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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

> Longtermists use this reasoning to justify many controversial stances; for example, longtermists rate climate change as a relatively unimportant concern, since it will only have a direct effect on the billions of people who live on the Earth, and not the countless multitudes, who, they believe, will one day live in various star systems across the galaxy.

There's longtermism and then there's longtermism. Climate Change is a problem that will affect our kids and grand kids in this century and the next, hence it's a longterm problem.

But worrying about the future diaspora of "potentially hundreds of trillions or more" humans across the Milky Way Galaxy is so far off and unforeseeable I'm not even sure "longtermism" is the right word for it. That's more SciFi territory.

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Who is he even arguing against, Hari Seldon?

It's kinda tiresome all these -isms that people invent to argue against. More often they're strawman positions that few to no people actually hold. We should hold people to counter specific arguments made by specific people, not vague ideas held by nebulous -ists.

Indeed. I want to meet these people who say not to worry about climate change because we will have space travel.

Read the comments on any HN thread about Mars colonization. They generally go along the pattern of:

+ I am so excited about <potential of this development/timeline/discover>, what an amazing step towards Mars colonization.

  - Mars colonization is a waste of everyone's time. It's a giant distraction, and a truly gargantuan resource sink, that doesn't get us anything meaningful. We should be focusing on immediate problems, like hunger and climate change and nuclear weapons and toilet paper shortages.

    + Mars colonization creates redundancy for humanity against extraterrestrial existential threats. It's important to direct our efforts to ensure that <some tiny fraction> of 'humanity' can survive an Earth-killing cataclysm.

     - Extraterrestrial existential threats are unlikely and hypothetical on any appreciable timeline. We are spectacularly failing to deal with a short-term, man-made existential threat to our civilization. In the <near>/<long> term, I'd rather direct <gargantuan efforts required for building a self-sustaining Mars colony> towards saving <overwhelming majority> of humanity from <impending, obvious catastrophe>, than work to preserve <some tiny fraction> of humanity from <highly unlikely cataclysm that somehow kills off 100% of the people on Earth but 0% of the people on a hypothetical self-sustaining Mars colony>.

And so on, and so on.

With regard to Mars colonization, we can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time. The solution to world hunger isn't actually meaningfully impacted by resources spent on Mars colonization.

Rather, it would seem that solving climate change will give us the tool to deal with space colonization, as space colonization of new homes fundamentally involves managing new ecology and life support systems.

Longtermism is increasingly viewed as a respectable moral movement; one of its best-known proponents is Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, which received a $10M donation from Elon Musk. You can read more about longtermism (and some of the really bizarre views its adherents espouse) in this Current Affairs piece:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/the-dangerous-ideas-o...

I think the current affairs piece does a terrible job of representing and critiquing the argument. The blog post in the OP is much better.

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it :P

Who is he even arguing against, Hari Seldon?

It's common for people concerned about an impending AI apocalypse to use this sort of "longtermist" argument. For example this article:

https://oxfordpoliticalreview.com/2019/08/25/is-ai-safety-ra...

If we reduce existential risk by mere one-millionth of one percentage point, it will be worth more than 100 times the value of saving a million human lives. The expected value of any other good actions – like helping people here and now – will be trivial compared to even the slightest reduction in existential risk.

Similarly, the recent book The Precipice argued that the most important risk for humanity is AI risk because the badness of AI destroying all humanity is much worse than, say, climate change killing off 99% of humans.

The other side of the argument though, is the "reduce existential risk" part. There probably isn't anything meaningful I could do, to reduce the risk of some future war against aliens. But with AI, the presumption is that the risk is near and that AI research going on right now could meaningfully impact future AGI designs. AI research, say, 80 years ago wouldn't have the same tradeoff. I'm not sure I buy the assumptions, but the argument does require an assumption of near-term influence (albeit it allows that that influence to be very small).

There probably isn't anything meaningful I could do, to reduce the risk of some future war against aliens.

Not your primary point, but I think we can reduce the risk of losing some future war against aliens by discovering the aliens sooner. The Aztecs would have been a lot better off if they had realized Cortés was coming a decade earlier....

Except those million human lives today would go on to produce trillions of human lives and untold amounts economic growth over the extremely long term.

Nick Bostrom for example who seems fairly respected with some money behind his institution.

Ideologically 'longtermism' functions the same way as arguments about 'existential risk'. They're often highbrow ways to justify authoritarian stances. To give you a concrete example, Bostrom's writing contains a lot of arguments along the lines of "if there is an infinitesimally small risk of some terrorist making a bioweapon that wipes out life on earth, it's worth to introduce widespread surveillance measures".

I'd agree that it's not a particularly common belief system and it's not like the government will be full of draconian longtermists but it has gained some traction.

https://cherwell.org/2019/04/27/mass-surveillance-could-save...

It's foolish to overemphasizing existential risks and underemphasize marginal gains. If authoritarian mass surveillance reduces economic growth by 0.05%, then in the extremely long term, it is catastrophic and far out weighs the benefit.

Here's an example from within HN. I'm not sure this is a strawman.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30052781

It's the most common thing in the world to the average set of ideas held by a group of people with some expected set of ideas for a particular member. With the aggregate result that groups are punished for including people with ideas in conflict, since the average position is then hypocritical.

You can even use this to reason the other way: Climate change will lead to a planet that can sustain less humans 100 years from now, so those lost people won’t have their 100’s of trillions of offspring thousands of years in the future. We should stop climate change.

Well, I'm quite confident that a species that figures out how to travel at the speed of light (which is still very slow if you consider that the milky way is 100,000 light years across) will no longer depend on a 9 month biological process for reproduction.

In fact, it's really questionable if the human species will still exist in its biological form. AI might already meet human intelligence within decades and then exponentially grow in might from there. Add this exponential function to a timeline of thousands of years and where do you end up?

Current humans? I don't think so.

The faster you go the less of those 100.000 years you will experience so there's that.

I agree with your sentiment - longtermism as a term needs to be tempered with a dose of reality. When does longtermism become another word for "fantasy"?

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