Sabine
patreon
What Do Longtermists Want?
🕑 Added 2022-10-29 12:01:06 +0000 UTCHave you ever put away a bag of chips because they say it isn’t healthy? That makes sense. Have you ever put away a bag of chips because you want to increase your chances of having more children so we can populate the entire galaxy in a billion years? That makes… That makes you a longtermist. Longtermism is a currently popular philosophy among rich people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Jaan Tallinn. What do they believe and how crazy is it? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
The first time I heard of longtermism I thought it was about terms of agreement that get longer and longer. But no. Longtermism is the philosophical idea that the long-term future of humanity is way more important than the present and that those alive today, so you, presumably, should make sacrifices for the good of all the generations to come.
Longtermism has its roots in the effective altruism movement, whose followers try to be smart about donating money so that it has the biggest impact, for example by telling everyone how smart they are about donating money. Longtermists are concerned with how our future will look like in some billion years or longer. Their goal is to make sure that we don’t go extinct. So stop being selfish, put away that junk food and make babies.
The key argument of longtermists is that our planet will remain habitable for a few billion years, which means that most people who’ll ever be alive are yet to be born.
Here’s a visual illustration of this. Each grain of sand in this hourglass represents 10 million people. The red grains are those who lived in the past, about 110 billion. The green one are those alive today, that’s about 8 billion more. But that is just a tiny part of all the lives that are yet to come.
A conservative estimate is to assume that our planet will be populated by at least a billion people for at least a billion years, so that’s a billion billion human life years. With today’s typical life span of 100 years, that’d be about 10 to the 16 human lives. If we’ll go on to populate the galaxy or maybe even other galaxies, this number explodes into billions and billions and billions.
Unless. We go extinct. Therefore, the first and foremost priority of longtermists is to minimize “existential risks.” This includes events that could lead to human extinction, like an asteroid hitting our planet, a nuclear world war, or stuffing the trash so tightly into the bin that it collapses to a black hole. Unlike effective altruists, longtermists don’t really care about famines or floods because those won’t lead to extinction.
One person who has been pushing longtermism is the philosopher Nick Bostrom. Yes, that’s the same Bostrom who believes we live in a computer simulation because his maths told him so. The first time I heard him give a talk was in 2008 and he was discussing the existential risk that the programmer might pull the plug on that simulation we supposedly live in. In 2009 he wrote a paper arguing:
“A non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilization is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback: a giant massacre for man, a small misstep for mankind”
Yeah, breakdown of global civilization is exactly what I would call a small misstep. But Bostrom wasn’t done. By 2013 he was calculating the value of human lives: “We find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives [in the present]. One might consequently argue that even the tiniest reduction of existential risk has an expected value greater than that of the definite provision of any ‘ordinary’ good, such as the direct benefit of saving 1 billion lives ”
Hey, maths doesn’t lie, so I guess that means okay to sacrifice a billion people or so. Unless possibly you’re one of them. Which Bostrom probably isn’t particularly worried about because he is now director of the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford where he makes a living from multiplying powers of ten. But I don’t want to be unfair, Bostrom’s magnificent paper also has a figure to support his argument that I don’t want to withhold from you, here we go, I hope that explains it all.
By the way, this nice graphic we saw earlier comes from Our World in Data which is also located in Oxford. Certainly complete coincidence. Another person who has been promoting longtermism is William MacAskill. He is a professor for philosophy at, guess what, the University of Oxford. MacAskill recently published a book titled “What We Owe The Future”.
I didn’t read the book because if the future thinks I owe it, I’ll wait until it sends an invoice. But I did read a paper that MacAskill wrote in 2019 with colleague Hilary Greaves titled “The case for strong longtermism”. Hilary Greaves is a philosopher and director of the Global Priorities Institute which is located in, surprise, Oxford. In their paper they discuss a case of long-termism in which decision makers choose “the option whose effects on the very long-run future are best,” while ignoring the short-term. In their own words:
“The idea is then that for the purposes of evaluating actions, we can in the first instance often simply ignore all the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1,000) years, focussing primarily on the further-future effects.”
