Against longtermism (2021)
aeon.co
aeon.co
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.
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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"""
* 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.
"[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.
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.
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
"The underlying reasoning here is based on the idea that people – you and I – are nothing more than means to an end. We don’t matter in ourselves; we have no inherent value of our own. Instead, people are understood as the ‘containers’ of value"
This is the central problem with any kind of utilitarianism: it gets things backwards. People are not means to an end; they are ends in themselves. Any kind of "value" (which, as the article notes, utilitarians, including "longtermists", basically equate with hedonistic pleasure) is a means to an end, with people being the end.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
If anyone would like to donate to support further development, let me know. More details, previews and demos available, for backers.
groglogic+akhn2023515@gmail.com
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.