Strong longtermism goes beyond its weaker counterpart in a significant way. While longtermism says we should be thinking primarily about the far-future consequences of our actions (which is generally taken to be on the scale of millions or billions of years), strong longtermism says this is the only thing we should think about.
Some of your comments, including this one, seem to me to be defending simple or weak longtermism (āby far the most important effects are likely to be temporally distantā), rather than strong longtermism as defined above. I can imagine a few reasons for this:
You donāt actually agree with strong longtermism
You do agree with strong longtermism, but I (and presumably vadmas) am misunderstanding what you/āMacAskill/āGreaves mean by strong longtermism; the above quote is, presumably unintentionally, misunderstanding their views. In this case I think it would be good to hear what you think the āstrongā in āstrong longermismā actually means.
You think the above quote is compatible with what youāve written above.
At the moment, I donāt have a great sense of which one is the case, and think clarity on this point would be useful. I could also have missed an another way to reconcile these.
I think itās a combination of a couple of things.
Iām not fully bought into strong longtermism (nor, I suspect, are Greaves or MacAskill), but on my inside view it seems probably-correct.
When I said ālikelyā, that was covering the fact that Iām not fully bought in.
Iām taking āstrong longtermismā to be a concept in the vicinity of what they said (and meaningfully distinct from āweak longtermismā, for which I would not have said āby farā), that I think is a natural category they are imperfectly gesturing at. I donāt agree with with a literal reading of their quote, because itās missing two qualifiers: (i) itās overwhelmingly what matters rather than the only thing; & (ii) of course we need to think about shorter term consequences in order to make the best decisions for the long term.
Both (i) and (ii) are arguably technicalities (and I guess that the authors would cede the points to me), but (ii) in particular feels very important.
In their article vadmas writes:
Some of your comments, including this one, seem to me to be defending simple or weak longtermism (āby far the most important effects are likely to be temporally distantā), rather than strong longtermism as defined above. I can imagine a few reasons for this:
You donāt actually agree with strong longtermism
You do agree with strong longtermism, but I (and presumably vadmas) am misunderstanding what you/āMacAskill/āGreaves mean by strong longtermism; the above quote is, presumably unintentionally, misunderstanding their views. In this case I think it would be good to hear what you think the āstrongā in āstrong longermismā actually means.
You think the above quote is compatible with what youāve written above.
At the moment, I donāt have a great sense of which one is the case, and think clarity on this point would be useful. I could also have missed an another way to reconcile these.
I think itās a combination of a couple of things.
Iām not fully bought into strong longtermism (nor, I suspect, are Greaves or MacAskill), but on my inside view it seems probably-correct.
When I said ālikelyā, that was covering the fact that Iām not fully bought in.
Iām taking āstrong longtermismā to be a concept in the vicinity of what they said (and meaningfully distinct from āweak longtermismā, for which I would not have said āby farā), that I think is a natural category they are imperfectly gesturing at. I donāt agree with with a literal reading of their quote, because itās missing two qualifiers: (i) itās overwhelmingly what matters rather than the only thing; & (ii) of course we need to think about shorter term consequences in order to make the best decisions for the long term.
Both (i) and (ii) are arguably technicalities (and I guess that the authors would cede the points to me), but (ii) in particular feels very important.