‘Turtles all the way down’ is a silly metaphor from philosophy, and cosmology, representing a difficult premise, similar to Schrodinger’s Cat. It refers to the problem of the ‘prime mover’, or ‘first cause’, in the universe, e.g., who created God?, what happened before the Big Bang?, etc. The idea is that it’s so absurd to figure out what the absolute origin of everything is that the world might as well rest on the back of a turtle, who itself sits upon an infinite pile of turtles below it.
The analogy isn’t perfect, I admit. What I meant is this:
There’s a trade-off between saving lives in the present due to the flow-through effects they’ll have in terms of saving lives in the future, and just saving a greater number of lives in the far future.
Time is so indiscrete, and the world so full of variables, that I can’t think of how to solve to problem of how much do we neglect saving lives at one point in the present or near-future, for the purpose of saving lives in the future further ahead.
Finding the perfect slice(s) of time to focus upon seems like trying to get to the bottom of an infinite stack of turtles to me.
Yes, I’m familiar with ‘turtles all the way down’ in general. For this question of finding the ideal time-slice to focus on, it’s the second link (Seth Baum’s post) that is relevant. He addresses the issue of an indefinitely postponed splurge—the idea that you might always have to wait before consuming goods by countering that we are consuming all of the time, just by staying alive.
That’s a philosophical counter but I could also just give a more practical one—there are plenty of other people who will fuel consumption. If you think that the future is neglected, then you don’t need to have an exact plan for when consumption should occur in order to invest in it.
‘Turtles all the way down’ is a silly metaphor from philosophy, and cosmology, representing a difficult premise, similar to Schrodinger’s Cat. It refers to the problem of the ‘prime mover’, or ‘first cause’, in the universe, e.g., who created God?, what happened before the Big Bang?, etc. The idea is that it’s so absurd to figure out what the absolute origin of everything is that the world might as well rest on the back of a turtle, who itself sits upon an infinite pile of turtles below it.
The analogy isn’t perfect, I admit. What I meant is this:
There’s a trade-off between saving lives in the present due to the flow-through effects they’ll have in terms of saving lives in the future, and just saving a greater number of lives in the far future.
Time is so indiscrete, and the world so full of variables, that I can’t think of how to solve to problem of how much do we neglect saving lives at one point in the present or near-future, for the purpose of saving lives in the future further ahead.
Finding the perfect slice(s) of time to focus upon seems like trying to get to the bottom of an infinite stack of turtles to me.
Yes, I’m familiar with ‘turtles all the way down’ in general. For this question of finding the ideal time-slice to focus on, it’s the second link (Seth Baum’s post) that is relevant. He addresses the issue of an indefinitely postponed splurge—the idea that you might always have to wait before consuming goods by countering that we are consuming all of the time, just by staying alive.
That’s a philosophical counter but I could also just give a more practical one—there are plenty of other people who will fuel consumption. If you think that the future is neglected, then you don’t need to have an exact plan for when consumption should occur in order to invest in it.
Thanks, noted. That makes sense.