I’m tempted to just concede this because we’re very close to agreement here.
For example we need to wrestle with problems we face today to give us good enough feedback loops to make substantial progress, but by taking the long-term perspective we can improve our judgement about which of the nearer-term problems should be highest-priority.
If this turns out to be true (i.e., people end up working on actual problems and not, say, defunding the AMF to worry about “AI controlled police and armies”), then I have much less of a problem with longtermism. People can use whatever method they want to decide which problems they want to work on (I’ll leave the prioritization to 80K :) ).
I actually think that in the longtermist ideal world (where everyone is on board with longtermism) that over 90% of attention—perhaps over 99% -- would go to things that look like problems already.
Just apply my critique to the x% of attention that’s spent worrying about non-problems. (Admittedly, of course, this world is better than the one where 100% of attention is on non-existent possible future problems.)
I think this is might be a case of the-devil-is-in-the-details.
I’m in favour of people scanning the horizon for major problems whose negative impacts are not yet being felt, and letting that have some significant impact on which nearer-term problems they wrestle with. I think that a large proportion of things that longtermists are working on are problems that are at least partially or potentially within our foresight horizons. It sounds like maybe you think there is current work happening which is foreseeably of little value: if so I think it could be productive to debate the details of that.
I’m tempted to just concede this because we’re very close to agreement here.
If this turns out to be true (i.e., people end up working on actual problems and not, say, defunding the AMF to worry about “AI controlled police and armies”), then I have much less of a problem with longtermism. People can use whatever method they want to decide which problems they want to work on (I’ll leave the prioritization to 80K :) ).
Just apply my critique to the x% of attention that’s spent worrying about non-problems. (Admittedly, of course, this world is better than the one where 100% of attention is on non-existent possible future problems.)
I think this is might be a case of the-devil-is-in-the-details.
I’m in favour of people scanning the horizon for major problems whose negative impacts are not yet being felt, and letting that have some significant impact on which nearer-term problems they wrestle with. I think that a large proportion of things that longtermists are working on are problems that are at least partially or potentially within our foresight horizons. It sounds like maybe you think there is current work happening which is foreseeably of little value: if so I think it could be productive to debate the details of that.