational empathy should stop the moment such actions inconvenience them.
> the moment such actions inconvenience them
That's "not even silly", the threshold for "inconvenience" begins way earlier. And "caring for others" doesn't mean not caring for oneself, I'm also one of those other people, if you will. And your need to somehow disprove the empathy, love and/or generosity of everybody else, with such cheap sophistry to boot, says more about you than about the people you know nothing about. If you're looking for convolution, you might want to also look into that.
And why does caring for others only requiring those who get oppressed, and not attacking their oppressors? Give a man a fish, and he has a fish. Denazify the world and he has a place to raise kids in. Everybody has their own views what caring and doing good means, and comforting a bullied person ranks way lower for me than dealing with the bully. I wouldn't answer "no" and squirm, I'd laugh in your face.
Its also one of the reasons, why i like family fathers and mothers so much- even though most of them vote conservative. There is something selfish, that wants to see that the selfishness last forever. Thats why those future persons need a spokesman, a long term selfish bastard/algorithm, who is able to veto on short-term behavior that is ultimative self-destructive.
The problem here is, that with such a control mechanism, its easy to go idealistic and try to "patch" humanity up while your at it- ending up with something, somialhinn, socialism. So the patching up process, known as government, needs a reality check to prevent a run-a-way - and balances, to prevent a lock-out of the living from base resources and short term solutions on the way to long term solutions. Some flaws might be unfixable, and only work arounds will prevent them from flaring up again and again.
For example i can not get this generation to worry about the earth of tomorrows temperature.
The obvious solution would be to have a Future-Gen-House-of-Parliament veto on all usage of coal and oil. Leading to a total standstill. Thus the future-gen, could be bargained with- give us oil for another generation, and we will trade you in Carbon-Emission-Taxes and the development of fusion.
I dont claim to have a answer here, but it would be nice if there was some modeling software on how to build a better government here- including a simulation on how to reign in corroding elements like financially well endowed industries and tax-strained voters.
Everybody's different, it doesn't do well to derive generalizations of society from your own internal conclusions.
In practice it's a cargo cult ritual that leads to the conclusion that we should give within epsilon of zero fucks about anything that happens N years from now for sufficiently large N (which you get to choose as the author of an analysis).
That's partly because there's no mathematical difference in exponential discounting for the role played by 'pure rate of time preference' and the 'good' discount rate. It's always just 3.5% for no particular reason other than that's what in the back of the Treasury handbook written before 2008 during the Great Moderation.
Oh, and is 3.5% a reasonable number? Sounds kinda like inflation/mortgage rates, right? But if you look at CPI $100 dollars in 1817 is, equivalent to roughly $2k dollars in 2017. But would I rather spend this 'same' amount of money in 1817 or 2017? It's a no-brainer as long as I prefer penicillin and smart phones to legal opiods and vintage mustache waxing. This is really hard stuff to model, which is a clue that it doesn't get done.
If Ord and Wiblin could pick one easy fight to change about government policy making and promote longtermism it would be savaging the use of discounting in long term policy decisions rather than beating around the bush.
> Instead we will try to:
> 1. discount money in the normal way to take account of inflation and opportunity costs.
This is one of the problems with discounting though. Inflation is measured very badly over time due to technological change. If you go back to a policy maker in 1817 would have no idea that 2017 dollars could treat schistosomiasis, or any number of other medical conditions, so they would undervalue a 2017 dollar. I think it's fair to assume this process will continue to some extent over the next few hundred years.
This suggests that money is the wrong way to weigh up long term decisions. While problematic in their own way, something like QALYs and functions of QALYs could serve much better as a unit of account because their meaning is not relative with time. But you'd have to model how many you get in the future explicitly.
In terms of behaviour change, giving a mixed message is just going to excuse people falling back into the default method. This is what thoughtless acceptance of the default means:
http://www.heritage.org/environment/report/discounting-clima... http://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/questio...
