Against longtermism (2021)

As with &quot;effective altruism&quot;, the whole thing seems like an exercise in rationalizing destructive behavior in the present. &quot;Sure, my actions are causing harm to hundreds of people, but that&#x27;s outweighed by the good that will be realized millions of years in the future.&quot;<p>For me the universal antidote to this kind of thinking is this Stephen Jay Gould quote:<p>&gt; 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.<p>Thus actions that put more people into &quot;cotton fields and sweatshops&quot; today instead of lifting them out of poverty are detrimental to the long-term survival of our species.

It&#x27;s somewhat dangerous, agree, especially if it was to be a commonly held opinion. But it&#x27;s likely just another folly that (it seems) mostly the rich and powerful use to fill their minds with delusions of grandeur, but one in a long row of such delusions. I doubt it will be of any real consequence except as an elitist project.<p>That said, the article touches on the type of folly that this is: i.e. mixing the &quot;goals&quot; 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.<p>It is the same with the concept &quot;species&quot; 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&#x27;s the concept of species we have had as humans for millions of years, it&#x27;s likely to continue to be so, and who knows where that will take us. It&#x27;s really none of my business.

The problem is, it is not obvious what the &#x27;correct&#x27; decision is today to maximize the future lives. It&#x27;s all guesses, for longtermist and presentist. Its just that the longtermism people are using this long term argument for things they do want now, but are potentially &#x27;atrocities&#x27;, but in the view of infinity looks logical. So dress up some logic using the infinite future with trillions of lives, to make my current bad decision seem reasonable. Its tipping the scales when they also do not know which is best decision.

Ironically this post only reinforced my longtermist leanings. I do value the species over the individual and I tend to think that if we don’t realign our incentives away from maximizing short term profits we may be destroying our future. Longtermism places species above nations, because nations can threaten our very survival. It’s the evolution of tribalism.

&gt; technology is far more likely to cause our extinction before [the Sun goes out] than to save us from it<p>Surely there is some middle ground between this neo-ludditism espoused by the author and the outright fascism of longterminists that can justify <i>any</i> current action if it&#x27;s somehow even marginally likely to decrease existential risk?<p>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.<p>We are a technological species since the first rock hit the first bone, and what &quot;humanity is&quot; 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&#x27;re just along for the ride.

I considered myself a longtermist, but climate change is the #1 risk to me, not AI, and I thought this prioritization was more common amongst the EA and longtermist communities. But my longtermist views come mainly from Derek Parfit, and it&#x27;s probably the case that the contemporary longtermists are not of Parfit&#x27;s kind, and unhealthily intertwined with billionaire weirdos (Theil, SBF).<p>&gt; 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’.<p>This is indeed a stupid idea, but the writer&#x27;s following examples don&#x27;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 &quot;have to move the whole pattern&quot;. 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&#x27;s obviously weak.

&quot;One survey even found that more than half of the people asked about humanity’s future ‘rated the risk of our way of life ending within the next 100 years at 50 per cent or greater.’&quot;<p>This is so vague it&#x27;s not even applicable here. It doesn&#x27;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.

&quot;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.&quot;

&gt;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<p>This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone admit this in print that wasn’t labeled a kook

People can spend their time and money on whatever they want, but a lot of these longtermism organizations seem like a massive waste of time and money. I liked effective altruism when it was about donating mosquito nets, but the AI stuff seems like pure nerd larping. Honestly, with all the research they&#x27;ve done, they don&#x27;t seem to have anything interesting to say about recent AI trends.

The classical longtermist loves everyone in general, but no one in particular.

In the third paragraph, the author writes that COVID was probably &quot;cooked up in the kitchen of nature&quot;, and links to an article to support that assertion. But the linked-to article does not make that point. In the comments section of the article, a commenter pointed this out, and the author replied to that specific comment with an answer that did not address the issue but expressed the author&#x27;s personal opinion on the matter, and has not updated the article to be more clear.

The underlying concern isn&#x27;t complicated, and it&#x27;s stated succinctly in a single sentence in the middle of the article, quoting Bostrom:<p>&quot;[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[...]&quot;<p>The problem, in other words, is that these people are aspiring Bond villains.