So in the next 100 years, anything goes so long as we don’t go extinct. Interestingly enough, the above passage was later removed from their paper and can no longer be found in the 2021 version.
In case you think this is an exclusively Oxford endeavour, the Americans have a similar think tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called The Future of Life Institute. It’s supported among others by billionaires Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Jaan Tallinn who have expressed their sympathy for longtermist thinking. Musk for example recently commented that MacAskill’s book “is a close match for [his] philosophy”. So in a nutshell longtermists say that the current conditions of our living don’t play a big role and a few million deaths are acceptable, so long as we don’t go extinct.
Not everyone is a fan of longtermism. I can’t think of a reason why. I mean, the last time a self-declared intellectual elite said it’s okay to sacrifice some million people for the greater good, only thing that happened was a world war, just a “small misstep for mankind.”
But some people *have criticized longtermists. For example, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. He is one of the founders of the effective altruism movement, and he isn’t pleased that his followers are flocking over to longtermism. In a 2015 book, titled The Most Good You Can Dohe writes:
“To refer to donating to help the global poor or reduce animal suffering as a “feel-good project” on which resources are “frittered away” is harsh language. It no doubt reflects Bostrom’s frustration that existential risk reduction is not receiving the attention it should have, on the basis of its expected utility. Using such language is nevertheless likely to be counterproductive. We need to encourage more people to be effective altruists, and causes like helping the global poor are more likely to draw people toward thinking and acting as effective altruists than the cause of reducing existential risk.”
Basically Singer wants Bostrom and his likes to shut up because he’s afraid people will just use longtermism as an excuse to stop donating to Africa without benefit to existential risk reduction. And that might well be true, but it’s not a particularly convincing argument if the people you’re dealing with have a net worth of several hundred billion dollars. Or if their “expected utility” of “existential risk reduction” is that their institute gets more money.
Singers second argument is that it’s kind of tragic if people die. He writes that longtermism “overlooks what is really so tragic about premature death: that it cuts short the lives of specific living persons whose plans and goals are thwarted.”
No shit. But then he goes on to make an important point: “just how bad the extinction of intelligent life on our planet would be depends crucially on how we value lives that have not yet begun and perhaps never will begin.” Yes, indeed, the entire argument for longtermism depends crucially on how much value you put on future lives. I’ll say more about this in a minute, but first let’s look at some other criticism.
The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, after reading MacAskill’s What We Owe The Future, shared a similar reaction on twitter in which he complained about: “Certainty about matters on which we’re ignorant, since the future is a garden of exponentially forking paths; stipulating correct answers to unsolvable philosophical conundrums [and] blithe confidence in tech advances played out in the imagination that may never happen.”
The media also doesn’t take kindly to longtermism. Some, like Singer, complain that that longtermism draws followers away from the effective altruism movement. Others argue that the technocratic vision of longtermists is also anti-democratic. For example Time Magazine wrote that Elon Musk has “sold the fantasy that faith in the combined power of technology and the market could change the world without needing a role for the government”
Christine Emba, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post, argued that “the turn to longtermism appears to be a projection of a hubris common to those in tech and finance, based on an unwarranted confidence in its adherents’ ability to predict the future and shape it to their liking” and that “longtermism seems tailor-made to allow tech, finance and philosophy elites to indulge their anti-humanistic tendencies while patting themselves on the back for their intelligence and superior IQs. The future becomes a clean slate onto which longtermists can project their moral certitude and pursue their techno-utopian fantasies, while flattering themselves that they are still “doing good.””
Okay, so now that we have seen what either side says, what are we to make of this.
The logic of longtermists hinges on the question what the value of a life in the future is compared to ours while factoring in the uncertainty of this estimate. There are two elements which goes into this evaluation. One is an uncertainty estimate for the future projection. The second is a moral value, it’s how much future lives matter to you compared to ours. This moral value is not something you can calculate. That’s why longtermism is a philosophical stance, not a scientific one. Longtermist try to sweep this under the rug by blinding the reader with numbers that look kind of sciencey.
To see how difficult these arguments are, it’s useful to look at a thought experiment known as Pascal’s mugging. Imagine you’re in dark alley. A stranger steps in front of you and says “Excuse me, I’ve forgotten my knife but I’m a mugger, so please give me your wallet.”Do you give him your money? Probably not.