So I think there's a real cost and risk associated with not taking a clear position on this.
Trying to reason about the future on cosmic scales is beyond our current and any foreseeable capabilities so let's discount that right away; we don't quite know if the universe will end in heat death (though we have some hints). We don't know if it is possible to create or move to other universes or even whether such a concept makes sense. As long as such things haven't been ruled out we can assume they're true: if life survives to the end of this universe it will have accumulated enough knowledge and technology to create or move to a new one.
Back in the present every species on earth is doomed. Whether an asteroid strike or the sun turning into a red giant eventually this planet will become uninhabitable.
It is not known whether intelligent life is a common result of evolution or we're a fluke. We do know it takes a very long time if it happens at all. It is possible we are the only highly intelligent species that will ever appear on this planet.
The primary responsibility of humanity then is to balance resource consumption with the creation of an interplanetary society first, then eventually an interstellar one. We must protect the earth's resources and preserve as many species as we can reasonably preserve... but we must also preserve modern technology and pursue the establishment of permanent self-sufficient colonies on other worlds in the solar system. Once we do so we must take and spread as many species from earth as we can. In the medium term (next million years) this isn't so important but once we can achieve some form of interstellar movement spreading life to other systems is key to ensuring it isn't wiped out (or reset back to single-cell organisms).
We are the only natural process capable of preserving life and so far as we are aware ours may be the only instance of life (or intelligent life) in the universe. What future iterations of life will make of such an opportunity we can only guess, but if we don't do it in all likelihood no one else ever will.
If no intelligent life survives then our existence is pointless and will be erased when the sun's red-giant phase scours every last trace that any living thing has ever existed from the face of the earth.
Notice that this idea is only one step removed from "the long-term future of the race matters more than anything else". Think about what horrors have been done in the service of that idea. Let us be very careful, then, that we commit no horrors in the service of this idea. ("Nothing matters more than X" easily becomes "therefore it's OK - even good - to trample on people in the service of X".)
Humanity is the most incredible thing in what we know of the universe. Stars and gas clouds sure are beautiful too, but unless you are very religious, the those are simple an artifact of statistics, there was no intention there.
Without the humans, the universe is empty.
Besides, the only alternative is useless optimism - to assume that life elsewhere does exist and implements our values (perhaps better than we do,) and thus we are totally unnecessary and it makes no difference if we all die. (This is the same nihilism inherent in believing in an afterlife.)
Max Tegmark adds a twist to that statement: without consciousness (subjective experience), the universe is pointless.
Because humans care about humans more than anything else and that's fully sufficient. Let's not kid ourselves, we care about us, most everybody else is kinda meh. Symbiotic species like us too, I guess.
If you do not have that drive, then it is natural to cull yourself.
you don't need to care about future generations in general, but you probably deeply care about the future of your children. if you do not have any (yet): i'd said similar things before i became a father. since i've had kids... my urge to preserve the well-being of my children specifically is absolutely visceral, and i can only assume (it does seem so) that other parents feel similarly. no parent needs to care about their children's whole generation, the urge to care is decentralized and spread over the whole generation of parents.
the next question might be: why would you care about your offspring? because parental care is a trait that helps carry the DNA which encodes it farther than DNA without this trait will get (all other things equal). in general, we care about (a few particular members of) future generations (our offspring) because people who didn't give a fuck about their own children died out.
imo, life has as much purpose as stars have: none. it's the wrong question to ask. life is simply there, just like stars are there. it "materializes" when-and-where there are the right conditions (a narrow spectrum of energy gradients), just like stars do (the spectra are extremely far apart, of course).
If we accept your interpretation, then I think we must conclude that the purpose of life is to hasten its own extinction, by accelerating dissipative processes.
If we humans perish, our knowledge could survive us. What we have found out about how nature works transcends our species. That is not a good justification why life exists, but at least this reason is not limited to humans, like all other ones.
