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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

The argument is specifically against longtermism and against the idea that "existential risk" should be prioritized over immediately helping people.

Maybe there are actually a lot of EA who don't approach things this way. Great but that's not countering the objection to longtermism producing bizarrely distorted priorities.

I'll admit the article doesn't make explicit the point that hypothetical scenarios like trillions of people colonizing galaxies are simply too tenuous to base present reasoning on - and the hypothetical dangers of "true AI" are even more tenuous.

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Yes, that is the main argument and I agree with it. But bundling it with EA is just inaccurate.

Longtermism seems to me like one of many deadends that utilitarianism takes you down if you embrace it and only it as your moral theory.

A little bit of utilitarian thinking can be fine when you have another theory to tell you the "why". That's why I don't have any problems with EA which is usually quite concrete

I don’t understand where AI-safety research is ever meaningfully competing with renewable energy for resources. The article is making the case that these two types of progress are mutually exclusive, without any evidence. What’s a plausible scenario where the environmentally conscious choice today comes at the expense of individuals living 10000 years from now?

Here's a passage from Toby Ord's PhD thesis quoted in the book. "Saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive."

It seems like the Longtermism critiqued by the article is discussing by article is indeed talking about the real distribution of real resource.

That quote in isolation is also evidence-free (and sort of appalling imo), I’ll have to look into all that Ord has to say about this. But I’d like to point out that choosing whether to improve lives in rich vs poor countries is not equivalent to choosing whether or not to engage with climate change aggressively.

The article is specific critique of the idea of longtermism. The article puts together a number of arguments and quotes showing people following the logic of weighing purely hypothetical far-future people against the actual interests of real people and advocating resource transfers accordingly. I've shown a bit of this in the quote above.

That quote in isolation is also evidence-free

-- Are you implying some caveat or extra bit of information could make the quote OK?

No just that cherrypicking quotes like that (by the author, not by you) does not really show that longtermism and climate change efforts are mutually exclusive, _even if_ it shows one influential and potentially mistaken person believes they are. Like I said before, I'm just looking for a plausible example of where pursuit of environmental goals would negatively affect the lives of people 10^3, 10^4, 10^5, 10^6 years in the the future; basically I think one can be an adherent to longtermism without having to denigrate environmentalism. The strawman the article creates is that these things are mutually exclusive when they are not, and creating this false dichotomy is not helpful to any of the important causes in question.

You might be interested in my sibling post with a more complete statement. I think it is a lot less appalling in context.

Its not from Toby Ord, it is from Nick Beckstead's Thesis.[1]

The idea is introduced as an couple sentence thought experiment in a 200pg thesis (emphasis mine):

>To take another example, saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Richer countries have substantially more innovation, and their workers are much more economically productive. By ordinary standards, at least by ordinary enlightened humanitarian standards, saving and improving lives in rich countries is about equally as important as saving and improving lives in poor countries, provided lives are improved by roughly comparable amounts. But it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.

Context is important, specifically the abstract assumptions of fixed cost for each life, and fixed innovative capacity.

You could easily turn the premise around with the opposite conclusion. Improving the innovative capacity in poor countries is more important than saving lives in rich countries, provided you foster more innovation innovation in the poor country than is lost in the rich one.

It looks like an interesting read, covering many topics discussed in this thread.

Chapters include:

Should "Extra" People Count for Less?

Does Future Flourishing Have Diminishing Marginal Value?

A Paradox for Tiny Probabilities of Enormous Values

Infinite Value, Long Shots, and the Far Future

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=ON+T...

Context is important, specifically the abstract assumptions of fixed cost for each life, and fixed innovative capacity.

Sorry for the mis-attribution, at the same time both the quote, your explication of the quote and the chapters you cite seem consonant with the longtermism the article (rightly imo) criticizes. One point the article makes is that reasoning this way can justify anything.

Reasoning with based on "Infinite Value, Long Shots, and the Far Future" is inherently fallacious, is no more plausible than arguments like pascal's wager. The only limit on "long shots" is one's ability to cook them up (which alien landing should we be preparing for anyway, etc).

I was mostly adding some context to the quote that seemed to be taken out of it.

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