But then he offers to pay back double the money in your wallet next month. Do you give him your money? Hell no, he’s almost certainly lying. But what if he offers a hundred times more? Or a million times? Going by economic logic, eventually the risk of losing your money because he might be lying becomes worth it because you can’t be sure he’s lying. Say you consider the chances of him being honest 1 in 10,000. If he offered to return you 100 thousand times the amount of money in your wallet, the expected return would be larger than the expected loss.
But most people wouldn’t use that logic. They wouldn’t give the guy their money no matter what he promises. If you disagree, I have a friend who is a prince in Nigeria, if you send him 100 dollars, he’ll send back a billion, just leave your email in the comments and we’ll get in touch.
The point of this thought experiment is that there’s a second logical way to react to the mugger. Rather than to calculate the expected wins and losses, you note that if you agree to his terms on any value, then anyone can use the same strategy to take literally everything from you. Because so long as your risk assessment is finite, there’s always *some promise that’ll make the deal worth the risk. But in this case you’d lose all your money and property and quite possibly also your life just because someone made a promise that’s high enough. This doesn’t make any sense, so it’s reasonable to refuse giving money to the mugger. I’m sure you’re glad to hear.
What’s the relation to longtermism? In both cases the problem is how to assign a probability to unlikely future events. For Pascal’s mugger that’s the unlikely event that the mugger will actually do what he promised. For longtermism the unlikely events are the existential threats. In both cases our intuitive reaction is to entirely disregard them because if we did, the logical conclusion seems to be that we’d have to spend as much as we can on these unlikely events about which we know the least. And this is basically why longtermists think people who are currently alive are expendable.
However, when you’re arguing about the value of human lives you are inevitably making a moral argument that can’t be derived from logic alone. There’s nothing *irrational about saying you don’t care about starving children in Africa. There’s also nothing *irrational about saying you don’t care about people who may or may not live on Mars in a billion years. It’s a question of what your moral values are.
Personally I think it’s good to have longterm strategies. Not just for the next 10 or 20 years. But also for the next 10 thousand or 10 billion years. So I really appreciate the longtermists’ focus on the prevention of existential risks. However, I also think they underestimate just how much technological progress depends on the reliability and sustainability of our current political, economic, and ecological systems. Progress needs ideas, and ideas come from brains which have to be fed both with food and with knowledge. So you know what, I would say, grab a bag of chips and watch a few more videos.
Comments
I really did not enjoy this video. Except for the comments by Christine Emba, all the philosophers' comments set off my bullshit meter. I will not be spending anytime observing either the longtermists nor the altruists.
Rad Antonov
No one knows for sure, but odds are higher that we find new physics in neutrino oscillations or the holy grail of a 0νββ decay, rather than another run of the Tevatron to check the W mass anomaly reported earlier in the year. Yes, the JWST is glorious now even though it too once sat at the bottom of the J-curve, looking like an investment of dubious value. Above all, the many young, talented and dedicated individuals working on projects of pure curiosity aren’t doing it for the money or the glory. Call it altruism or longtermism or even a selfish desire to know, I hope that as a society we continue to support them.
Hi Rad, in the case of JWST, there was a pretty good knowledge of what was there to be examined, but with newer, better tools. (The images are AMAZING) There's already fruit from from those tools. LIGO, the calculations of gravity waves that would be detectable was bourn out. I'm thinking about these neutrino detectors and there doesn't seem to be that strong likelihood of results, like, maybe a neutrino will bump into something and be detected instead of whizzing straight through. Maybe they're spending money on detectors instead of submarines?🤷♀️
Regarding a bigger collider, there was a video I watched by this random chick who turned out to be a well-known physicist saying that since things that were supposed to be found by the LHC that money shouldn't be spent on building a bigger collider, amongst other criticisms of particle physicists looking to build it. That was news to me at the time. I've half-arsedly being following reports of detectors and as far as I can tell with relatively little knowledge is that they're spending money and materials on detecting the possibly undetectable, or rarely detectable. Maybe these projects are worth it for what's built from building them but they seem like potential wastes. Please correct me if I'm wrong since I may well be.