Any prediction more than 50 years in the future is pure guesswork. There are just too many interconnected feedback loops and branching possibilities. This applies to any side of any debate, be it climate, economy, social sciences and so on. This applies to doom-sayers and it_will_be_fine-ers. This applies to the original article as well.<p>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.

I do believe that future people do have moral value and deserve ethical consideration.<p>The fundamental problem with longtermism, like with utilitarianism, is our limited capacity to understand and predict chaotic systems.<p>Thus justifying horrific acts in the name of some &quot;predicted good&quot; becomes an act of enormous hubris.<p>We are better off striving to act virtously towards utilitarianism towards utilitarian &#x2F; longtermist goals since that reduces the chances that a misprediction leads to our acts having a net negative result.<p>The underlying valuation is

No one ever got poor coming up with elaborate rationalizations and defenses on behalf of people accumulating hundreds of billions of dollars.

To me the money quote is this one:<p>&quot;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&quot;<p>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 &quot;value&quot; (which, as the article notes, utilitarians, including &quot;longtermists&quot;, basically equate with hedonistic pleasure) is a means to an end, with people being the end.

It seems pretty clear that longtermism and consequentialism in conjunction have the potential to be dangerous; although I endorse both.<p>That said, the author of this piece seems to be a bit of a nutcase. There&#x27;s a well-evidenced writeup of various dubious behaviors in this blog post:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;markfuentes1.substack.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;81210415&#x2F;tyler-cowen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;markfuentes1.substack.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;81210415&#x2F;tyler-cowen</a><p>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.

The fact that some of the world&#x27;s most annoying people (eg Musk, Thiel) are throwing money at this should clue you in to the point: it is about maintaining the current economic structure and, in &quot;ideal&quot; world, living forever (eg transhumanism, mentioned in the article) to &quot;enjoy&quot; it for the very few on top.<p>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.<p>&gt; We can now begin to see how longtermism might be self-defeating.<p>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.

This doesn&#x27;t even remotely make the case that &quot;longtermism&quot; is dangerous.<p>It appears to be just one more of the many, many &quot;philosophies&quot; 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.

No human or group of humans can have enough certainty about the future to make decisions for it now. Effectively it is such a ludicrous task to predict the future that it is akin to saying god told you so, rendering this belief system just as irrational as any other religion that tries to weigh in on matters on certainty

Every good ideology needs a &quot;Big Other&quot; which subsumes all ordinary moral concerns. How could you think about something so trivial as the atrocity you see before your eyes when wealth formation&#x2F;history itself&#x2F;divine will&#x2F;trillions of future human lives are at stake?

Note to update the headline to 2021 (its publication date)

Fighting against environmental destruction (including global warming) is longtermism. We need to pay some price now, but IMHO, it is worth it. The opposite is myopia - like setting a house on fire in the winter, so it will keep us warm.<p>What&#x27;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:<p>“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.”<p>― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being<p>Was it hijacked by the rich and powerful? Well, as any ideology. No, they don&#x27;t believe in that nearly as they say. Compare (not much to contrast) with invading a neighboring country as it is pagan.

The education software I&#x27;ve been building in my free time places a heavy emphasis on thinking in terms of societal consequences and on pursuing the best longterm future for humanity<p>If anyone would like to donate to support further development, let me know. More details, previews and demos available, for backers.<p>groglogic+akhn2023515@gmail.com

I get the longing for new ideology, but that&#x27;s not going to be it. Dominating intent to identify, predict and mitigate &quot;existential risks&quot; is simply arrogant.

If you take longtermism and reduction of suffering to the extreme, isn&#x27;t nuking the whole planet the most &quot;ethical&quot; thing to do, because it would prevent thousands of generations of humans from suffering?

I skimmed through the article and it kind of reminded me of „Transhumanism: The most dangerous idea“ [1] by Francis Fukuyama.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.au.dk&#x2F;fukuyama&#x2F;boger&#x2F;essay" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.au.dk&#x2F;fukuyama&#x2F;boger&#x2F;essay</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;much-better-awful-can-be-better">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ourworldindata.org&#x2F;much-better-awful-can-be-better</a>