And if there is no one else that can use our knowledge, and no one comes after us, life was pointless all along.
You have already admitted that individuals may enjoy life and find much meaning, so it seems only honest to append a very large qualifier to your "life is pointless" belief.
No there isn't, for a simple reason: I enjoy life, many others do, and those who don't generally want to enjoy it. The point is what we want. Not some external criterion we have yet to discover. (Some Christian fundamentalists make a similar mistake, believing there would be no morals without God —as if we haven't eaten the damn fruit already.)
Now there's this tiny little problem about resolving conflicts: we have yet to extrapolate a collective will from lots of individual wills in a way we'd all agree is "fair" —I believe we have demonstrated the absence of a general solution. The overlap however is quite comprehensive, so I have hope.
What we should do is defined by what we want. Most of us want life and humans to continue to exist. Therefore they should. It's that simple.
Intelligent life is so far subjectively the most amazing thing that has happened in this universe.
We are the only intelligent species on our planet, our planet is the only place where we know for sure life exists in our solar system.
Based on our limited observations we are also the only intelligent beings in our galaxy at least at this time period.
While intelligent life may have no interensic meaning we have the capacity to give our life and the life of future generations meaning, this trait is quite likely the result of natural selection.
We study history, cherish our past, honor our heroes and plan for a better future and this is a universal trait that we as a species share.
Saying that life has no meaning is a pointless argument there is nothing to benefit from making this assumption, in fact you lose everything.
And it's not true that everything up to now would be pointless. Advancements in technology, science, knowledge, etc. have all been enjoyed by those who are living and have previously lived. Any lack of future humans doesn't mean the benefits of those efforts were not realized or consumed.
Arguably humans make life on earth worse for most other types of life we are in contact with
Well, not exactly. Life on Earth's only hope of surviving beyond the decline of Sol currently hinges on some intelligent species developing space travel. They say, "life finds a way"- maybe we are life's way of getting all her species off this planet before it is engulfed by the sun.
If we get off our planet we will ensure the long-term self-replication. Without us it wouldn't happen and all life on Earth would sooner or later vanish.
Note: nothing in this comment should be taken as an endorsement of that. I'm just offering it as an example of people who are making an argument that we should not try to survive as a species.
> Toby Ord: Good question. I think just saying, “Okay, what about improving science?” my guess is that because this begets technology, which begets some of the risk, it’s unlikely that just pushing on that is a plausible thing to particularly help.
> ... They probably wouldn’t even know about asteroid risk, or super volcano risk, or various other natural risks.
I think talking about these kind of risks is a mistake. They're not the biggest thing on our plate and people will always be able to foresee them as too distant and too small.
~~~~~
> Robert Wiblin: We’ve talked a lot about reducing risks to the future. What about thinking about the opposite of that, which is extremely large upsides? Are there any practical ways that people might go about not so much preventing extinction or something horrible, but also trying to create something that’s much more positive than what we have reason to hope for?
> Toby Ord: It’s a good question. I’m not sure.
If you want a specific technology, work on electric transportation. Fossil fuel transportation in agriculture allowed us to scale up humanity to 7.5+ billion people, but it created a time-bomb because as soon as its too pricey to move food around, we can no longer create it as scale, and there's no going back to agrarian pastoral society without killing almost all the humans. Over the long term, we have a moral imperative to advance ourselves beyond fossil fuels for transportation. This is what I believe to be the most moral technology we could work on.[1]
"Humanity has a bug. We think of the future too little, and too often we think technology propels itself, that the future will simply unfold automatically. Or worse, many seem to have suffered a loss of faith in any real vision of the future. I wish this was not so."
[1] https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/the-moral-technology-6413ca...
The problem is when experiments continue despite failure.
Also - you should know there were communities without property before the Soviet Union.