Excellent point, Colleen. Functionally, a newer, bigger collider is unlikely to bring new science -- new engineering, yes, but new science, no. However, those pushing for a new collider are not narcissists, they are simply curious about their physics and blind to certain facts (or, at least, that's my read). Their names won't be etched into it, their faces won't be on it, it won't be named after anyone.
Rad Antonov
What makes you say they are of dubious value? Would you consider the JWST or LIGO to be of dubious value? I actually find big science projects to be more heavily scrutinized and opposed than any half baked public works 🐷. In what othet field has a Nobel Laureate testified in front of Congress to kill the dream project of a generation? Or to wit, how often do you come across opinion pieces from biologists or chemists denigrating their former colleagues and trashing what they do? The money is tight and the bar is high. Long gone are the Cold War days of funding submarine communication with neutrinos 😂.
And finally: "All in all, I hope my comments shed some light on some of the mistakes made in this video. I hope I'm wrong in saying that you're arguing in bad faith and that you can see that EA's/longtermists are people who deeply care about all of those alive today and just want to work towards a world where we can all flourish and live happily. You don't have to agree with longtermism! I definitely don't agree with every single thing some longtermists say (ex. some might argue all of EA's current resources should go to x-risk reduction, while I think a world where EA doesn't work on global health and animal welfare would be truly sad). I'm just making these comments because I don't like seeing EA/longtermist views being explained in such an unfair way. I hope we can come to a better understanding of our differences!" I hope these comments don't take up that much space here and spark in a valuable conversation
They continue: "Now on to some other points raised in the video. 1:30 "Longtermism is the philosophy that the longterm future of humanity is way more important than the present and those alive today". Not way more important, but equally important. Many EA's and longtermists believe everyone is of equal importance, whether they live now or in the future. 01:45 "...Effective altruism movement, whose followers try to be smart about donating money so that it has the biggest impact". Close! EA is about having the biggest impact with your time and resources. So you're correct it's about "being smart about donating money", but it's also about how you spend your time (for example, through your career or by volunteering). By saying things like "EA is telling everyone how smart they are about donating money" and "stop being selfish, make babies", I assume you're arguing in bad faith. "Longtermists don't really care about famines or floods because those won't lead to extinction". People in these movements are some of the most caring people I know. I can say with high confidence that many of us care deeply about all the suffering in the world, including those who suffer from famines and floods. EA is about prioritizing. We would love to be able to help everyone. Unfortunately, in life, you have to make decisions. Acting morally is recognizing we are in a triage every second of every day. We have to make decisions about who we help. This is truly hard and an unfortunate situation to be in. More on this here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vQpk3cxdAe5RX9xzo/we-are-in-triage-every-second-of-every-day 4:03 I haven't read all of Bostrom's papers in detail, and I can't say I agree with everything he says, but this quote doesn't seem that wrong to me if you read it carefully. It's a philosophy paper, so naturally he writes in a language that isn't appealing for a broad public (not saying that's a good thing). Here he's zooming out from the perspective of all of humanity, in which case a non-existential disaster is "a small misstep" if you compare it to an existential catastrophe where our whole entire future is wiped out. I'm not a big fan of the phrasing "a small misstep" either. But I'm sure Bostrom, as he even writes, does see it as something truly horrible, a "giant massacre for man". I don't understand why people working from Oxford is such a bad thing? There are also many EA's and longtermists in other universities and other parts of the world! 5:35 You should read What We Owe The Future by Will MacAskill! It's a great book. It's also more pragmatic than Bostrom's papers or the Strong Longtermism paper. 6:20 I think it's important to read this with the context of the rest in the paper in mind. "In the next 100 years, anything goes" is definitely far from what Will MacAskill believes. He wrote a book on working on global poverty and animal welfare (Doing Good Better) and still cares deeply about those issues. They likely removed it because it doesn't depict a clear picture of their views. 7:06 Here's Will MacAskill's reply to Elon's tweet, worth reading as he explains his disagreements with Musk: https://twitter.com/willmacaskill/status/1554378994765574144?lang=en "Longtermists believe a few million deaths are acceptable". Sorry, but you're truly arguing in bad faith here. This makes me so sad, giving all the people I know in these movements that so deeply care about the suffering of all sentient beings. 