Brainstorming some concrete examples of what everyday longtermism might look like:
> Alice is reviewing a CV for an applicant. The applicant does not meet the formal requirements for the job, but Alice wants to hire them anyway. Alice visualices the hundreds of people making a similar decision to hers. She would be ok with hiring this specific applicant, because she trusts her instincts a lot. But she would not trust 100 people in a similar position to make the right choice; ignorning the recruiting guidelines might disadadvantage minorities in a illegible way. She decides that the best would be if everyone chose to just follow the procedure, so she chooses to forego her intuition to favor better decision making overall.
> Beatrice is offered a job as a Machine Learning engineer to help the police with some automated camera monitoring. Before deciding whether to accept, she seeks out open criticism of that line of work, and tries to imagine what are some likely consequences of developing that kind of technology, both positive and negative. After doing a balance she realizes that while it will most likely be positive there is a plausible chance that it will enable really bad situations, and rejects the job offer.
> Carol reads an interesting article. She wants to share it in social media. She could spend some effort paraphrasing the key ideas in the article, or just share the link. She has internalized that spending one minute summarizing key ideas might well be worth a lot of time saved to her friends who otherwise could use her summary to decide whether to read the whole article. Out of habit she summarizes the article as best as she can, making it clear who she genuinely thinks would benefit from reading the article.
Brainstorming some concrete examples of what everyday longtermism might look like:
> Alice is reviewing a CV for an applicant. The applicant does not meet the formal requirements for the job, but Alice wants to hire them anyway. Alice visualices the hundreds of people making a similar decision to hers. She would be ok with hiring this specific applicant, because she trusts her instincts a lot. But she would not trust 100 people in a similar position to make the right choice; ignorning the recruiting guidelines might disadadvantage minorities in a illegible way. She decides that the best would be if everyone chose to just follow the procedure, so she chooses to forego her intuition to favor better decision making overall.
> Beatrice is offered a job as a Machine Learning engineer to help the police with some automated camera monitoring. Before deciding whether to accept, she seeks out open criticism of that line of work, and tries to imagine what are some likely consequences of developing that kind of technology, both positive and negative. After doing a balance she realizes that while it will most likely be positive there is a plausible chance that it will enable really bad situations, and rejects the job offer.
> Carol reads an interesting article. She wants to share it in social media. She could spend some effort paraphrasing the key ideas in the article, or just share the link. She has internalized that spending one minute summarizing key ideas might well be worth a lot of time saved to her friends who otherwise could use her summary to decide whether to read the whole article. Out of habit she summarizes the article as best as she can, making it clear who she genuinely thinks would benefit from reading the article.