And after. Arguably the problem with Communism isn't so much that it is entirely impossible, but that it is entirely possible for it to scale much past 50-100 people, making it an exceedingly poor choice to try to structure a country's governance with. (And generally even by the 50 person mark the strains are seriously setting in and the community frequently still becomes unstable and disintegrates.)
But I get your point, just substitute any of the human catastrophes of the nineteenth century.
Well, thats kind of unsurprising, since all the actual attempts to implement “Communism” on a national scale threw out the prerequisites in Marxism on favor of the (notionally transitional) elite ruling class of Leninist vanguardism (an adaptation to allow bypassing capitalist democracy entirely, because—viewed generously—the Bolsheviks and their successors were too impatient for Marxism.)
There is a reason why slavery was abolished on the brink of capitalism birth. It's because capitalism depends on free trade, not just any kind of it - the freer the better it grows.
*freedom for the property owner. Which is why it can facilitate a slave trade, property is a limitation of freedom.
By the same token, you could argue that Nazi Germany was an "absolutely worthwhile" experiment. "Hey, societies with mixed race have all sorts of problems, let's see what happends when we change that variable!"
Some ideas are simply WRONG when you try to apply them in practice.
(I don't know you, so maybe you've also experienced communism and totalitarianism first-hand; but if not, I would respectfully argue that it's easy to judge something as "worthwhile" if you haven't personally been affected by it.)
Even without going into rigorous philosophical discussion, if you still confidently claim that all of it is fatally worthless even after having seen as much of what there is to life, I think you seriously lack perception.
It's just shallow pessimism, not a thoughtful outlook on conscious existence.
I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to stop.
That makes sense from a "maximizing your descendants" point of view--maybe.
Assuming a normal sized family losing your son knocks out from 25 to 100% of your living descendants.
Assuming that your descendants on average have average sized families then by the time you have a great^10 grandson you should have a large number of living descendants. Losing one barely makes a dent.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine a scenario where you could take an action now that would greatly affect (positively or negatively) a great^10 grandson without similarly affecting hundreds of your other great^10 grandchildren.
Please don't project your own personal thoughts and opinions on to the entire human population. It's possible that some, even many people do not think this way. I would claim to be one, although of course I can offer no evidence other than my word.
> I would say 90% of our environmental problems stem from this one fact. I mean we all drive cars and are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifice to stop.
Again, that seems like a projection of yourself on to the whole population. This ones easier to refute though, since it's an objective fact that I don't drive a car (and haven't even bothered learning). Concern for the environment is certainly a large part of the reason.
If we have a sense of wonder about the universe or our planet, then what we should really do is rid it of us, because all we have ever done is ruin it, make it hideous, inflict pain and destruction on it.
I have kids. My behavior is not consistent with my beliefs. In that I'm very human.
Humanity is beautiful, and the things humanity creates are beautiful. In our solar system, or in the local group of stars, as far as I know, it's the humans who are making the things that are the most beautiful.
There is a type of beauty in nature, but that beauty was based on a harmony. The mountains don't have an intention behind them. The art that humans make does. They're very different things, and the u universe would be at a loss if humans were not a part of it.
What confounds me about this view is that humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it. What is so unique about humanity in the universe that gives us the exclusive agency to tarnish it? Why are the products of humanity somehow excluded from the perfection of the other productions of the universe?
If, as you say, humans are as much a product of the earth/universe as any other part of it, what is the justification for speciesism? What gives us the right to take everything for ourselves, kill and decimate other forms of life?
The rate of the extinction of species that the earth is going through right now is unprecedented in all of earth's history, to say nothing of the torture we inflict on farm animals. And this is not an accident. We are doing it on purpose and we're proud of it; we call it "development", when the right word should be: destruction.
Are humans, among the species on earth at least, uniquely capable of speciesism? Are rats or ants guilty of it too, to the extent that they exercise speciesism until they run up against limitations of their environment? Or is speciesism a moral ideal, similar to murder, meaning rats and ants can't be guilty of it because they can't reason and act with intent?