7:25 All longtermists/EA's I know don't believe sacrificing millions of people for the greater good is a good idea. In fact, it's a terrible idea, for many reasons. First of all, it's a naive reading of utilitarianism, as a world in which we would sacrifice people for the greater good would obviously be a horrible world to live in. And utilitarians want us to live in the greatest world possible. Secondly, many EA's/longtermists (including me) aren't strict utilitarians (and some aren't utilitarians at all), and believe there are certain actions that are horrible in itself to do (including sacrificing other people's lives). 8: 25 I don't think Peter Singer completely agrees with the direction EA is going indeed. But this passage is more of a marketing point: He's afraid focusing on the long-term future won't attract people to EA. Which is a fair concern, I don't know if that's true or not. 9:07 I'm not sure what Peter Singer is criticizing here, you just put longtermism in his mouth, I don't think it was a term back then. But I could be wrong! Peter Singer does believe, like longtermists, that people in the future matter as much as people today. I think his criticism is more that issues in the near-term are more tractable. Which I don't think is an unreasonable view to hold. 10:11 You showcase the Vox piece by Kelsey Piper while acting as if it's criticism. It is actually a great piece explaining why longtermism doesn't mean ignoring the present! You should read it :) 10:36 Yeah I don't agree with Elon Musk"
I found these comments posted by "A Happier World" on YouTube to be valuable: "(these views are those of the owner of the channel, Jeroen, and aren't necessarily shared by those who helped with or worked for the channel). Since I've made videos sympathetic towards longtermism and effective altruism (EA), I wanted to respond to this video. I appreciate any criticism towards longtermism and EA, but this video has a lot of mistakes and misconceptions. I also think a lot of the video is argued in bad faith. First of all, most EA's and longtermists don't like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (personally I'm not very familiar with Jaan Tallinn, so I won't comment on that). Elon Musk hasn't even donated to EA/longtermist causes (at least to my knowledge, and if he did it probably won't be a lot). Many in the movement think he actively causes harm, especially by accelerating AI development through OpenAI. I personally also just think he's a huge asshole. Peter Thiel has had a tiny bit of involved with EA around 2013 I believe, but not in recent years and I don't need to explain to you why I think he is a horrible person. I'll first respond to the Pascal's Mugging objection, since I think it's the most important one you raise. Pascal's mugging is a great thought experiment and an important one in these conversations! I agree that that in situations with high numbers, it would be weird to act on it. And in many of the more philosophical papers within longtermism, you will find high numbers for which it would be weird to act on. Many longtermists would also agree with that. But the reality is different, especially those of existential risks. They just aren't that unlikely. The threat humanity will get wiped out is way too high for the next hundred years. The philosopher Toby Ord did some research on this, and here are some of his estimates (from 2020): Nuclear war ~1 in a 1000 Climate change ~1 in a 1000 Pandemics ~1 in 30 Unaligned AI ~1 in 10 Total risk humanity will get wiped withing the next hundred years: ~1 in 6. Now Toby Ord is just one person, so we definitely shouldn't rely just on him. But there are great forecasting websites that have similarly worrying predictions, take metaculus for example: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/2513/ragnar%25C3%25B6k-question-series-if-an-artificial-intelligence-catastrophe-occurs-will-it-reduce-the-human-population-by-95-or-more/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4779/at-least-1-nuclear-detonation-in-war-by-2050/ To understand why forecasting websites are a helpful tool in predicting the future, I would recommend the book "Superforecasting" by Philip Tetlock. Of course, predictions will always remain uncertain and no one can be 100% confident about what the future will look like. But it's still important to think about! We do this all the time in economics and politics, so it's important to try and be as accurate as possible with our predictions. The odds you die in a fire or plane crash are less than 1 in a 1000, yet we take a bunch of safety measure to make sure those don't happen. And I'm sure you wouldn't call those pascall's mugging situations. So given that the odds of existential catastrophe within the next 100 years is so high, and given that's it's currently extremely neglected by most of humanity, it makes sense that effective altruists focus on reducing the risks! You don't even need to be a longtermist to care about this, because existential threats will affect those alive today too. No need to bring 10^58 billion potential future people in the mix (although that can shift your priorities)."
