"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"
"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"
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.
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.
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.