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Comment by cwoolfe | Hacker News Reader

"Why do I think this ideology is so dangerous? The short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years."

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Right, so, for example the long-termist says no need to worry about global warming, it'll just be a blip in the history of our species.

Meanwhile, the short-termist says, not need to worry about global warming, because it's not that big of a deal right now (they'll figure it later).

I mean, it's pretty obvious that either of these extremes is mistaken. When modeling these sorts of decisions (whether its in RL or in cost/reward analysis), choosing the "right" temporal discounting parameter is crucial. But what that parameter's value should be often comes down to values, morality, philosophy and ethics.

I think the author's fear of longtermism is misplaced, because longtermism is not really manifest anywhere in actual decision making. If anything, it might be used to mask what are actually short-termist motivations for doing short-sighted things (like continuing to rely on fossil-fuels).

Even as a longtermist, I wouldn't discount global warming so fast. Even if you categorize it as a "non-existential" threat (which I wouldn't be so sure of - you just have to look at Venus to see where global warming can lead to), it took less than what we are currently facing to throw (European) civilization back for about 1000 years when the Roman Empire fell.

> it took less than what we are currently facing to throw (European) civilization back for about 1000 years when the Roman Empire fell.

The whole "dark ages" trope is generally understood by people who study that period to be a popular misunderstanding.

yes. that's why we have so many written records from western europe at that time <sarcasm>. it's called dark ages for a reason: the paucity of written records from that period. And there is a reason for that!

It really isn't called that anymore by people who study that period. There is a reason for that.

The concept of "dark age" is a cultural myth that is not backed by our modern work on understanding of the period.

Perhaps you think you know better, but before you entrench yourself in that belief you would be well served to spend some time reading the works of those who have spent their lives studying that period.

You make too many assumptions about what I've read and what I have not read.

One does wonder when all these longtermist people tend to be already pretty successful and rich in their own personal short terms.. Not to mention how all these longterm ethical guidelines seem to validate or forgive their lucrative enterprises. Perhaps even in the best of intentions they aren't epistemologically equipped for this kind of thinking!

Right? That's because it's not a philosophy but a fig-leaf of a justification for the status quo.

This feels like quite the large strawman in TFA. Most of the folks I've talked to in longtermist-adjacent circles (futurists, effective altruists, etc., that crowd) see climate change as a very real existential risk, for the same reason the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists do: it greatly increases the risk of large-scale conflict which could lead to nuclear war. Even if Homo sapiens survives, there's an existential state where we knock our progress so far back, we aren't able to re-bootstrap the industrial revolution, due to depletion of surface-level resources at a scale sufficient to restart industry.

So yes, climate change does have the potential to compromise our existence over trillions of years.

I think the bigger problem with this movement is the concentration of already-wealthy types amongst its adherents, which skews the overall perspective away from more common plights.

Yeah took a while trying to find the actual thesis among all the preamble.

My biggest issue with this article as a whole is that every philosophy falls apart when applied in extremes, in fact the examples here are basically the same as the arguments against pure unflinching utilitarianism.

Do any of the named longtermists actually view humanity's potential above all else, or are they just prioritizing spending resources on avoiding existential risks?

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