All my current science crushes are still alive and on social media. We're seeing what they're up to in real time, more or less. I think, sure, let's have these projects that expand the width and breadth of the data collected that can be mined for new insights, but I think there's enough fancy-dancy detectors looking for neutrinos and other phenomena dancing on the heads of quantum mechanical pins. Maybe all these detectors and colliders of dubious value being built and envisioned are the modern version of Mount Rushmore or the Pyramids, etc.
Rad Antonov
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/patreon/id1044456188
Rad Antonov
Thank you, but I can’t take any credit. We owe it to that now departed tech mogul, Jobs. The Patreon app works much better on the iPhone than in a browser. Give it a try and your emojis will work right too. Good points all around 👍
On narcissism vs altruism, If a greater good comes from it, I don't really care if Elon's face is carved into it, though I would roll my eyes at it. Considering the pyramids, there were a number of engineering challenges that needed to be solved in the name of narcissism; it is likely that the engineering techniques learned on the pyramids then helped the construction of useful infrastructure that advanced civilization. This is why I am fine with distributing some tax dollars to what looks like, on the face of it, frivolous longtermism. By that same argument, one might argue that all of science is longtermism. I have worked on problems that likely won't be solved for a very long time, but the small advances we make with new telescopes put ever more useful limits on what we can derive from the data. Michael Faraday (or pick your favorite science crush), nor anybody alive at that time (~200 years ago), certainly had no clue that his frivolous experiments would lead to your smartphone, which is really just an intermediate result on the way to... By the way, I continue to be amazed at the ability of you, Rad, and other posters who can put pictures and symbols in text. I have tried it, the symbol appeared, but upon a refresh, gibberish showed up instead. I'm jealous.
f(x)=x/Sin(x) is an χ Σιτη certain ψερταιντυ
Everyone is en titled to their own title...the reality presented by all nuts is the brain like resemblance to said eclectric moulded NaCl/H((2)) listening to EP Chapter three Occhams cake comes to mind as the one example which puts entrupy back down where it belings at the inverse end of 186 or the rounded version f(3χ6) ακα ΓοψκΥ where the edge will entropy itzelf back to the end and the end is the end of the end as energy is entered into the equation pointing to the point of the point which is the edge defined by the (())cc ηαμζ Γαζ()Γ the one process is the inverse of the other as are 66 degrees when subtended by 24 the angle of more spin with which the ryhme of the dime is the slime of time so please do try it at home and see that in both directions of entropy the edge of a blade will immediately begin to reverse itself at the speed of in verted version such as the Red Wood the Mountain the Sea ground a broken pane of glass back into sand using the force of friction convert more friction into flame melt said silicon into a wilicon window which only crashes when the foot is put through the screen in a uni of(verse) rather than at the random whim of the windoze wallet wiper...Billy the big thinker thinking the world into a smaller pile of things with all of the moon eye wallet lines linked to the wallet of he as we wait for him to turn back into silicon salted less by water than you and theee anyway the initial state of an edge is always predictable by looking at it and dropping a ripe tomato on the fine angled edge of to see where the angle lies relative to the right hand quadrant of the unit circle where the top semi chrome dome is A the left when looked at from the right is C the right when eyed from the left or the center is D and as the radian approaches ((18)) aka 3χ6 τηε εΔΓΣ ιΣΣ evident as is the D which the edge will return to as the at most of the sphere beats the blade back to the base of ace waiting for you the crafty cook to move the molecules around again re turning the blade into the leg of a chair or the cutter of hair
Rad Antonov
P.S. I feel Melinda deserves as much, if not more, credit than Bill for directing their philanthropic efforts towards vaccination, even though he got the spotlight, like that other jack 🐴is getting it now.
Rad Antonov
How should we judge past narcissism that’s still with us today, like say the Pyramids? As for the altruism or narcissism of generations, is it just historical circumstances? Would the baby boomers have fought against fascism instead of setting the stage for its return, had they been around a couple of decades earlier? To turn to science, would you work on a project that you knew would not deliver a result in your lifetime, for example, this nifty gravitational lensing observatory that PBS Space Time talked about recently? https://youtube.com/watch?v=4d0EGIt1SPc&feature=share&utm_source=EKLEiJECCKjOmKnC5IiRIQ. Personally, I’d rather see my tax dollars go to that instead of yet another road infrastructure project.
