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 (‘by far the most important effects are likely to be temporally distant’), rather than strong longtermism as defined above. I can imagine a few reasons for this:
You don’t actually agree with strong longtermism
You do agree with strong longtermism, but I (and presumably vadmas) am misunderstanding what you/MacAskill/Greaves 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 ‘strong’ in ‘strong longermism’ actually means.
You think the above quote is compatible with what you’ve written above.
At the moment, I don’t 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’m 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 “likely”, that was covering the fact that I’m not fully bought in.
I’m taking “strong longtermism” to be a concept in the vicinity of what they said (and meaningfully distinct from “weak longtermism”, for which I would not have said “by far”), that I think is a natural category they are imperfectly gesturing at. I don’t agree with with a literal reading of their quote, because it’s missing two qualifiers: (i) it’s 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 (‘by far the most important effects are likely to be temporally distant’), rather than strong longtermism as defined above. I can imagine a few reasons for this:
You don’t actually agree with strong longtermism
You do agree with strong longtermism, but I (and presumably vadmas) am misunderstanding what you/MacAskill/Greaves 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 ‘strong’ in ‘strong longermism’ actually means.
You think the above quote is compatible with what you’ve written above.
At the moment, I don’t 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 it’s a combination of a couple of things.
I’m 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 “likely”, that was covering the fact that I’m not fully bought in.
I’m taking “strong longtermism” to be a concept in the vicinity of what they said (and meaningfully distinct from “weak longtermism”, for which I would not have said “by far”), that I think is a natural category they are imperfectly gesturing at. I don’t agree with with a literal reading of their quote, because it’s missing two qualifiers: (i) it’s 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.