*cure poverty - I meant, cure cancer. But poverty too.
Hfil66
Helo Colleen, The biggest problem I have with your statement is the idea that we are causing damage or have anything to repair. These assume some sort of grand design for the universe (or at least some some grand design for planet Earth). I have never seen any such grand design, I have never seen any design specifications, so how am I to say what is damaged and what is working as designed, because there is no design to compare against. People who think they are trying to 'repair' the planet are merely trying to recreate an imagined design for how the planet should function. Of course, the big advantage (if that it be) for creating colonies on Mars is that we start by treating Mars as a blank sheet of paper upon which we can create our own designs to our own specifications, which might be seen as easier than trying to 'repair' something for which we have no design specification. To some, it might seem like being able to play God on Mars where we are unable to play God on Earth. I suspect reality will get in the way of our being Gods on either Earth or Mars. As for people finding reasons to fight each other, this is so, but the question is what reasons do we have for not fighting each other. In a tightly interdependent world there is a good reason not to fight people you are interdependent with, but when you have two groups of people that at there closest point are 33 million miles away, it is very easy to cause severe pain to people who are 33 million miles (and many months travel) away than it is to create the same pain to people whom you are only a few hours away from.
Hi Hfil66 Whether I'm naive or not, that's the requirement, as I see it. Not being too utopia necessarily, but repairing as much damage as possible and making as little more as possible. Maybe there are people who will leave if things do go that far south but if everything's collapsed there's possibly less likelihood of them getting people and resources to pull it off. Humans are pretty great at finding reasons to fight each other, hey.
Armando Mistral
That was just savage! I'd not heard of longtermism before, it certainly sounds... flawed. It sounds like the midaeval arguments about angels on the head of a pin. There's nothing here that's particularly actionable, it's just pseudo- philosophical blather dressed up with really big "sciencey" numbers (writing that one down). Moreover, the assertions are conveniently untestable.
I pretty much agree with everyone here. Especially the difference between the Gates Foundation vs a Musk or Thiel. I wouldn't know what the Gates Foundation was up to unless I went to their website and looked. But Elon Musk shouts loudly every time he does something he thinks deserves praise. The Gates foundation is about altruism, Musk is about narcissism. If the narcissism of the super rich can bring about a positive change, OK, great, but the longtermist narcissism of Musk et al seems to be a way for the super rich to get a pass for ignoring current ethical issues. I do think there is a place for both weak and strong longtermism, even some small amount of public funding of think tanks to consider the technological and ethical issues -- what do we owe the future inhabitants of this planet? I saw so many comments on youtube, facebook, and twitter about how previous generations left us with a mess, so fuck the next generation (do these people have kids?). I like how Hfil66 put it, there is a difference between long-term contingencies and long-term plans.
Hfil66
On the contrary, the most likely outcome of a self-sufficient human colony on Mars would be a war between humans on Mars and humans on Earth. As for getting 'our stuff together', that is naive. Such a utopia will never exist, and it is foolish to believe it ever could. Life is generally about getting half way to solving one set of problems just in time to meet the next set of problems (many of those newer problems being the by-product of the actions we took to solve the last set of problems). We are not Gods who can create universal utopias in the image of whatever it is we consider to be our flavour of utopia of the day.
Hi Allan, yes I agree.
Hi D, I agree with your points. There's a post I've seen on Facebook that consists of someone asking, what if the person who is going to cure poverty is aborted? and the reply, asking what if that person is born into poverty on a mountain of trash. (I think that was it.) We as a species have a long way to go already, let alone thinking about travelling off planet. As fascinating as the ideas of travelling and living in space are, it's in the same category of building another bigger collider as far as I'm concerned: not of much use and a waste of money better spent at present. Look after people in extreme poverty and difficulty in each country, work out solutions to Earth's problems. If we do that, possibly the ancestors of the people cared for now will bring about exodus to space after Musk, Thiel etc. are gone.
D Brown
I agree as well. 1: What happened to the benefits of living in the present (i.e., saving the people/earth now)? 2: I have not seen evidence that suggests people like Musk and Theil have any concern for the average person. Musk overworks people and fires them at the drop of a hat, and does so in a ruthless manner (which says a lot). To me, Gates and Benioff (Salesforce) are examples of billionaires who are trying to do good. 3: Having no concern for people living today means you might be condemning to poverty the next Einstein, or the person who will develop cold fusion. Yes, I know, Sabine covered this. Just adding my 2-cents worth (adjusted for inflation).
I do think that considering the far-flung future of humanity as Musk etc. are is total fantasy. We've got to deal with the reality of now & the next years and decades. If our species does survive long enough to actually build settlements and breed off-planet it'll be because we got our stuff sorted before then and didn't kark up Earth completely.
Hfil66
The trouble with having long term plans is they tend to fall apart at the first contact with reality. Having long term contingencies (and many of them) is good, but having long term 'plans' is not so good.
Hfil66
In order for anything to survive for as long as possible its first requirement is to be as inefficient at survival as possible. Modern humans are efficient, and striving to be ever more efficient, at survival, and this will be their downfall. What I mean by inefficient is that they must be over-engineered, so that they are not finely tuned to a specific environment, but by being less efficient in any one environment they are equally attuned to many environments, and so don't lose their efficiency as the environment changes.
Hfil66
Most species do indeed die off within a million years, and of the half dozen or so human species that were alive a mere couple of hundred thousand years ago, we are the sole surviving example of a human species - not a good track record to project into the future. All that is born must die, whether it be an individual human or an entire species - that is an unavoidable truth. This is why in modern terms, since we are all so terrified of death (our own death, or the death of species, or the death of anything) so we increasingly stop things from being born so as to ensure the minimisation of death.
ALLAN LEES
Thank you for replying to my comment - most unexpected. To elaborate a little, my primary problem with what I personally think of as pseudo-long-termism is that it's merely substituting a technological afterlife in place of those people used to believe in when god-centric mythologies were more popular. In both cases, the conjuring trick is merely a way to take today and project it far into the future; formerly with hazy notions of neuter ghosts and today with hazy notions of whizzy shiny tech. When we have serious problems to address today, it seems absurd to waste billions on trying to create billionaires' retreats on a fundamentally hostile planet. Although technology can be employed to solve pressing human problems, more often it enables our maladaptive instincts. There's absolutely no reason to believe that newer shinier tech will magically prevent us from making the same old basic human errors over and over and over again. So personally I'd rather see us focusing on ways of mitigating our ape-brain hardwired behaviors than to pretend Musk and his ilk are going to "save" us by creating unsustainable arks beyond the protective cover of Earth's magnetosphere. The former might enable us to eke out a few more centuries before we exterminate ourselves; the latter will change nothing.
I basically agree with this. It's not that I'm against longtermism per se, but our ability to predict the future is generally miserable and Gates' approach seems to me more pragmatic.
What's conservative about it is the number of people (much lower than the current population), not the number of years. The whole argument assumes that we don't go extinct.
ALLAN LEES
I'm puzzled by the statement that "a conservative estimate is... the (Earth) will be populated by a billion people for a billion years." Most species come and go within one million years; own own is particularly ill-adapted for the world we've accidentally created. The idea of establishing a totally non-self-sustainable billionaires' panic room on Mars reveals such a paucity of imagination that it could only come from some fanboy like Musk, whose idea of progress is keeping things exactly the same but making traffic jams with EVs rather than ICE vehicles.
I like Sabine's version of surviving. I fucking despise the idea of a bunch of self-serving people deciding what we all need. that humanity is some sort of seething mass that exists for these disgustingly wealthy techno-wankers to project their fantasies onto. I know Bill Gates is a target for woo-conspiracists but he's doing things to help actual people. What's the point of keeping 'humanity' going if there's not anything worth having or things worth doing or people to have company and joy with, and an ecosystems with living things we didn't all kill off... The Longtermists want an ant-farm dystopia, as far as I'm concerned. Pass the chips!
